What are Long Tail Keywords and Expert Verbiage, and when should I apply them ?

After you have finished your VMAD "high-level" market analysis, and decided upon your websites architectural structure, including silos or themes, then you're ready to search for keywords that you can use to fill in the articles of your website.

This is when Long Tail and Expert Verbiage keywords are needed. 

Both Long Tail Keywords and Expert Verbiage are statistically improbable phrases.

Definition: Long Tail Keyword

A Long Tail keyword is a keyword with 2 or more words associated with a  headword. For Example, if your Parent Theme is "tshirt", then "custom tshirt design" is a Long Tail keyword, with a headword of "tshirt". "custom tie-dye tshirt design" is a longer Long Tail with the same headword.

Definition: Expert Verbiage

Expert Verbiage is highly specialized vocabulary.  For example, if your Parent Theme is "skydiving", then "reserve static line" is an Expert Verbiage keyword because it is a statistically improbable phrase which relates specifically to "skydiving."

Expert Verbiage vs. Long Tail:

The longer a Long Tail grows, the more likely it is to become a statistically improbable phrase which relates specifically to a particular theme. This gives it the characteristic of Expert Verbiage. However, there is still a difference between Expert Verbiage and Long Tail Verbiage: The Long Tail always has a "headword" tied to a vertical market segment within it, which is preferably the theme of the website in which the Long Tail is found. The Expert Verbiage keyword is not bound by this requirement.

Key Point: These Expert Verbiage and Long Tail terms are useful only after you have selected the primary themes, silos and topics for your website. These terms are best used to support your primary general projects, silos and articles. Sorting and selecting Expert Verbiage and Long Tail keywords and phrases comes later in the game.

Remember long tail keywords are good to use as "salt and pepper" within the deeper pages of your silo structure. In other words you can sprinkle long tail keywords throughout your articles. Do not disregard these long tail keywords simply because the traffic is low. (1-3 natural clicks per day). You probably should not delete long tail and expert verbiage keywords and phrases from the Zoom Analysis screen. You will want to access these phrases later when your website is further along the architectural development process.

When you are ready to gather Expert Verbiage and Long Tail keywords, it is important to remember that these keywords often do NOT have any cost or traffic*.

* We will soon implement the Long Tail Index, making it easy for you to determine which zero cost and traffic keywords are most useful in relationship to your parent theme.

This point is especially important to remember in two instances:

   1. When Importing Keywords which contain Expert Verbiage and Long Tail keywords that you wish to keep, be sure to "uncheck" the "Theme Zoom quality standard" filter. Otherwise, most keywords with no cost or traffic will be filtered out:

   2. When Filtering by Cost and Traffic be sure that your cost and traffic filter criteria do not select only keywords which have cost and traffic (as is recommended for the early stages of the website design process).

More information on The Long Tail, and long tail keywords:

For more information on Long Tail keywords and The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, please visit http://www.thelongtail.com

Also be sure to listen to Russell Wright and Jay Towney speak on the topic of long tail markets in the following radio show podcasts:

http://www.jaytownley.com/the_long_tail_and_specialty_retail_stores

You will find several other audio titles that include the keywords "long tail" on http://www.jaytownley.com