Thursday, November 22, 2007

Long Tail Traffic: Why You Need It, and How to Get It

Most are familar with the marketing concept of the long tail. For those that aren’t, the idea is basically this: the "big keyword phrases" out there, even if they were all combined, don’t even come close to the number of obscure queries that are made only once or twice a month.

Why You Need Long Tail Traffic

1) Long Tail Traffic Means MORE Traffic: In trying to rank in the top 10 for some regular keyword, you could get content, get incoming links from authority sites, and do everything you could to promote it, and still get disappointing traffic results. However with long tail traffic, you get easy traffic. You don’t need to worry about having an absurd number of incoming links, the sandbox, or how to beat your competition. It comes naturally and without effort, and requires no maintainance.

2) Long Tail Traffic Can Improve Your Site: If you let it, anyway. Long tail traffic reveals not only what your users want that’s already on your site, but it also reveals information they may want that you don’t yet have pages about. It gives you ideas for content sometimes great ones. Examine your web log, keyword files, to see what users want that isn’t presently available.

3) Long Tail Traffic is Worth More: People who do PPC marketing should hopefully already know this. Long tail users know what they’re looking for. As long as you can give it to them, and provide related ads, services, or products, you’ll make more money.

4) Discover Bait Words: After a while, you’ll start realizing certain words will almost always consistantly drive more traffic to your pages. This varies by niche. There are always bait words in every niche that won’t be obvious. However to discover those, you need to analysize the web logs for your long tail search queries. From there you can purposely drop the bait onto more and more of your pages. This will have a tremendous impact on your incoming traffic from search engines.

How To Get Long Tail Traffic:

1) Quality Content. And Lots of It: It’s cliche, and it seems like this is the supposed answer for everything, but when it comes to the long tail, it’s really the truth. When you write lots of content and have long articles, the combinations of words that you’ll end up getting traffic for will really surprise you.

2) If appropriate, set your site up so users can add comments directly to the pages. Also product reviews is a good way to add more content.

3) Start Forums: With forums, users get to decide what they want to talk about. Get your forums up and running, then analysize the logs. Find bait words, find new topics, and go back and modify your pages and add new content.

So where do you go to research long tail keywords?

An easy way would be to browse through your web statistics for the past few of months. Take a look at the keywords that people have been using to find your website. Also, check to see where you are ranking on the search engines for those terms. If you are low, then you can think about developing more content for those keywords. The more content you create, the more you will notice those long tail keywords piling up.
This why optimizing websites for long tail keyword searches are important.

Here are two websites linkertinker.com and opportunitylinker.com sucessfully using longtail marketing to get web traffic.

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