Optimizing for the Long Tail

Typically, a website gets around 30% of it’s search visitors from around 10 popular phrases.  The rest of the traffic comes from a great number of keyword phrase variations, each one individually contributing a small amount, but in total, they often represent the majority of search traffic.  The great thing about phrases in the long tail is that they are usually far less competitive than popular terms an therefore you can more easily achieve high rankings for them and bring in high quality targetted traffic.

First, you need to know what phrases are common in your long tail.  They often consist of a variety of combinations of a few keywords.  One great way to find them is to use your server logs.  Use any good log analysis tool, (I like Deep Log Analyzer to see what terms people are currently using to find your site.  If your site has a decent amount of relevant content, you should have some traffic coming in using relevant keywords.  You can then see what words and phrases are being used.  Additionally, you can set up Google Analytics for free on your site and it will give you some great keyword data.  Of course, and especially if you don’t currently have much SE traffic, do some keyword research using a variety of tools like Google’s Keyword Tool or WordTracker. 

Look at what words and phrases are common in the long tail.  Often a great deal of the long tail will be made out of different combinations of just a few words.  Targetting the most popular of these words and prases will usually bring in the most traffic.

What you will need to do to optimize for these phrases depends on how competitive the landscape is and how many words you are going after.  In general, sites with the most keyword rich content do the best in the long tail.   Though  local business looking to grab more local traffic may only need to make sure their town is mentioned in the meta description and at the bottom of the page to suddenly rank well for queries that include the town name.    Consider ways to add more keyword rich content:

1. Make sure your pages have a good amount of TEXT.   If you can write a few paragraphs about your topic on each page, that is much better than just a few words next to a picture or video for SEO purposes.
2. Make more pages.  Sounds simple – and it is.  Make relevant, themed pages, with keyword rich internal linking.
3. Consider adding a blog.  A blog is the fastest and easiest way to add a great deal of content, and usually has very good internal linking built in.
4. Make sure to link to these pages internally with keywords in the anchor text.

Depending on how competitive your phrases are, you may or may not want to add specific pages with the long tail keywords in the title.  A good first step is to add some content, and make sure the most common words found in your long tail are found in the content.  If you find you are not ranking well for them, then consider adding dedicated pages with keywords in the title.