Keywords, the long tail of search

A few months back we were having a discussion about keywords or something related and I disclosed how many different search phrases people had used to find my site in the previous week. Well today I took a look at how many search phrases had been used in the previous month for my environmental chemistry site.

In the past month people have found my site using over 100,000 different search phrases and in the past three months people have used over 300,000 different search phrases to find my site.

My point in sharing this is to show that overly obsessing on a narrow group of keywords with one's SEO efforts really misses the big picture. People rarely search for what you offer using the keywords or phrases you would expect. The more tightly you focus on a select group of "high value" keywords the more likely it is you will miss out on other people who are looking for what you offer but not using the terms you focused on at the exclusion of their search phrase. The long tail of search can be a very good source of traffic.

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Originally Posted by KLB

A few months back we were having a discussion about keywords or something related and I disclosed how many different search phrases people had used to find my site in the previous week. Well today I took a look at how many search phrases had been used in the previous month for my environmental chemistry site.

In the past month people have found my site using over 100,000 different search phrases and in the past three months people have used over 300,000 different search phrases to find my site.

My point in sharing this is to show that overly obsessing on a narrow group of keywords with one's SEO efforts really misses the big picture. People rarely search for what you offer using the keywords or phrases you would expect. The more tightly you focus on a select group of "high value" keywords the more likely it is you will miss out on other people who are looking for what you offer but not using the terms you focused on at the exclusion of their search phrase. The long tail of search can be a very good source of traffic.

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Keep in mind the majority of sites out there don't have near the content your site has let alone articles that are long like the ones found on your site.

I agree long-tail = great but in order to get a LOT (like you) of long tail the site really needs many pages of content.

Quality UNIQUE content, focused on the site's topic with a lot pages NEVER hurt anyone ;)

If you are writing about a subject on which you are knowledgeable the long tail terms don't require any effort; you already know and use them as a natural part of your writing. Of course, even when you know what you want to say getting the content from your mind to the computer takes work :(

Has anyone tried a tool like DragonNaturallySpeaking to speed up the process?

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Has anyone tried a tool like DragonNaturallySpeaking to speed up the process?

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Coincidently ordered it yesterday from amazon and it has just arrived.

Will see how it improves productivity

Oh yeah, all of my traffic comes from long tali searches now. Since I launched them, I've always targeted for long tail now. Now the site's quite big, I am looking to target a big keyword as well, but not at the expense of the small ones.

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Originally Posted by Mike

Oh yeah, all of my traffic comes from long tali searches now. Since I launched them, I've always targeted for long tail now. Now the site's quite big, I am looking to target a big keyword as well, but not at the expense of the small ones.

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This is exactly what I'm saying to do. About the only time I really focus on specific key phrases is if I'm posting a timely blog post and want it to get attention from Google News, in which case I will structure the title and some of the key phrases of the key words being used in the articles already being bicked up in Google News. When I do it right I can get near the top of the related articles list, unless every news agency on the planet is also reporting about the same thing at that time.

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Originally Posted by ToddW

Keep in mind the majority of sites out there don't have near the content your site has let alone articles that are long like the ones found on your site.

I agree long-tail = great but in order to get a LOT (like you) of long tail the site really needs many pages of content.

Quality UNIQUE content, focused on the site's topic with a lot pages NEVER hurt anyone ;)

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You make some good points. The more content a site has the longer its tail can be; however, any site can lengthen its tail by not becoming obsessed with focusing on a narrow group of terms at the expense of other terms.