Take the Keyword Phrase by the Tail

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence is the successor to the 2009 beta tool called adCenter Excell Add-in Keyword Research Tool.  Set up an account to repurpose the tools to locate long tail keyword phrases.  With ten spots heavily competed for on a search engine's first results page, it matters more to offer rich content and expertise than your competitors offer.  In time the search engines will determine that you are an authority in the industry and improve your rankings based on your quality.  If you have quality content, other important sites in your industry will want to link to you.  How to accomplish this is through a customized business blog that is optimized with this goal in mind.  Spread your content by regularly posting new content with the keyword phrases anchored to specific pages in your main site and then bookmarking the new content to the social media networks relevant to the content.  If you lack the time to consistently perform this work, then consider  a full blog management service.

The more obvious the keywords are, the more likely all of your competition is using those keywords. Most webmasters only work with the obvious and don't research longer keyword phrases.  So, these 'long tail' keyword phrases hold a lot of untapped value. Add these long tail keywords into your content and tags. This is the way to compete with other sites that have long been established on the net.  A few primary keywords typically dominate a sizable percentage of the search traffic, but then there are secondary and even tertiary keywords. By themselves, they are clearly not as effective as the primary keywords, as fewer users search on them. But there are people who either search directly on them or use them as a part of longer queries, and those users are just as valuable as conversion opportunities as users of primary keywords. (excerpt from Bing Webmaster Center, author Rick DeJarnette).