the long tail

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paulavery

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What are peoples thoughts on long tail when it comes to key words? I'd be interested to hear.
BTW - long tail to me means a significant amount of traffic coming from several thousand different combinations of KWs. So one phrase might only bring one or two visits a month, but when there are tens of thousands of these it adds up to a good amount of traffic.
Paul
 
Would be helpful if you would explain what 'long tail' means. I've not heard the phrase before.
 
I think this is why many of us blog. Hundreds of keywords can be used, each on its own page so there are hundreds of pages a guest can find. We can target the main keywords on our main webpages but then go nuts with anything and everything on the blog.
 
Morticia and I are on the same page.
From wikipeida http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail
Effects of online access[/h3] In his Wired article, Chris Anderson cites earlier research,[9][10][11] by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. They found that a large proportion of Amazon.com's book sales come from obscure books that were not available in brick-and-mortar stores.
Same idea with traffic, a significant amount of traffic can come from obsurce keywords that only a few will search. Further, I'd also suggest that some of the long tail is higher quality traffic.
 
Morticia and I are on the same page.
From wikipeida http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail
Effects of online access[/h3] In his Wired article, Chris Anderson cites earlier research,[9][10][11] by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. They found that a large proportion of Amazon.com's book sales come from obscure books that were not available in brick-and-mortar stores.
Same idea with traffic, a significant amount of traffic can come from obsurce keywords that only a few will search. Further, I'd also suggest that some of the long tail is higher quality traffic..
Paul,
The wikipedia entry only focuses on the more popular version of "long tail"... those keywords that have low volume. The other version of "long tail" is keywords with three or more words. The two versions usually overlap, but not always.
regards,
 
Morticia and I are on the same page.
From wikipeida http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail
Effects of online access[/h3] In his Wired article, Chris Anderson cites earlier research,[9][10][11] by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. They found that a large proportion of Amazon.com's book sales come from obscure books that were not available in brick-and-mortar stores.
Same idea with traffic, a significant amount of traffic can come from obsurce keywords that only a few will search. Further, I'd also suggest that some of the long tail is higher quality traffic..
I was going to use Amazon as an example. Another one is Target. However, a lot of times they buy AdWords based solely on the idea you may use 'for sale' in your query. So, if I want to buy an item that Target does not even carry, I find their ad in the paid section, click over thinking they have the item and I'm on their home page and the item isn't even on their site.
THAT is annoying.
So, targeted long tail is much better than random long tail.
Someone may find me based on a combo of words in a blog that I never even thought of. But they're not really looking for a place to stay and will move on. An example was this winter when a blog about snowshoeing had people calling me to rent snowshoes because I mentioned renting snowshoes in the blog post. They only called to be sure I had them 'in stock' before they came over! I WAS able to help them with the snowshoes by telling them where they could get them, but they were in no way looking for accommodations and probably immediately forgot who was so helpful!
 
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