Web Design Tutorials Made Easy

If you have any kind of experience in SEM (Search Engine Marketing) you may have heard Web Guru’s say the phrase “the long tail” before. So what exactly is it? And how can it benefit you and your site?

In the following I will explain in depth what ‘the long tail’ is and how it can help you increase your search engine ranking and sales. For the purpose of this article I will be using a fictional site to show how this is all put into practice.

99% of ‘SEO-experts‘ begin by jumping head-long into keywords with such high rankings that they will likely not see quality results for a long time.

‘The long tail’ is primarily about achieving very good overall results in a short amount of time. And you will find out how this works.

Let’s say I have made a site about sportswear for sale. My site is complete and I even have my e-commerce setup. At this point, not even crickets are visiting my web site. What do I do?

First, we need to do a little research. We need to determine what the most popular phrases people are likely to search for when trying to find sportswear.

So lets pop-over to Word Tracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/) . If you dont have an account you will have to sign up for a free temporary trial account. They will email you an immediate temporary trial url.

Once you have the trial page up and ready, type in sportswear on the left column. After a bit of time (approx. 60 seconds) you will see related terms appear in the left column. Click on sportswear. Now in the right column are the most popular keywords used to search for sportswear on the major search engines.

Now that we know that sportswear is a popular keyword, we need to start optimizing for it right? Wrong! Let’s open up google and enter the phrase sportswear to see how many results it has.

Competing for the term sportswear are 21 million sites? Yeah thats right 21 million!.

Clearly it is now evident that we aren’t going to rank well for sportswear right out the gate. So what do we do? We head back over to Word Tracker and do a little more research.

Look for the low ranked keywords. Once you found them, click the dig icon (looks like a shovel) for the second keyword phrase from bottom ‘starter brand sportswear‘. This opens up a page displaying an indepth look at that keyword phrase, and related keywords.

Now let’s go back to google and check how many competing sites there are for our new keyword phrase (starter brand sportswear).

Only 119,000 sites compete for this keyword phrase starter brand sportswear. Why is this good for us? It simply means with only a little effort we can be quickly be ranked number 1 on google for those keywords.

How does “the long tail” fit into all this?

Well “long tail” basically means key phrases which consist of 3, 4, 5, 6 etc words. To us that means those combinations of words are not typically competed for as strongly as broad keywords like sportswear. The length of the “long tail” starter brand sportswear works to our benefit.

How does this benefit us?

Competing for many “long tail” key phrases has many benefits. Mainly, combine all the visits generated from your long tail keywords and no doubt they will be well over your visitation ratio for being number 1 for the large keyword such as sportswear. So instead of competing for one large pie, you are competing for smaller portions of the big pie which are a lot easier to get. These smaller portions eventually add up to a very large pie!

Another benefit is when a person is close to buying an item they do not use broad key phrases. If I were going to buy a computer, I doubt I would use computer as my search criteria. Instead, I would likely be using a combination of keywords (the long tail) to search for exactly what I want.

In closing, thank-you for taking the time to read this and it is my hope that it helps you to achieve those SEO goals!