How many Longtail keywords do I need to rank?

[Jay]

I have a blog that is 3 months old. I am trying to rank high for a longtail keyword for a gaming niche. How many articles do i need to write with longtail keywords included in them to rank high so i can get traffic to my blog? Or better yet, how many articles to do i need to write. the keyword and niche is very little competition.
Thank you all for your answers: 1 more thing. What if I make my domain name the same as the long tail keyword? Would i still have to do alot of backlinking? or will this help out tremendously?

[Jake]

The general answer is more than the competition has, search for those keywords and examine the top ranked sites' content, while content is very important it's not the only SEO factor, the number of links from and the quality of blogs, social sites and forums linking to your site are tallied up to determine the popularity of your site, use tools like opensiteexplorer.org, backlinkwatch.com to examine the backlink profile of the competing sites.
Individual article pages are ranked, although they can go toward the over site ranking "a rising tide raises all boats" quality content that people actually want to read and recommend will go a lot farther than keyword stuffed fodder.

[Tommy]

Hi Jay,

There are no definite answer to your question. There is no set number of long tail keywords or number of article you need to write with the long tail keyword to get ranked.

If you simply want to rank, you will have to wait for Search Engines to crawl your pages or submit a Sitemap.

If you want to appear on the first page, then that is a different story. There are more things you need to do other than simply writing articels with long tail keywords.

1) You need to create contents (of course, with the long tail keyword) that are informative
2) Optimize your on-page SEO (Title Tag, URL, H1, Image SEO, Anchor Text and etc.)
3) Earn a lot of backlinks with your content
4) Optimize other off-page SEO
5) Continue to optimize your content and keep on creating new contents

[DeGen]

Numbers are not important.

You can have a single article with a few long tail keywords that will rank extremely well but you can also have 100 articles with a few long tail keywords that might not rank at all.

It all depends on how you do your backlinks (i.e. blog commenting). Go for blogs that match your content and include some long tail keywords into your comment as well that are found in the article that you are commenting on. I suggest going for commentluv enabled blogs.

You can try searching for blogs matching your content and commentluv enabled by searching on google by this string :

yourkeyword “commentluv” + blog

You can also ask people to add your blog into their blogroll but you have to add them to your blogroll too. Don't overdo it because Google might think you are doing backlink spam. A max of 10 links in your blogroll should be enough.

Hope this helps.