There has been a lot of talk lately about the “long tail” strategy in search engine optimization. People have been asking me how to work this into their campaign.

First, let me explain to everyone what “long tail” means in SEO. Picture a graph of your search terms in relation to traffic provided. That graph would have a peak for your most popular term, and then get shorter and shorter down to the least trafficked term. The idea of long tail is that the bulk of your traffic is made from these lesser terms, thus the long tail.

USWeb treats long tail as content development approach. With few exceptions, long tail is a common trend for our clients. The most notable exceptions being in certain e-commerce clients where only a handful of search terms convert. Still, search is not only about gaining the initial conversion, it’s about increased visibility to a targeted audience. For example, USWeb sees a significant long tail effect in search engines. Even though we rank on the first page for terms like “online marketing” and “internet marketing”. We see the bulk of our traffic from terms that were not intentional targets. This isn’t a bad thing, especially since most of the these less relvant terms are business related.

The long tail SEO strategy is one of the most effective traffic building approaches you can take. USWeb accomplishes much of our clients long tail success through constant content development. For most clients we try to determine the top 1000 search phrases. We figure out which terms they already rank for, which terms have pages of content ready to optimize, and then which terms we will need to create content.

USWeb is different than most search marketing firms in that most of the expense to our clients is for content development and link building, not just consulting.

Try to imagine the type of impact 1,000 targeted terms have on long tail. Suddenly your site is visible for all sorts of terms that you would have never thought of. One of the biggest clients USWeb has came to us through search, but not one of our prime target terms, but because they were searching for someone by name, who happened to be someone we mentioned.

The trick to converting long tail is to make sure that every page of your site properly explains who you are, what you offer, and a direct call to action. This is easier done for some sites than others, but the pay offs are significant.

One additional benefit to our search engine optimization clients is the search terms they discover once they optimize their site. It’s amazing the terms you can find by seeing how people find your site. You can then add those terms to your Yahoo and Google AdWords list and increase your visibility on terms that most likely are very inexpensive.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.