Long Tail Search Engine Optimization

Long tail searches are combined searches formed from several high frequency keywords and key phrases.

Long tail optimization simply targets the customers that very few others target using the less popular keyword or phrases. There are the hundreds to thousands of less popular keywords and key phrases that a site is searched for, yet rarely noticed or used by site owners or internet marketers.

Principle of the Long Tail
The principle of the Long Tail is the opposite of focusing on the top 10-20 keywords or key phrases for marketing of sites. According to long tail principal the length, or total number of low-number referred terms outnumbers the height or the total of top 10 terms.

In other words, the terms that are most popular, are rarely those that provide the most business. In most cases the victory of the site was from the hundreds of words outside of the most popular terms.

A long tail search may also be considered an evolving search, for ex:
Loan
House Loan
Long Island House Loan

How to Optimize for Long Tail
Unlike your main keywords, you can never tell what keywords to look for in long tail, so the biggest dilemma for long tail optimization (LTO) is figuring out which keywords or key phrases to use. There are a few options that you can try:
- Constantly keep researching you're site to see which terms are attracting traffic.
- Try adding a few articles and see which terms are attracting visitors to your article and then optimize accordingly.
- Combinations of different keywords or key phrases and different combinations of the same keywords or key phrases will help in LTO
- Very long articles with large amount of content can help you rank for numerous keywords and key phrases.
- Unlike normal article writing, you should do a lot of "rearticulating" of your keywords, try and use "lesser" used keywords and key phrases.
- Writing numerous shorter length articles is another way.
- Separate your long articles and short articles into sections, with each section dealing with a specialized topic.
- Use longer titles for your articles, your main keywords should be in front, but also add more terms related to your article to help in long tail.
- Anchor text in your internal links should have more keywords and key phrases
- Use the author's name or the site name or the company name, even if they are not famous, as many people tend to search by name.
- Create customized web pages within your site specifically targeting many individual groups of customers.

Benefits of LTO
Designing your site according to LTO or optimizing for long tail searches lets you gain new customers and increase profits rapidly. A new site can see increasing sales and at the same time build the importance of depth of the site over a reasonable period of time. This allows you to invest and take rake in more profit.

With long tail optimization you will see higher sales closing rate, the reason being that you're web site becomes naturally tailored to a wider audience.

Long tail search optimization is the future of web site and internet marketing, ignoring it might just cost you a fortune.