The long tail is a buzz word you’ll hear a lot about these days if you are paying attention to internet marketing. What exactly is it referring to and what does it mean for you?

The long tail refers to a key phrase that is relevant to your products or services with low search volume. It probably also has low advertiser competition in search marketing and low search engine optimization competition. For example, let’s say you sell baby clothing. Tons of people sell baby clothing which is bad news for you. It’ll be damn near impossible to get your website to come up first when people search baby clothing on Google. It will also cost you a pretty penny to get up top on Adwords results for “baby clothing”.

This is just as well, it’s a very generic term and you don’t need it to work for you. Instead, you focus on the long tail. Let’s say you sell baby clothing with bicycles on it. Your key phrases might be “bicycle onesie” or “bicycle baby clothing”. Parents who are cycling enthusiasts who want to outfit their kids with bike clothes are more likely to use this phrase to search, and they are more likely to want your products.

The good news is that there are very few pages on the net with those phrases in their title tag or URL (you can search the following in Google to find this out allintitle:bicycle baby clothing or allinurl:bicycle baby clothing). You can probably get this phrase for very little money if you do an Adwords campaign for it. What’s even better, if you create a page on your site with these phrases in the title, H1 tags, url and body content, your page has a good chance of coming up first when people search for bicycle baby clothing. (You make your chances even better if you get a cycling blog to post about your product line, since inbound links give you search engine optimization points.)

How do you go about determining the long tail for your website?

First, do a keyword analysis on your website using Google’s Keyword tool. See which phrases the tool finds on your site that have low advertiser competition, those are usually a good starting point.

After you find those phrases do a check to see how many other sites have those low competition phrases in their title tags and URLs (use the allintitle and allinurl attributes to figure this out on Google).

Once you’ve identified your list of low competition phrases, make sure pages on your site are well optimized for those phrases. This means you have them in your title tag, your URL, your H1 tag and in the body of your page. If at all possible, get a site that’s relevant to what you’re selling to link to your pages. Inbound links boost your page’s credibility and increase its chances of ranking higher in searches.

As you add new products and services continue with this process so that you can optimize for all of your offerings. The long tail won’t bring you scads of traffic over night, but the idea is that it will bring you some very well targeted traffic that is likely to convert. This is actually better than scads of traffic any way. One visitor that buys what you’re selling is better than 1000 visitors who don’t.