First, lets talk about the phrase, "long tail". What is it?

When your website is found through Google or any search engine there are a number of keywords it can be found on. There are the small group of keywords that everyone seems to target that best describe their business - and maybe there are 5-20 top keywords in anyone's well-defined business niche. Let's call those the short tail keywords.

In addition to those people that choose the common words to search for a business like yours there are hundreds, and even thousands more that people use to search for a business like yours that are part of the long-tail.

The long tail is made up of the vast majority of keywords that searchers will use to find your business - but that can be uncommon terms you might not have thought of to find your business with. Let's show an example...

If your business is aloe vera gel to help relieve sunbathers the pain from a skin burn some of your top terms would be: aloe vera, aloe, aloe gel, and alo vera, alo vara, phrases that match exactly what your business is about.

Now, on the long tail side you will have many other words that people may search on to find your product. If someone can't remember the name of the plant they may search on "green gel", "green jelly", "sunburn stuff", or other words that relate to your business, but don't really hit it on the head.

The short-tail keywords aren't easy to own in Google's search results. There is a lot of competition for them, and most businesses spend the majority of their time focusing on them. This can be a mistake.

If instead, you were targeting long-tail keywords you would spend less time optimizing your site for them, and if you used a pay per click system you would be paying less money per click because there is little competition for those keywords.

Long tail keywords are usually general, uncommon, and un-focused. Their power lies in their ability to send the majority of traffic to almost any website in existence. Even though a keyword phrase in the long tail might bring just 5 people to your site in a month, it's a powerful part of the long tail group. As a group the long tail is almost always more powerful than the short tail group.

Web statistics for one site showed 33 words in the short tail and providing over 30 visitors to the site per month. Every keyword sending less than that was part of the long tail. The long tail is very long and the short tail - very short. In this case the long was made up of 134,000 keywords, some of them sending one visitor per month, some two, and so on.

How can a business make money without focusing on the short tail keywords?

Simply by trying to incorporate as many long tail keywords into the content as possible. Of course you'll want to use the short tail keywords too - and you must have them for Google to be able to understand what your website focuses on. But, as you write - also incorporate many long tail keywords into the content so you can be shown in Google's search results sometimes for those keywords. It's very easy to own the long tail keywords if you focus on them. Very few businesses do.

If you set about creating 50 articles about Aloe Vera that were informative, easy to read, and filled with short tail keywords you might barely break into the aloe vera business online. You would probably get ranked on a couple of the short tail keywords, but really you would have to build hundreds of pages of content to really become one of the top three websites about aloe vera.

If instead you focused on the long tail keywords you could create 50 articles filled with them and see a lot more results. Over the long-term if you added content routinely you would see great results and your whole business could be sustained on using them.

As you start your online business website and you are trying to decide which keywords to focus on as you develop your site you should really take the long tail into account and proactively develop content that targets some of them.

Author, Vern Lovic is a serial online business entrepreneur that has created hundreds of websites and incorporated many businesses over the years at his partner's site, Start Florida Business (.com).