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I have been a long time believer and promoter of the The Longtail. What is The Longtail, you ask? Hopefully, if you are client, you already know the answer. Or better yet, you’ve just handed the whole ball of wax to Jen and the SEO department and told them to go crazy, so you don’t need to know about The Longtail.

The term “longtail” refers to a key phrase that uses more words to get a more specific and accurate search result. For example, if you went to your favorite search engine and typed in “grill”, you would get results showing anything from an actual barbeque grill manufacturer (kudos to Weber {who else?} for ranking 1st in Google for the term!), to a rapper with gold stuff glued to his teeth.

Now, if you were to search the term “gas grill” or “charcoal grill” you are much more likely to find what you need. So, let’s take it a step further, and search the longtail phrase “stainless steel gas grill”. You have now narrowed the results considerably and will most likely find precisely what you would like to purchase.

Turn that around and take a look at it from an E-commerce standpoint. Optimizing your product pages with the longtail can increase conversions if you are very careful to choose the correct phrase, and concentrate most of the optimization on this phrase. If you stuff your page with lots of other phrases, then you dilute the power of the longtail.href=”http://www.theseoblog.org”>TKG’s SEO blog had a great idea for incorporating longtail phrases into your site a couple of months or so ago. Be sure to check it out!

Dave Davies over at WebProNews has some great pointers for The Longtail. He has another great analogy that really works when applying your strategy to an e-commerce site. Made me want to go buy a new TV, though.

If you’re still confused as to what the ‘longtail’ is, or how to develop these phrases and optimize for them, this video: How to Rank on Google for Longtail Phrases was posted on April 21, 2010, has great info and is pretty detailed.

If you’re still having trouble, give us a call, we’d love to help you out!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 13th, 2010 at 2:00 am and is filed under General, Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.