Invisible Long Tail Keywords

[EricVallee34]

I've been doing some research on SEOmoz and have seen some posts relating to invisible long tail keywords.  I have a couple of questions relating to this:

• Am I correct to understand that an invisible long tail keyword won't show any search in a tool like the Google Keyword Tool?  If not, how do you define it?

• If an invisible long tail keyword has almost no search (or search that can be proven by an SEO researcher), how can you be confident that it will produce results?

[BlinkWeb]

Well the more specific the search term (longer tail) the less likely it is that there is any data on that term. You cant be confident that a specific long tail keywords will produce anything if there is no search data on it.

IMO I find the idea of "targeting" specific long tail keywords kind of funny. By targeting head match keywords and generating content around those keywords you will naturally rank for long tail (high converting) keywords. But to think that I can anticipate the actual long tail terms seems unrealistic to me, unless it is something like a product specific "branded" search.

Does that make sense? Am I way off base here?

[flowsimple]

Roger is spot on. "Targeting" long tail keywords is somewhat funny to me too. You inevitably miss out on those "invisible" long tail keywords. Target your content to your topic and head match keywords that have have the potential to generate lots of hits from surprise long keyword searches. But then, also use a span of Google Analytics data on your organic keyword hits to figure out which long tail keywords are actually worth targeting.

[vforvinnie]

I agree with you on both fronts.  I never target any specific long tails, but I always build content to rank for long tails.  The way to do this is with quality content with a large word count.  I never write the content with any long tails in mind, but I know that with quality link building I will naturally rank for some long tails.

One of my sites gets thousands of visits from hundreds of keywords.  I might get 5-10 visits a month from each phrase.  It would have been silly to plan for any of these keywords.