Recently Chris Anderson published a book call the Long Tail. He goes into great detail about on how the ecommerce model is set up ideally for the Long tail and it can have the greatest impact on your business. But How can you really take advantage of that knowledge and do search engine optimization for the occasional visitor?

First you need to understand what the Long Tail really is. In a nutshell the Long Tail is the segmenting of the larger Market into very specific niches and sub-niches. For example if the general market you are in is Pets then a niche would be exotic or domestic, indoor or outdoor, Large or small, etc. Sub-niches of those could be cats, dogs, fishes, birds etc. You could segment it into even more sub niches from there by taking dogs and putting them into large, small, long haired, short hair, child friendly etc. The possibilities are really endless and that is the inherent problem with the Long Tail effect. With so many possibilities it does not become financial or physically possible to do effective Search engine optimization for all the possibilities that will be used by everyone.

SEO Challenges

You must know how your visitor is reaching your site. The are infinite possibilities on how this can happen so you want to be able to track it when it happens. If you are not using some type of Web Analytic Software then you should start immediately. Google makes it's analytic available to anyone who uses their Adwords service.

Once you have analytics in place you can look for trends of the visitor that come to your site. Here are things to check for

Once you have that information you can see the patterns that your visitor leave you. Check out the relationship between keyword terms and phrase to the type of site and web pages that your visitor spend the most time on.

This will give you valuable information an any type of sub-niche that you can now target.

Segmented SEO to target your sub-niche

Now that you have discovered where your visitors and coming from and where they are going on your web site you can begin to target them with search engine optimization. Now that you know the sub-niche you can better target them with the keyword terms and phrases that they not only used to visit your site but also do the research necessary to find more terms in that sub-niche.

Here is an example: (these are all fictitious web sites)

Through your Analytics you notice that visitor are coming to your site in the following ways:

You notice that most of your visitors are looking for some type of designer or custom dog clothing. When you do some additional research you will find that there are several sub-niches in the designer dog clothes niche.

Now that you have some phrases that consumers in the sub-niche use you can target those phrase specifically by adding content to your web site about that sub-niche. You can also start a PPC campaign to see how well those visitors convert into customers. You would give preference to higher converting keywords and phrases.

The biggest question now becomes is Segmented SEO worth the extra effort?

Targeting all of those low traffic phrases will eventually pay off buy when? How much will you have to spend to achieve the desired results?

With the efficiency that the search engines make information available and realizing that half of all the searches done on a daily basis are unique it will become necessary to do as much SEO for those "Long Tail" phrases as possible without taking away from your key traffic generating keywords. It will be an ongoing process but the main benefit is that as with most Long tail phrases achieving a high ranking isn't that difficult.

Best Practices for Segmented SEO (SEO for the Long Tail)

By Following these best practices you should be able to dominate your sub-niche and quickly gain a competitive advantage in your niche and larger target market.