Focusing on the Long Tail

One of the biggest breakthroughs in improving my positions in the SERPs was understanding the long tail. For years I worked on ranking for those highly sought-after keywords and would ignore the rest. My SEO efforts were spent day in and day out on optimizing all my pages for that highly sought-after set of keywords. During those times I would actually get a bit aggravated when those long tail searches started rolling in because it was not the grand pumba of keywords I was trying for.

In retrospect I can’t believe it took me so long to see the light. I remember spending my time building backlinks for just the keyword phrase I wanted to rank for. I am amazed that I had any success at all. The two reasons I had a bit of success was the fact that all of my copy was completely unique and that I would occasionally get the rogue backlink with some really whacked out anchor text, which would make the search engines realize that I was too much of an idiot to be trying to spam them.

What is the Long Tail?

I try to explain visually in the graph below. The long tail comprises all the searches that surround a larger niche. I use the example of widgets in the graph. You can see that the term “widgets” receives about 100 queries per month. What is really important to notice about the long tail is that the sum of all the other search terms hanging off of widgets is more than widgets itself. In general the rule of thumb is that the long tail has more hits per month than the big keyword in the topology.

Why I love the Long Tail

The long tail is truly the SEOs best friend. It enables you to have small amount of success with a site in the matter of a few months. It really does not matter if you have an online store, a MFA (Made for AdSense) site, or a forum. As long as you keep the longtail in mind when writing your copy, you can capitalize on those micro niches. Personally I use tools like WordTracker and Overture for getting an idea about the long tail, but you do not need them. One thing that makes the web so exciting is that there are an infinite number of niches that have yet to be created or discovered. The internet really reflects the uniqueness of each individual and industry, and allows for like minded people to congregate together. It is just a matter of finding a niche and writing some really unique content. The key to being successful is not necessarily liking the topic you are writing about, but rather having the discipline to write about the topic whether you want to or not.

For more information check out The Long Tail over at wiki.