Track Your Long Tail Trends For Traffic

Blog Traffic Tips Weekly Newsletter

by Yaro Starak – The Blog Traffic King

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Today I have a little search engine optimization tool for your blog.

This tool pertains specifically to The Long Tail, which is a new concept that has arisen as a result of commerce moving to the World Wide Web.

I won’t go into too much detail about The Long Tail because it is a huge subject by itself. In fact I wrote a 3000+ word pillar article blog post about it, which I strongly recommend you read when you have a spare ten minutes available.

You can find the article here:

The Long Tail

For the purposes of this newsletter you only need to know that The Long Tail refers to a change in the way business looks at a market. In the past businesses focused on creating a few very big hits which were purchased by a broad spectrum of society. Things like mainstream movies and popular music are perfect examples of hit focused (or short tail) marketplaces.

The Long Tail refers to all the tiny niche markets that business would ignore because there wasn’t enough demand to make it worthwhile. Thanks to the Internet it became cost effective to service even the smallest markets because the cost of distribution online is so low. Businesses like Amazon.com and iTunes are examples of companies taking advantage of Long Tail markets by making available products that interest millions of different niches, not just the hits.

If you don’t quite understand what the “tail” part of all this is about you need to see a graph. The graph shows the two ends of the tail, the hits at the short end of the tail, and all the little niches in the long end. If you go to my Long Tail blog article you will see the graph. Here is that link again:

https://yaro.blog/539/the-long-tail/

GOOGLE IS A LONG TAIL SERVICE

You may not realize it, but Google works because of The Long Tail. If you graphed all the searches done in the Google search engine there will be a smaller amount of “hit” searches done for the most popular things like Britney Spears, MP3s, popular music and movies, actors and politicians, and then millions – even billions – of long tail searches done for anything you can think of in any niche or sub-category imagined.

The long tail of niche searches collectively makes up a much larger overall percentage of the searches done on Google each day, and this is why as bloggers we should take notice.

You can take The Long Tail and apply it to how you optimize your blog for search traffic. The Long Tail of niches is accessed via secondary keyword phrases – all the lengthy but very specific search terms people use every day to find things.

You should focus on optimizing your blog for secondary keyword phrases because you will face less competition for them from other blogs and websites. The traffic from secondary phrases is usually very specialized (highly targeted) because people use them to find very specific answers (e.g. “hotel accommodation in toronto canada”, “wilson prostaff tennis racquet”).

The downside is not many people search for secondary phrases so the traffic is less, however if you target enough secondary phrases the total traffic can easily surpass that from just focusing on one or two popular phrases.

HITTAIL.COM HELPS YOU TARGET THE LONG TAIL

If all this seems just a bit too confusing don’t worry, the wonderful folks at Hittail.com provide a fantastic free tool that analyzes your current blog traffic and makes suggestions for secondary keyword phrase articles you should blog about. In other words, they help you tap into the long tail.

You can find the service at:

http://www.hittail.com/

Hittail works best if you already have some traffic. You don’t need much, but enough so that hittail can analyze it and tell you what secondary phrases people use to find your blog.

Hittail will tell you the phrases people are using to reach your blog that you may not currently have an article about. You can read through and collect these suggestions in a “to-blog-about” list. You then take the phrase and write a blog entry focusing specifically on that phrase using it as the title of that article.

For example for one blog I used to own, SmallBusinessBranding.com, Hittail recommended the following phrases –

  • what is branding
  • local marketing ideas
  • the magic of thinking big
  • techniques to get customers attention

This is just a very small sample of the suggestions Hittail is offering, but as you can see there are lots of ideas there for articles that currently at SmallBusinessBranding.com we do not specifically cater to and could blog about.

To take advantage of Hittail data I could take one of the suggested phrases, write a blog article about it and make sure I use the keyphrase exactly as it is as the title of the blog post. By doing this I maximize the likelihood that blog article will rank at the top for that search phrase in Google.

If I repeated this process, taking many of the suggested phrases and wrote articles for each one, I could count on a nice and steady increase in search engine traffic.

Hittail also provides a cool representation of the long tail of keywords currently “hitting” your blog and some other data mining tools. It’s not very complicated to use and installation is simply a matter of signing up for free and placing a line of code on to your blog template or theme.

I suggest you check it out today and start taking advantage of The Long Tail of search traffic.

Here’s to your blogging success,

Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King

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