How thick is your head? How long is your tail? SEO style.
I just read this remarkably insightful post on how you can think about optimizing your SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) efforts. It starts out with a lot of how-to analysis of your head (that part of the curve where there’s a small number of search terms resulting in a large proportion of your visits) and the tail (the long part where each search term results in very few hits, but collectively represent very meaningful amounts of traffic).
He gives you some ideas on how to measure the thickness of your head and the length of your tail, using excel. So you get a real sense of where things lie and how your search terms are stacking up. Obviously there’s no hard and fast rule, but he gives you great guidelines on how to develop your understanding of the curve and the curve of your website in particular.
He also talks about the difference in key phrases, dividing them into two piles “Brand Key Phrases” and “Category Key Phrases”, where the brand phrases are things that are particular to your website, products, trademarks and what not and category phrases are, more or less, everything else.
Analyzing these two things (key phrase buckets in relation to your head/tail curve), he comes to this insightful conclusion. Use SEO on your pages to bring up brand searches in the search results pages - these brand keywords are generally going to be in the “head” portion of your curve so it is these huge keywords that you should optimize all your pages for, don’t worry about SEO for the category keywords which are part of the tail, it isn’t worth the effort. The category keywords are where you focus your search engine marketing efforts, since there’s so many it can be cheap to access a ton of these long tail words and collectively they will add up to good times for your site.
That was just a super brief summary of the piece, it’s definitely worth reading and seeing if it makes sense to you and for your particular site.
