Imagine it is 1978 and a pipe bursts in your basement on Christmas Eve. You grab the telephone white pages, but everything is listed alphabetically by name. Now if you are trying to find “Joe’s plumbing” you have a fair chance of finding him quickly before the broken pipe in the basement does too much damage. But let’s say that you are new to town and have no idea of the local plumbing establishments. So now you would have to start somewhere in the book and hope to find a business with Plumbing in the name. That could take a long time and you might pass several capable companies.

But you’re smart and recover from your panic and remember you have the yellow pages! And you are in luck there are 487 plumbers in the book under the heading “Plumber”. Each one is represented with a single line listing that includes the business name and number.

But remember it is 9:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve so just having the name and number means you have to start calling each number just to see if they are available. But 114 of the Plumbing companies also took out ads that surround the free regular one line listing. So you can skim the pages, some ads have pretty pictures with trucks and pipes, but not much text, others list volumes of services, Drywall repair, Excavation, Roof Repair, Chimney cleaning….others still tout their professional friendly staff and that they have been in business for over 20 years. You can hear the water gushing below you, none of this information and adjective laden prose is helping slow the water filling your basement. So you continue and eventually come to an ad that says “after hour and holiday emergency service”. BINGO. You call and problem solved.

Now in Computer times we might jump to the always on high-speed connected netbook computer and head to a search engine and hastily type “Plumbers”. You might get upwards of 15 million results depending on the engine and other factors. Your basement will be toast before you even get through a fraction of these pages.

Ok so you refine your search “plumbers” and now you get over 500,000 results, but at least the first dozen pages or so of results actually came from my town, oh, my town name is in a dozen other states, oops. Refine search “plumbers INSERT your town and your state” Down to 32,000. But remember its Christmas Eve… Refine again “plumbers INSERT your town and your state emergency service” 3100 Results now and almost everyone on the First page meets every criterion I need. In Internet terms I have moved from Short or Broad Head (Most Results with little accuracy and high competition) to Long Tail (Fewer Results less competition).

The Keywords of my search were Plumber, My Town, My State and Emergency Service. The first three are keywords, and the last is a key phrase. The Page with #1 ranking in my results effectively used every one of these terms throughout the web page I need.