The Long Tail

[JamesEvansSEO]

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The long tail is the hundreds to thousands of keywords and key phrases that a site is found for, and in most cases those keywords are not noticed or exploited.

Most people want to focus all their energy and efforts in getting a better ranking for 1 or 2 keywords when the truth is that you can get more traffic from long tail keywords.

In statistics we have a term called long tail, in these distributions a highfrequency or highamplitude population is followed by a lowfrequency or lowamplitude population which gradually ‘tails off’.

Most webmasters are amazed to see that they are getting most of their traffic from long tail keywords allowing them to change their website’s strategies.

So, don’t try to get the most competitive terms, do a proper keyword research, in the long term you will get more benefits in a shorter time.

Example:

‘Loans‘ is the general keyword topic and long tail keywords within this niche includes terms such:

Loans for people with bad credit
List of low interest loans
Benefits of small business loans
Good UK loans for students

A good tool (Free) that will help you to find good long tail keywords to increase your ranking on the search engines is HitTail. This tool is going to help you to get a better knowledge of how people find your website and based on that you can optimize your front page, create new pages, write articles based on those long tail keywords.

[purple]

http://www.hittail.com/ looks good I will have a play with this later. The long tail seems to be a buzz word of the moment.
It is finding that longtail term which will get visitors but have little competition.

[DavidCartlidge]

Server logs are your friend

[Shane]

Server logs are your friend

not quite as good a friend as your main competitor's server logs would be though lol

[D-Mac]

Thanks for the link James. I've just added the code to one of my sites and will report back on the quality of the 'suggestions' HitTail makes.

[jrisby]

that reminds me, I bought thelongtail.co.uk back in 2005 - offers via pm!

[HarveyC]

Pretty good domain actually, would make for a nice keyword discovery tool!

[tbp]

Great post, I`ve seen a couple of graphs, and they really emphasise the point that many long tail keywords get a lot more traffic overall than a few really popular keywords.

Most of my work now involves long tail phrases!

not quite as good a friend as your main competitor's server logs would be though lol

This is suprisingly easy for a lot of competitors A lot of people use webaliser, which by default tends to dump the stats in common directories with no password protection.

So all you need to do is try a couple of URL's and occasionally you get luckly

In a lot of cases, a look for the keywords that webaliser uses on its results page in google can reveal some interesting results!

Not that I endorse this or do it myself though, although its perfectly legal, as the pages are publicly available to everyone