Focusing Knowledge

In our last article in this series, ‘Effective Web Marketing: Common Sense SEO Understanding Search Engine Boundaries‘, we discussed the working of search engines and how they go about doing their job – matching a users request with a list of appropriate responses in the form of web pages.  This article is about how to make your website coexist with that paradigm, and how to effectively compete with the thousands of other sites which offer the same product you do.

Now, understand that there are literally billions of web pages out there, and choosing the right ones to deliver is not a trivial task.  Let’s say you have a business that sells household appliances.   Well, there are thousands of other business that are in the same line of work.  How do you get your page to the top of the list?  Don’t forget that if your page is 240th on Google’s list, it will appear on page 10 of the results.  It’s not too likely that many people will have the patience to wade through 10 pages of results and find your offerings.

One poor strategy might involve optimizing your page for another popular trending topic of the moment – say Britny Spears, or Jonas Brothers, or Barack Omaba.  That might bring a lot of traffic to your page over the near term, but not traffic that would result in folks buying an appliance from you.  Mostly, those people would visit your site expecting to get information on one of the trending topics listed above – and would be disappointed!  The search engines would also quickly find out about your rouse, and would ban you for your deception.  Don’t forget – it makes them look bad, too.

So now you can see that if you optimize your page for ‘appliances’, you will lose because Amazon,, Sears, Walmart, and hundreds of other more well-known and better capitalized businesses are ahead of you in the line.  If you optimize for one of the popular trending topics of the day, you will disappoint the user, and the search engines, and, most likely, be banished into the black hole of unindexed sites. What’s a body to do?

Well one strategy is to employ the ‘long tail strategy‘.  A hypothetical user is searching for an electric bar swizzle stick.  Consider the number of people in a month who search for ‘appliances’ – could be in the hundreds of thousands – huge competition for you; household appliances in the tens of thousands – less competition, but still unworkable; ‘household bar appliances’, perhaps in the hundreds – much better!  Similarly, if you were a dentist who wished to maintain a viable presence on the internet, simply optimizing your page for ‘dentist’ would put you in competition with  tens of thousands of other dentists.  However, if you were a endodontist in Rye, NY, or Westchester County, you would have a much better chance at being clicked on by a guy with a root canal issue in Rye, NY.

So the right strategy is to give up the very small opportunity to be seen by a rare one of the hundreds of thousands of folks who are looking anywhere for any kind of appliance or dentist for the much larger chance of being selected by a user looking for a specific product or service in an certain area – even though that population will be much smaller than the generic search.  Now there are a number of variations on this particular technique.  They vary with the size and budget of your organization, the number of goods and services you offer, and the type of business you’re in.  But this long tail technique, generically speaking, is one of the most effective search engine optimization tools available.  Please visit our website, or watch this blog for further articles on SEO (search engine optimization) and web development.