Understanding The Long Tail (and how it helps your lens)

A Long Tail keyword is something that, instead of being a keyword like ‘myspace’, is a keyword like ‘is myspace free to use in china’.

In short, Long Tail means that the majority of your lens visitors likely come from people typing in things that very few people type in compared to the search terms that lots of people type in.

An example day might be this: 150 people who search google for ‘myspace friends’ visit my lens (amazingly, as of this moment, my lens comes up 5th!).

On the same day 200 people might find my lens via different Long Tail keywords, and each one of them might search for a long tail keyword like ‘adding myspace friends faster’, ‘how can i get more myspace friends’, ‘finding a good myspace friend adder’ etc.

The number of visitors arriving at my page via different long tail keywords, it is said, out-number those arriving there by a non-long tail keywords.

Basically, the yellow part of the graph is larger than the green part.

An employee of Amazon explained it in a simple (yet at first mind-bending) way: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.”

[Go on - read that bit again!]

So how can all this help you make better lenses that get more visitors?

Don’t try too hard to target a word like broadband or myspace or computer.  Or even cheap broadband or myspace friends or best computer.

Just make a high quality lens that will help people.  And be genuine about it.  And if you’re writing about a specific topic, you should get the visitors you want.

It’s all in the Long Tail!

 - Lewis

PS.  for more info on giving your lens a helping hand ranking in search engines for chosen Long Tail phrases, check out www.squidoo.com/tricks

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