The Long Tail: Is the Pain Worth the Gain?
SEW has an article on the long tail that is worth a read. Apparently Google estimates that nearly 50 percent of all searches are one-of-a-kind. That's more than 100 million unique searches per day on Google alone. Having just spent a month polishing up the long tail of a site I have with 1st page on serps for the one word search (30 million results) but where algo shifts were pushing me down on long tail queries, I can agree with their conclusion. certainly my time has been amply and quickly repaid.
Quote:
Bottom line: The long, long tail of search not only is where things get difficult, but also interesting and profitable. Advertising in the tail will differentiate you from your competition and allow you to find conversions at a great value. But savvy search marketers realize that chasing the tail requires time, effort, money, solid analytics and, yes patience
- Y! MyWeb
chasing tail
Hi Cornwall, to generalise (as far as poss) has your tail polishing meant you building pages each featuring a number of long-tail keyword variations, or each page going for keyword density on a single long-tail search term?
Long-tail keyword variations...
...rather than "a single long-tail search term". With what I have been doing, it does not seem necessary to go that far to get into money, though I concede in the future it might be.
"long-tail" is web2.0 marketspeak for....
....what web0.02'ers called bottom-feeding and experience has shown that it is [A] stable, [B] lucrative, and [C] more difficult --for organic placement.
Anyone else notice the gaping hole in that article where organic serps should have been? To me, it smelled of sems justifying ppc.
Get others to create the long tail
Yep, I noticed that too. Not much there on SEO at all.
What imo was also missing is the various ways any webmaster can get a long tail through a well optimized blog, forum or other community building script. 90% of my traffic comes through the +200,000 indexed forum posts. Obviously I didn't write them all myself :-) You get the typos (one of my top search terms today was "googel video" on google.de)and a great selection of niche phrases with each new thread.
Nothing on the need for a well thought out internal linkage strategy either, particulary valuable for large shops or for example a worldwide hotel booking site.
.oO(I feel an article coming on lol)
Alan