The Head of the Tail

I first started seriously expounding on that whole long tail thing a little over three years ago, when I urged AdWords advertisers to "avoid insider thinking" in their selection of keywords. Search engine optimizers have done this for much longer, since they've always looked at ways of ranking well on secondary phrases in industries where the top phrases are too competitive. A great way to continue to get lots of diverse search referrals to your site is still pretty basic: have a lot of great content. The diversity of words on those pages will act as a net that should capture odd, unexpected searches -- the phrases that only get typed in once or twice by anyone, ever. So should we all start getting worried that more people are discovering the tail (props to Seth for the reference)? Nope. If you live by the tail today, or benefit from it, you're safe. Andrew Goodman is Principal of Traffick.com, an acclaimed "guide to portals" which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.