Longtail SEO
Return to the articles index
Longtail SEO is one of the strangest terms to emerge from the rapidly expanding search engine marketing and optimisation sector.
Conjuring up pictures of some wierd SEO beast with pockets full of wizard oil and yes, a long tail, Longtail SEO is now regarded as an essential white hat search engine optimising technique that over time increases the number of relevant search terms and phrases a website is found under.
The ABC of Longtail
As with most search engine optimisation techniques, Longtail SEO is actually really easy to understand and to impliment.
All you need is a statistics package such as Google Analytics attached to your website, something that tells you what people type into the search engines just before they stumble across your website.
The next bit reminds me of my maths class in Primary School: take a piece of paper and a pen, bring up the 50 or so least popular search phrases that people have typed in to find your website, and tally the words.
For example, Jo's Gift Shop was found by people who typed in the following search phrases:
best gifts for family
my favourite gifts and presents
unusual family gift ideas
best ideas for gifts
birthday gift ideas for friends
Jo's word tally looks like this:
best II
gifts III
family III
unusual I
ideas III
presents I
christmas I
From this example, Jo now composes an informative article to add to her website using the words 'gifts' 'family' and 'ideas' in the title.
She also repeats these words in various ways throughout her article, and perhaps includes some context linking* to products and other content in her website.
The Importance of Longtail SEO
Jo repeats the above steps a couple of times a month, composing a handful of new articles for her website each time using combinations of popular words used in less popular search phrases.
After a while Jo notices that her website visitor numbers are steadily increasing and some of those articles optimised for various combinations of words are starting to be found more often in the search engines.
How Does Longtail SEO Work?
The articles are naturally optimised for less competitive search phrases made up of popular search words. This gives each article more of a fighting chance to get closer to the top of search engines on these less competitive search phrases.
Although most articles may only initially contribute a nominal increase in visitors to your website, over time their effectiveness will grow and some might even turn into significant contributors.
The other obvious benefit of carrying out Longtail SEO on your website is that you are increasing the volume and breadth of relevant content, thus improving your websites' standing with the search engines.
Like all good SEO practices, little bits regularly is the best approach. We have an article here that discusses other tips on improving your search engine marketing.