Stand Out FINAL pdf

STAND OUT 115
KEY CONCEPT: Understanding the Long Tail of Search
Wired
The Long Tail,
The principle of the Long Tail is the opposite of focusing on the top 10-20
keywords for marketing your website. The “top keyword” concept is reinforced
by agencies that contract to gain rankings for 10-20 terms, maybe 30. However,
when studying the referrals from the search engines and the traffic they generate,
their market.
People tend to focus on the thousands of visitors that come to the site for
the most popular terms. Most site managers are very happy to see the numbers
increase for those specific terms, and even happier to see those terms consistently
ranking well. Conventional thinking applies the 80-20 rule that the top terms
provide 80 percent of the business, but in evaluating multiple sites, this has
proved to be the opposite. An important marketing concept known as “The
Long Tail” is used to describe the hundreds to thousands of keywords and key
phrases that a website is found for, yet rarely noticed or exploited by owners
of the website.