Benefits of Long Tail Keywords
Focusing on long tail keywords can be much more beneficial regarding seo than investing your resources on conventional keywords. There can be an enormous amount of competition for generic keywords; achieving and maintaining a high rank for such competitive keywords can be quite a challenge. Instead of battling to get a decent rank for a generic keyword, you might consider targeting the long tail keyword variations. For instance, instead of trying to rank for the keyword, “Webmaster”, a long tail variation, such as “Webmaster Blog”, will be much easier to rank for. In order to fully benefit from targeting long tail keywords, you should target a handful of variation instead of just one. It will be much easier to attain decent rankings for these long tail variations than for the generic keyword. Even though the generic keyword will produce more traffic than a single variation, the sum of the traffic generated from a handful, 10-20, of the long tail variations will outnumber that of the generic. By targeting long tail keywords instead of the generics, your website can benefit more from organic search by taking advantage of the lower levels of competition for long tail variations.
I agree that targeting long-tail searches can achieve significantly better results than chasing after the generic, short-tail searches.
I recently did some research on PPC searches containing different numbers of words (i.e. short, medium and long-tail searches), and came to a similar conclusions to yourself: that long-tails often rank better because they have less competition.
I also found that that since people making long-tail searches are often further along in the buying cycle and are therefore more motivated to buy, conversion rates are often much higher. Although the research was carried out with more of a PPC focus, the general principles still apply for SEO.