The Long Tail: SEO Tips

[dilvie]

I was inspired by recent forum discussions (you know who you are) to type up some of my ideas about how to do SEO to capture The Long Tail. I'd love to get some feedback. Am I missing something? Making sense? Let me know.

The Long Tail: SEO Tips

- Eric

[andrewgoodman]

Capturing the long tail has been a classic pillar of intermediate to advanced SEO from Day One.

From a spammer standpoint, this means churning out huge numbers of gibberish pages which the SE's must learn to reject.

Assuming SE's can tell quality from gibberish (a big assumption), I cannot see how an increase in the number of pages of quality content on your site from say 35 to 200 wouldn't increase your topical SE referrals over time. Unfortunately it doesn't always seem to work that way (frequent bloggers still don't seem to get all of their posts well indexed), but that isn't going to stop me from pursuing that route. It's just too fundamental to how SE's work. More words, more topics, more pages... certainly it isn't going to result in *fewer* SE referrals.

Now: what happens after the click? If nothing, then there was probably not much point in bothering to attract that visitor.

[dilvie]

Originally Posted by andrewgoodman

Capturing the long tail has been a classic pillar of intermediate to advanced SEO from Day One.

Of course, but when people talk about SEO, the long tail is often neglected in favor of targeting a handful of very visible keywords.

...I cannot see how an increase in the number of pages of quality content on your site from say 35 to 200 wouldn't increase your topical SE referrals over time.

Having more content is important for the long tail. If your site is only a few pages, your strategy probably should concentrate on expanding your content, and targeting a more specific group of keywords, but if your site already has a large base of content, your strategy should include beefing up search saturation for the content you have already created.

Unfortunately it doesn't always seem to work that way (frequent bloggers still don't seem to get all of their posts well indexed), but that isn't going to stop me from pursuing that route. It's just too fundamental to how SE's work. More words, more topics, more pages... certainly it isn't going to result in *fewer* SE referrals.

The fact is, if you want your content indexed, it needs to be well linked. The search engines must be told that the page is important, and the best way to tell the search engines that something is important is to link to it from a page that already has a large number of inbound links. Having external links helps, too.

Now: what happens after the click? If nothing, then there was probably not much point in bothering to attract that visitor.

That's a topic for another article.

- Eric