The “long tail” is a term you will soon be hearing in SEO circles soon.

Before I get into the SEO implication let me talk a bit about the history of the concept.
The term “long tail” was coined by Chris Anderson, a writer at Wired magazine, who says that the collective demand for less-popular items (micro niches) can exceed the all the most popular added together.

Online music stores are a perfect illustration of “the long tail” as they can carry large inventories of music albums as they are not limited by shelf space like conventional brick and mortar stores.
Shelf space in a brick and mortar store has a price, and if the items on the shelf aren’t converting enough, you will need to replace the existing items with other items that convert better.

But this limitation doesn’t exist in the online domain. Amazon is a website has a digital inventory that would be many time more than what a traditional brick and mortar store can accommodate in physical media.

An interesting point to be noted is that only a small percentage of the total sales volume at Amazon comes from its best sellers. Most of its sales volumes come from the relatively obscure items that not many people buy.

So the aggregate revenue of all the “not so popular” items is 85% of the sales and only 15% from the best sellers.

You can see how companies are benefiting from this, but what does this have to do with your SEO efforts, and your web site?

Think SEO, and most people would think Google. Google states that more than 75% of its searches are unique search phrases that comprise 3 or more words. Most people make the mistake of trying to optimize their web pages for the short tail, i.e. the top keywords in their niche. For example if you were to focus your website on a keyword like “Stove” and I were to focus on a phrase like “Morso 3610 Wood Burning Stove”. While your webpage may be buried on the tenth page in Google, my webpage is most likely to be on the first page.

Now even though the number of searches for this phrase may be low, if I build my site around 50 such phrases the collective income from my site will far exceed your site.

Another advantge my site would have is that a person who comes to my site from a search for “Morso 3610 Wood Burning Stove” is a buyer, where as a person who searches for a term like “stove” might be searching for any kind of information related to a stove and not necessarily interested in buying a stove.

So the conversion rate on such focused phrases is much more than a generic phrase.

Now a question that may come to your mind is “How do I know what people are searching for?”

One option is to analyze your sites log files. You’d be amazed at the kind of marketing intelligence they can reveal.

An easier option is to use a free tracker like extremetracking.com

This site has a link called “Referer tracking 1″, where it shows you the last 20 search engine queries that a user typed to find your site.

You would be amazed that there would be such obscure terms in there which people have found your web page for.

Your next step is to save these keywords and create additional web pages optimized for these phrases.

Now these new pages you have added might be found for further obscure terms. So this continual process can eventually make your site a leader in the niche you are targeting.

So remember using the long tail concept you can make money off obscure key phrases that others are leaving lying on the table.

Quick bookmarks
                                                

SEO | No Comments »

Webmasters are always looking for ways to get inbound links from authority web sites. An authority web site is a web site that is important or authoritative in its sphere of expertise due to the quality of content and features that it possesses.

For improving search engine rankings, an incoming link from an authority site is worth more than an incoming link from an average site. Slashdot.org is such an authority web site. With a Google PageRank of 9 and an Alexa Traffic Rank of 200, Slashdot.org belongs to the most successful sites on the Internet.

How to get a link from Slashdot.org

A simple 5 step process allows you to put any link with any text from Slashdot to your web site:

1. Go to Slashdot’s story submission page.

2. Fill out the form and enter a link to your web site in the “The Scoop” edit field. Don’t forget to include your keywords in the link.

3. Use a tool like the Web Developer extension in Firefox to convert the form action from POST to GET. This can be done with one click with the Web Developer extension.

4. Click the “Preview story” button.

5. Copy the preview URL and link to the preview URL on one of your pages. If the search engine spiders follow the link they will find a link from Slashdot.org to your web site.

You can use any keyword and any URL to get links with this method.

Quick bookmarks
                                                

General | No Comments »

At the Social Search track at SES San Jose, Doug Caverly lends an eager ear to panelists discussing how community-built websites, like Wikipedia, Digg.com, and Del.icio.us, can be utilized for search engine marketing

Neil Patel, cofounder of Advantage Consulting Services began the session by illustrating how a Wikipedia articles often appear quite high in the search results.

This presents an opportunity, on relevant pages, to add and monitor content about a company or brand. It may also be a good idea to create your own page(s). Patel warns about what is common sense to those familiar with social sites: be fair; be honest; be transparent. Spammers, promoters, and cons often receive backlash.

SEOmoz.org CEO Rand Fishkin agrees that social communities can drive “massive” traffic to your website. Along with that traffic can come positive (or negative) branding associations. Fishkin pointed a spike in traffic to his site after “double-Digging and Del.icio.using.” Or even better, is what we like to call Hat Trick 2.0, which involves a link from Digg, Slashdot, and BoingBoing. If you score one of these, you’d better be prepared for server overload.

Fishkin also recommends tagging content for Technorati, posting visual content on Flickr, and submitting your website to StumbleUpon, a plug-in for Mozilla’s Firefox that retrieves websites at random according to a user’s specification of content preference.

Fishkin reiterated Patel’s admonition of not being a spammer. “Only submit content that has the ability to get popular with your audience,” said the accompanying PowerPoint slide.

Because content is harshly judged, winning abundant cheers or jeers by social audiences, Andy Hagans, a strategist for Text Link Ads, reminds the audience how difficult getting positively featured on these websites can be. So what’s the best way to get your content in front of the digerati without being lambasted for spamming?

Hagans recommends “funny lists,” encyclopedic resources, unique tools, or anything one might consider “bookmark-worthy.” This is “link bait.”

“You really want to create relationships with bloggers,” said Hagans. “Most link bait flops. That is normal. Commit to doing it regularly.”

Gada.be’s Chris Pirillo closed the session with a discussion on creating value for social bookmarkers. “All these words mean nothing unless you’re creating value,” he said. “Do something stupid - something that will call people’s attention and you’ll do well.”

via:

Quick bookmarks
                                                

SEO | No Comments »