Make It Wag, Baby
Ever heard of the “long tail”?
It’s something Amazon.com and all big retailers are aware of and work to use effectively. To give a quick definition, it’s where the collective demand for less-popular items (say, “Fly Fishing” by J.R. Hartley) can be greater than the demand for the most popular items (the Harry Potters and Dan Browns) added together.
How can this be? It’s because there aren’t that many really popular items, but there are loads of less popular (but still profit-making) items. So whereas the big-name items get all the publicity and marketing efforts directed towards them, a lot of the real money gets made in lesser-known, less-competitive markets.
This can apply equally well to your website and the phrases you’re hoping to be found for on the search engines. You’ll have your big-hitter keywords and keyphrases, sure, but there will also be a much greater number of word combinations people will use to reach you that you weren’t even aware of.
Until now. I’m about to recommend that you try using a bit of paid-for online software called “HitTail”. I’m not associated with them in any way, can’t guarantee that your site will be a perfect match for what they offer, and won’t be responsible if your SEO efforts end in miserable failure.
Okay, caveats over. HitTail lets you know in real time how people are finding you and gives suggestions on promising keywords and keyphrases that you might think harder about working to optimise. Some of the suggestions might be slightly off base – it’s an algorithmic bit of software, after all, not put together by humans – but a lot will make you think “Aha! Hhhmm, hadn’t thought of that one before. I’ll try it!”
It all helps your website to be found on the search engines, which can’t be bad. So give it a go. They offer a 60-day trial, so at the very least you’ll have two months of free suggestions before you pull the plug on them.
Here’s the URL:
It’s all very easy to set up on your site – all you need to do is add a tiny bit of code to the background HTML of the pages on your site – so g’wan!
