I was recently doing some search engine optimization for a client which included some articles with keywords included in them. I think keyword rich (NOT keyword stuffed) articles are a good marketing tool. Most of the articles went okay. Then I got to one article in which the keyphrase was a four word phrase that was grammatically incorrect. I don’t want to say what it was exactly, but to give you a fictionalized example, it was something like “Cadillac Dealership Car Oklahoma”. In other words, it wasn’t anything you would ever use in a sentence; it was just the result from a Google keyword search. I suggested to my client that they rethink this keyphrase as an article but they insisted because 500 people a month search for that phrase.

Welcome to the attack of the long-tailed monster. The long tail – a notion famously developed by Wired writer Chris Anderson – is the idea that the accumulated amount of a small group of things is greater than the “short head”, the total of the initial spike. So, when you add up all of the books sold on Amazon, the one or two they sell of millions of copies of books far outweighs the millions of copies of a best-seller. Thus, the long tail doesn’t look to be that profitable for them but it actually is. (If that doesn’t make sense, try reading this Wikipedia entry for clarification.

The long tail applies to search, as well, as illustrated by my attempt to write an article with keywords similar to “Cadillac Dealership Car Oklahoma” in a sentence. In this article, over at SEOmoz, they report that the 10,000 most common search terms only account for the top 18.5% of all searches.

Let me put this into perspective for you: If you were to list the top 10,000 search terms, you’d be hard pressed to do so (but you could probably list the top 250 – 500 and then you’d dry up!) but if you could do it, you’d still not be able to only account for more than three quarters of the searches done online. This study was based on 10 millions searches done in the US. That means that 1,850,000 searches were conducted with the top 10,000 terms… and the remaining 8,150,000 searches were on different terms. That is crazy!

… It also means there’s some dramatic opportunity for you to target the long tail in your business. So, even though “Cadillac Dealership Car Oklahoma” makes absolutely no sense in a sentence, it could be enough (when combined with other similar keywords) to bring in the traffic you want to bring in!

How it works in article marketing, well, that’s going to be the tricky part for marketers and writers and business owners, but that’s going to be the future of web marketing.

photo credit: sierragoddess