Welcome
This page presents information, for reaching a mass audience, using the search engine tail.
What is the search engine tail?
In summary the search engine tail are the keywords that are relevant to your website but are not the most common ones. By way
of example consider a website dedicated to Software Quality Assurance – SQA. In this case the popular keywords and phrases are:-
Software Quality Assurance
Software Quality Control
SQA and SQC
The search engine tail, in the above example, would include:-
Software quality factors
Software quality characteristics
Software metrics
Software audit
These are lesser searched phrases that are relevant to the content of the website.
Why is the search engine tail so important?
There are two main reasons why the search engine tail is so important to attracting visitors to your website:-
It is very difficult to get ranked on the most popular search terms.
Even when ranked, on a popular search term, the search engine tail will represent over 50% of your traffic.
The value of the search engine tail is that there are so many variations of relevant keywords for your website that, given a large enough population of searchers, you are
bound to get ranked in a percentage of the searches. Therefore any site has the potential to get search engine traffic.
How to get ranked with the lesser keyword search terms?
The main website characteristic for getting search term ranking is content. There is no substitute for relevant content. There are many web sites that list the virtues of content in relation to
website search engine optimization and the benefits of relevant content extend to the search engine tail.
The basic theory is that if your website contains enough varied content, around the central theme of your website, then there is a strong chance that someone will search for a term that matches your content.
This is a kind of shot gun approach of putting out content that contains so many phrases that a match is inevitable.
Care should be taken, however, not to place content that is out of context or just spam phrases that are likely to be searched. Even for the tail of the search engine it is
better to construct whole pages around a single theme and have phrases relevant to that theme. The goal here is to have a many varied themes, around the central theme, as possible.
This can be achieved by building up a library of articles over a period of time. This approach should make your website both search engine friendly and attractive to the end user.
A common website structure for attracting the lesser searched terms.
A common website structure would be to separate your website into a hierarchical structure, around subject matter. In this way the user (and search engine) effectively drills down into a given subject area.
At the lowest level of this hierarchy is an article that goes into some detail on the given subject. An example of this, from the world of Software Quality Assurance would be:-
Software Quality
-->Software testing
-->-->Performance testing
-->-->-->Performance testing tools
-->-->-->-->Microsoft's Visual studio load testing tool article
In the above example anyone searching on Microsoft's load testing tool may get a match with your article and the article itself is
in context within your subject matter. Both search engines and real users like websites that are structured this way. Website structure is key to getting as much varied content, around a theme, as possible into your website.
Varied content is itself the key to getting the search engine tail matches and attracting more visitors.
No guarantee (or claim) is made regarding the accuracy of this information. Any questions or comments should be sent to:-