The long tail, in aggregate, actually drives more traffic and conversions than head keywords . The problem with the long tail is that despite the fact that it drives a lot of traffic, it’s both difficult to manage, and nearly impossible to create a predictive model around.
One of the most difficult aspects of capturing traffic from the long tail of search is creating relevant  targeted content. As we discussed in “Determining Searcher Intent and Delivering Relevant, Fresh Content”.

search engines rely on lexical analysis to determine what a web page is about. As a result, your chances of showing up for a long tail phrase are greatly increased if you have that long tail phrase, or at least all the words that make up the long tail phrase, on your page.

The idea to you do target unique queries is to aggressively target mid-tail keywords, while intelligently structuring your site such that you can acquire longer tail traffic.

The best approach is to use the long tail research techniques is obtain lots of content that will help attract long tail traffic.
Popular ways of doing that include Web Directories, Business /Blog reviews, blog comments, and a way to upload videos or images, among others. As users submit content, they do the hard work of writing the text you need to capitalize on the long tail.

Here is where you’ll create a nice infrastructure for longer tail queries:

• Optimize for mid-tail terms.
• Include variations of your mid-tail term in the page’s sub-headlines (h2s and h3s).
• Create verbose (but well-optimized) content.

The first step is to optimize for both the middle of the graph (your core key phrase) and more specific variations. This means targeting your mid-competition phrase while prominently featuring variations. Extending the search marketing example, the page might look something like this:

• Title – Internet Business Resources - Search for The Best Company Portfolio
• h1 – Business Resource Directories
• h2 – Best Reviews and Rating for Business Portfolio
• Etc.

Advantages Of Long Tail Traffic

There are a number of advantages of long tail traffic including

1. Less Competition – Long tail keywords are generally much much easier to rank for as your competitors chase the broader keywords thinking there is “gold in them there hills”.

2. Costs Less – With links having become somewhat of a commodity, buying any kind of link becomes expensive. This is not the case with the long tail as you do not need to spend so much time and money link building although you cant stop that link building campaign altogether.

3. More Convertible – There can be no doubt. The long tail is the pot of gold. The holy grail of search traffic. The long tail converts far better than the broad search terms.

What You Need To Target the Long Tail Keywords

There is one thing you will most definitely need when targeting the long tail keywords.

“Unique” CONTENT – Content is king for sure. Without it, you have no content to optimize for the long tail keywords. its also important that the content you have on your site is not duplicated, ie not scraped from other sites on the web. Google and the other engines will not index duplicate content, meaning your pages will be of no use and will not be shown in the search results.

Example Of A Long Tail Strategy

With so many sites out there competing for so few customers its a tough niche to do well in. There are ways that you can target the long tail though and bring in lots more relevant traffic.

1. Make sure your deeper listings are unique content and NOT MLS syndicated. This is a tough proposition for most but is KEY to successfully targeting the long tail.

2. Make sure that as many of your listings are crawlable and indexed.

3. Add your most important listings pages to your sitemap.

4. Be sure to link to your deep content via featured listings that rotate on the site, or via regular blog posting and other internal link opportunities.

5. Bookmark as many of your most important listings as possible to help the engines and users find them.

6. Brainstorm with colleagues and friends as many keywords, modifiers and descriptors as possible. (I will show you how to do this in my next post)

7. Make sure that the listings are well optimized, ie title tags, alt tags meta data and that the main copy/text is keyword rich. Try to mention words that your searchers may use such as disabled friendly, pet friendly, villa, apartment, private pool, close to shops, close to bearch etc etc. Your users do use these words, trust me!

Finally, you want to create longer documents. The search marketing Wikipedia page, like many, contains almost a thousand words. By creating a long document that includes natural language and a lot of industry specific terms, Wikipedia is ensuring that they are primed to rank for all kinds of random word combinations.

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