If your website’s home page is getting good ranking for the specific keyword you might think that your search engine optimization work is done... But you could be missing out on a large volume of potential traffic. You should consider the use of long tail keywords for search.

Your interests are better served by considering your website as a complete entity. Your home page can only be reasonably be optimized properly for the one or perhaps two keyword phrases. But, as you know there are potentially a lot more keyword phrases that your web site could be attracting traffic for. But, it would be unwise to try to get your home page to include all these specific long tail keywords or keywords phrases.

Long tail keywords don’t "fit" on your home page

Your website’s home page is best kept as a “storefront” for the rest of your website. Your home page provides:

1. the look and feel you want for your business
2. some basic information about your company and its products
3. some easy to use navigation

It’s plain to see that most good or effective home pages are not going to have a lot of content. It is simply not the function of a home page to explain everything your company does. Nor is it good practice to try to include a lot of interesting content on your home page. Rather your home page is a dashboard which visitors use to access your additional content.

Long Tail Keywords in Back-links

Even if you to get a lot of links to your home page with great long-tail keyword anchor text your home page may still not rank very well for these words or phrases. That’s because the contents of your page must correlate to the key words in you link’s anchor text. Design-wise and user experience-wise your home page is not the ideal place to optimize for multiple keywords or long tail keywords because it will be confusing and send a lot of wrong signals.

Long tail keywords for deep links

Instead of trying to stuff in a lot of relevant keywords to your home page it is far better to create new pages with specific content matching your keyword driven links. This, in a nutshell is what is called deep linking… serious mojo for search engine ranking.

Long tail keywords for internal linking

This technique also allows you to create internal links from your home page to your content pages. These internal links serve the same purpose as external links. The anchor text used on your internal links tells the search engines crawling your site a lot about the content of the target page. This is one of the key ways search engines know what your web page is all about and therefore how to categorize and list your page in their algorithms.

You might want to read these other articles:

• Writing Anchor Text Links With Keywords
• Basic Content Writing Tips For Better Search Results