[Admin]

Search Engine Optimization is highly competitive and Rankings are becoming harder for many small business, because there is powerful companies with big budgets bustling for the top positions.

How can you compete in the search market with a budget of a few thousand, when there's companies investing tens of thousands of dollars per week? It's really quite easy to harness customers and sales from search engines and i'm going to give you an insight how.

The below is a real example of a Taree Internet client, who had a web site, a vision to create their own online business and a limited budget in comparison to the leading brands in the marketplace. This client's web site is now running on a 3 web server cluster, 1 server for the PHP and HTML files, 1 for the MySql database which stores product details and another server for media such as product images and video.

Long Tail - 4,785 Page 1 Rankings in 14 Days!

What i wanted to post about is Long Tail, and how people completely ignore it or underestimate the power of picking up Long Tail search terms. For those who don't know what Long Tail terms are, these are simply very specific search terms and generally have 4-5 or more words and little competition. An example is instead of ranking for the search term "Canon Camera" which has stiff competition, you would break it down and target a page for "Canon PowerShot S400 Digital Camera" and another page for "Canon EOS 400D Digital Camera" and so on until you have sewn up the Canon Camera line.

Benefits

The benefits of this are numerous. Firstly i will say too many people get caught up trying to rank for "the big one" and loose sight of the bigger picture. Sure it's a nice trophy saying i rank page #1 for "SEO Company" or i rank page #2 for the holy grail "SEO" (which i do) however it does take quite a bit of time and effort to achieve those types of placements then you have to maintain them.

What happens when you wake up tomorrow and Google has decided to tweak something and it negatively effects your prized term? You are history, your traffic dries up, all your hard work is undone, your income collapses and you waste days, weeks or sometimes months trying to recover your term. You have a single point of failure that's not in your complete control.

Using Long Tail diversifies your traffic sources, you no longer have to rely on a single rank but have multiple ways for visitors to find you via the SERP's. On any given day some Long Tail keywords will drop and others will rise which is completely normal flux but overall your traffic won't be effected.

The other benefit with optimizing for Long Tail terms is your traffic will be "highly" targeted and more likely to convert in to a sale. Consumers have a reasonable idea what they are looking for and generally sculpt specific terms. If they are looking for a Canon Camera it's highly unlikely they will just Google "Canon Camera" unless they are looking for the Canon official website. They will know a few basics on what they want such as a Digital with 8 MegaPixels so are more likely to type "Canon 8 MegaPixel Digital Camera".

Right there you have a highly targeted term that's very likely to get queries and convert with minimal competition (216,000) you can rank for quite easily.

On page your Title holds the most bang for your buck, so by splitting your pages down and targeting Long Tail terms you have multiple bites of the Apple with the Title tool at your disposal on many pages giving you more chances to rank.

Result

Anyhow this is getting long and i have a few things to do so i'll finish up by showing a site i optimized for Long Tail about 2 weeks ago. As you can see by the traffic graph up until the 13th Dec traffic was ordinary, on the night of the 14th, the 15th and a few hours on the 16th the rise in the graph was me on the site making pages and optimizing things. 3 days later Google started to deliver and traffic went through the roof. (The yellow columns are visitors and stats aren't updated for the rest of the 27th)



And this one is the referring search phrases mainly from Google, and a bit from Yahoo/MSN. I've blocked the terms to hide the niche, but as you can see the site was found with 5,982 different search terms. Going by the stats that only 80% of searchers go to the second page it equals 4,785 page #1 placements all long tail.



Now the interesting thing is the top 10 search terms only account for 1.3% of the total traffic meaning 98.7% is long tail. Many people don't realize this, but your top 10 terms only account for a small percentage of your referring terms. I'd like everyone to check the percentage of visitors their top 10 terms bring in and post them, if it's 30% that means 70% is coming from Long Tail yet people fail to take advantage of it!

One Month Later - 24,949 page 1 rankings in 30 days

The page 1 rankings is calculated off the stat that 80% of users don't go to the second page like last time. As you can tell the bulk is still long tail.



Traffic has times by 6 since last graph, here's the graph however it's hard to compare with the last because the columns re-size to suit the highest and lowest of the month. However the lowest traffic day on this graph is similar to the highest day on the very first graph. Also the 12/13th isn't completely updated, although weekends is lower traffic because the type of site is a predominately Monday-Friday niche.

This week coming from Mon to Fri i expect the "hump" in the graph to go a lot higher than last weeks Mon to Fri like it did in comparison to the first working week of Jan compared to the second.



Revenue has gone up 100x, so they have made a positive ROI already in the 1 month since i started working on it.

Next Update - 63,338 Page #1 Rankings in 5 weeks



Now for the traffic trend, as you can see traffic completely buckled the server on the 20th resulting in a mad dash to get it on to a bigger one so some stat data was lost on 20/21st but it was very heavy traffic days.

As you can see the overall trend is still rising, and i expect it to rise really sharply now it's on a better server.

[Misa21]

Long Tail Keywords really help my site, I made some sales from long tail keywords...