Long Tail Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

More industry jargon! Great! *sigh* I'll add it to my Internet Marketing Glossary. Check it out for a tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek look at my favorite thing in the world - acronyms!

In this case however, Long Tail search engine optimization is actually a very relevant part of any SEO campaign and should have some close attention paid to it.

First off, a definition. Long Tail was coined to describe the basic idea that the bulk of visitors who use search engines to find your website are not using what you consider your main keywords to find you. Have a look at this graph:

Your main keywords will generate high levels of traffic. However, the combination of your lesser keywords, and sometimes unexpected keywords, will actually create a greater total volume than your main keywords. Hence the “long tail”.

For years, search engine optimizers have focused on their main key phrases, myself included. Why? Because those are the ones the boss checks in the morning. From the larger perspective though, paying attention to the long tail can pay off big! What this means those, is you'll have to start thinking in terms of whole new key performance indicators (KPI - I love acronyms!).

Ranking in the top 10 for a specific keyword phrase isn't enough anymore. There are many ideas floating around in cyberspace about what the new SEO campaign should measure as success. I'm a particular fan of Keyword Yield (KY - now that would look great on a report!). KY is simply the average number of unique keywords a given page attracts over a given period of time.

The more keywords that end up bringing a potential client to a particular page in your website, the better. Put another way, this can “thicken” your website's search engine presence.

For example, if you run a hotel in downtown Chicago, clearly you want to rank well for search phrases like “downtown chicago hotel”. What if your website ranked highly for something like “chicago tourist attractions” or “chicago museums”? While the relevancy may not be as high, if I was visiting Chicago for the first time, I very well might be interested in both tourist attractions AND hotels. Sometimes the phrases may seem completely irrelevant, but searchers may still click on your link.

Traffic is traffic. As long as your titles and descriptions are accurate, the visitor will likely be at least somewhat interested in your website no matter what keyword phrase they used. Then it's the site's job to convert them into customers.

So, how do you search engine optimize for long tail? The first thing you need is a good analytics and tracking system that can tell you what keywords people used to find a particular page. Check out my article if you're not sure how to do that. On a side note, I'm a big fan of Google Analytics. It's very sophisticated, and free.

Start tracking keywords and keyword phrases for the pages in your website individually. If you're not sure how to do this for your particular tracking program, check the help files. For Google Analytics, go to the Top Content report under Content, click on the page you're interested in, then choose Entrance Keywords from the Analyze drop down list. This will show you the keywords people used that entered this page directly from a search engine. If nothing appears, it's possible no one reached that page organically. Click on Entrance Sources and you'll see where the visitors came from.

Once you've identified several of your long tail keyword phrases, start adding them in to your regular SEO campaign. The best results will come when may individual pages in your site are optimized for various main and long tail keywords. Remember, every page should target some slightly different phrases with different titles, tags, and content. In particular pay attention to the number of visitors per keyword. As you begin to optimize for long tail phrases, you should see this number rise.

The long tail, while often ignored by the boss who likes to judge SEO efforts by one or two phrases, is a critical component to a successful Internet marketing campaign. It can bring all kinds of visitors to your site that you never knew even existed. Once you have the basics of search engine optimization, then expand your program and go after the long tail!