sweetfunny

Ok now i have your attention with the marketing style title, let me say i'm not selling anything because you couldn't afford me and yes the above statement is true so read on.

I posted this one elsewhere and it was quite popular, so i thought i would share the info with iDomainsite. Likewise if you have any questions feel free to ask.

Long Tail
What i wanted to post about is Long Tail, and how people completely ignore it or underestimate the power of picking up Long Tail search terms. For those who don't know what Long Tail terms are, these are simply very specific search terms and generally have 4-5 or more words and little competition. An example is instead of ranking for the search term "Canon Camera" which has stiff competition, you would break it down and target a page for "Canon PowerShot S400 Digital Camera" and another page for "Canon EOS 400D Digital Camera" and so on until you have sewn up the Canon Camera line.

Benefits
The benefits of this are numerous. Firstly i will say too many people get caught up trying to rank for "the big one" and loose sight of the bigger picture. Sure it's a nice trophy saying i rank page #1 for "SEO Company" or i rank page #2 for the holy grail "SEO" (which i do) however it does take quite a bit of time and effort to achieve those types of placements then you have to maintain them.

What happens when you wake up tomorrow and Google has decided to tweak something and it negatively effects your prized term? You are history, your traffic dries up, all your hard work is undone, your income collapses and you waste days, weeks or sometimes months trying to recover your term. You have a single point of failure that's not in your complete control.

Using Long Tail diversifies your traffic sources, you no longer have to rely on a single rank but have multiple ways for visitors to find you via the SERP's. On any given day some Long Tail keywords will drop and others will rise which is completely normal flux but overall your traffic won't be effected.

The other benefit with optimizing for Long Tail terms is your traffic will be "highly" targeted and more likely to convert in to a sale. Consumers have a reasonable idea what they are looking for and generally sculpt specific terms. If they are looking for a Canon Camera it's highly unlikely they will just Google "Canon Camera" unless they are looking for the Canon official website. They will know a few basics on what they want such as a Digital with 8 MegaPixels so are more likely to type "Canon 8 MegaPixel Digital Camera".

Right there you have a highly targeted term that's very likely to get queries and convert with minimal competition (216,000) you can rank for quite easily.

On page your Title holds the most bang for your buck, so by splitting your pages down and targeting Long Tail terms you have multiple bites of the Apple with the Title tool at your disposal on many pages giving you more chances to rank.

Result
Anyhow this is getting long and i have a few things to do so i'll finish up by showing a site i optimized for Long Tail about 2 weeks ago. As you can see by the traffic graph up until the 13th Dec traffic was ordinary, on the night of the 14th, the 15th and a few hours on the 16th the rise in the graph was me on the site making pages and optimizing things. 3 days later Google started to deliver and traffic went through the roof. (The yellow columns are visitors and stats aren't updated for the rest of the 27th)



And this one is the referring search phrases mainly from Google, and a bit from Yahoo/MSN. I've blocked the terms to hide the niche, but as you can see the site was found with 5,982 different search terms. Going by the stats that only 80% of searchers go to the second page it equals 4,785 page #1 placements all long tail.



Now the interesting thing is the top 10 search terms only account for 1.3% of the total traffic meaning 98.7% is long tail. Many people don't realize this, but your top 10 terms only account for a small percentage of your referring terms. I'd like everyone to check the percentage of visitors their top 10 terms bring in and post them, if it's 30% that means 70% is coming from Long Tail yet people fail to take advantage of it!

Hope you found this interesting and learnt something useful for your SEO techniques.

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iDomainSite

Welcome aboard Sweetfunny, and i must say that is one brilliant article!

Amazing, hows the traffic and site going now in January?

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sweetfunny

It's still getting stronger.. The daily traffic has slightly more than tripled since the best day in the above screenshot. There was a lul on Xmas day as well as New Years day which is to be expected however virtually every day the traffic has been higher than the previous day.

Also in the 10 days of January the site has been found by 12,774 keyphrases so going by the stats that 80% of internet searches don't go to the second page it works out around 10,219 page 1 rankings.

Although i admit, it is a fairly large ecommerce site with a lot of products/pages which helps with the large volume of different keywords.

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