SEO Speak: Long tail
23rd March 2009 by Emily Mace
For this SEO speak blog I thought I’d focus on a term we’ve used a lot in our blog: the Long Tail.
So what is a long tail keyword?
When you are working on the search engine optimisation of your website they keywords you tend to go for are those that have the potential to drive a large number of visitors to you site. These tend to be the common keywords that a large proportion of your potential customers might use.
If you look at the keywords driving traffic to the site from your stats package you will noticed that your well optimised site gets traffic from a lot more keywords than those you have optimised your website to.
These additional keywords which are driving visitors to your website are called the long tail. These keywords will be less common, and could be for some of your more niche products and services. These long tail keywords have a lower search volume associated with them.
However, it is interesting to look at the level of traffic your get to your site from these long tail keywords. It is possible, and in many cases likely, that these long tail keywords all added together will drive as many, if not more visits more to your website as your more common core keywords.
In the past we’ve suggested you use Long Tail keywords for blog post ideas and future keywords. Looking at the long tail keywords is certainly a good way of doing both these things. In addition to this monitoring the number long term keywords driving traffic to your website on a month by month basis can aid you in monitoring how well your site is being indexed and ranked by search engines. For example, if you have a keyword “bottled water” as one of your core keywords, you may also find that you are ranking well for “