Why do people say not to target lots of longtails?

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For example, I read about Brian Dean saying it wasn't a good strategy because you will get penalized.

But don't people target loads of head words anyway? Isn't that exactly the same thing just on the opposite end, it seems very contradictory

If the content is relevant and good, I don't see how that could get one penalized?

from here: http://backlinko.com/keyword-research

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But from @CCarter's keyword research guide, we can see that long tails tend to be a better bet for conversion?
 
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I believe he is referring to having a group for example, 50 long-tail keywords and then writing 50 articles - one long-tail keyword for each. I have to agree with him on that - that is a bad idea.

What you should do is silo your target content pieces as well as the categories; then have a targeted short-tail keyword and have the associated long-tail keywords within that article's content AND/OR be the anchor text to that article from within other pages on your site (interlinking).

Basically, don't create content just to create content and try to rank, you need to create content that has substances and each content article should rank for multiple keywords (long-tail which eventually leads to short-tail rankings), instead of having multiple articles each trying to rank for a single long-tail keyword on their own.
 
CCarter said:
Basically, don't create content just to create content and try to rank, you need to create content that has substances and each content article should rank for multiple keywords (long-tail which eventually leads to short-tail rankings), instead of having multiple articles each trying to rank for a single long-tail keyword on their own.
Click to expand...

This is the key here. You'll want to identify your main focus keyword for the article. From there, you go out and find a handful of long-tail keywords and semantic keywords related to this topic and use them within the content.

There's no rule of thumb here other than making sure you're not forcing them into the content. Just use them naturally within your writing.

Let's also clarify long tail keywords and semantic keywords.

First off.... creating long tail keywords does NOT mean that you go and just add more words as a suffix to your main keyword. Let's use "dog training" as our example:
  • dog training tips
  • dog training strategies
  • etc
While these are technically long-tails....you're still going to run-up the keyword count of your main keyword, since it appears in each of those variations. That's how you'll get slapped. You can use them...but always remember that you'll have to balance them with the density percentage of your main keyword.

Long-tails I'd like to use in a "dog training" article would look something like this:
  • teaching a dog to sit
  • potty training my dog
  • etc
Obviously, you'll need to use your keyword research to identify the long-tails that have some kind of traffic volume...but I think you get the idea.

Finally, you have your semantic keywords. All this means is that you use other phrases that have the same meaning as "dog training."
  • puppy tricks
  • potty practice for canines
I'm probably being a little too verbose for this topic...but I think it sometimes helps to see examples in order for it to click.

When it comes down to it, you're going to be hitting a bunch of long tails and LSI keywords that you would have never thought of...naturally. If you're covering a topic comprehensively, you'll already have a ton of these phrases included in your content.
 
Thanks for the advice @CCarter & @stackcash I still get confused with the whole grouping of keywords together, so I guess I'm just going to have to keep practicing with that
 
In my experience websites that focus on a small set of keywords and obsess over them are normally the ones that end up either being hit by the Google Penguin algorithm or being penalised manually.

The best approach is to research the widest possible set of terms that are relevant to your offering and then silo these terms by various groups such as intention, sector, type, business importance and then build the content strategy around that in a holistic way. Google has become very clever in the last few years, so it is case of trying to make your pages and resources relevant in a focussed way without over optimising, this means you need to stand-out above your competition on the competence level of your content by a long way.

And..if you find that whole process daunting, try to just focus on one silo for a while and measure what worked and what didn't. Once you find what worked in one silo in your niche you can then build a standard operating procedure to outsource certain aspects of this.
 
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