Competing with the “big guys”

There might be 1000 web sites or more just like yours on the internet. So how do you compete? The “big guys” dominate the search engines, and you might find it hard to get into the first 20 pages. Many internet users won’t look beyond the first page of the internet search, almost none look beyond the second or third Pages. Again, how do you compete? By knowing something that the “big guys” don’t. Enter the long tail.

Most Searches are Unique

More the 70% of searches performed on a search engine are unique, meaning that the query has seldom or never been used as a search term. It seems as though most searches would be more alike than not. Well in fact, they are. It’s how the search is worded that makes it unique. The 30% of searches that are not unique includes most of what makes up a typical SEO’s keyword and key
phrase list. If you run a website that sells used books, it might make sense to target the key phrase such as “used books”. It is true that good search engine standings for the key phrase “used books” make sense if what you are selling is used books.. Why stop there?

How Customers find your site

The question to ask yourself is: How are my customers finding my website? The best way to find the answer to that question is to look at your sites log files. There are plenty of programs available for free or for a fee, that will allow you to view the statistics. Of your site in an easy to read format. Awstats provides a nice looking, easy to use interface, for viewing a website statistics. Awstats allows you to view a complete listing of all of the keywords and key phrases your users employed to find your site.

If you look at the Used Book site statistics, you might find that 60% of the sites visitors came back from a search engine. Of those, 20% used the key phrase “Used books” to find the site, 8% used “Old Books”, and 3% used “Antique Books”. Each of the remaining keywords and key phrases were used by one or two visitors to find the site: terms such as “Tattered binding” and “Shakespeare
originals” and even common misspellings like “tatered Cover” or “The Dark night”. You might even find that there are some longer key phrases like “How to sell a collection of used books for cheap and fast”.

These lesser used keywords and phrases are the long tail. They make up a very high proportion of searches conducted on the internet. This is one reason why they are so important. Another reason that they are so important is the fact that little is known about the long tail. Most SEO’s and web site marketers ignore the long tail in favor of targeting the more competitive keywords.

Targeting the long tail should be at the top of any serious SEO or webmasters priorities. Making use of these keywords and phrases throughout your site can potentially increase your sites traffic as much as 2 or 3 times.