If you’ve never read The Long Tail, you should.
Here’s the basic gist:
The big things we notice are not as big as the sum total of all the little things we don’t.

• The weight of all the really big animals put together isn’t as much as all the weight of all the small animals put together.
• The sales totals of the few blockbusters is not as huge as the combined sales of all the movies that only one person a month wants to watch.
• The money made by the Fortune 100 isn’t as much money as moves through the millions of small businesses all over the world.

There, now you hardly need to read the book.

(Just kidding, you should read it.)

Since the book came out, a new phrase has emerged in the internet marketing and search engine optimization world: long tail search.

The idea being that for all the “perfect” keywords that get used by thousands of people each day, there a tons of “long tail” searches- long strings of unusual words that only get used once because somebody is looking for something specific.

Deb Ng, over at The Freelance Writing Jobs Network, just published a list of some of the weirder long-tail searches that have gotten people to her site. For each of these strings, she was #1 on Google at the time. Here’s a few examples:

• “Working on coffeeshop tax deductible”
• “Write dirty stories for Playboy.”
• “Meatball sub”

The list, along with Deb’s funny commentary, are worth reading.

I, too, have had a few interesting Long Tail arrivals, most notably:

• how to get a graph of entrepreneur
• risk and reward of entrepreneurship
• thesis vs atahualpa
• wp plugins that keep people on my site

This brings up a few points…

More Content

The Long Tail is awesome, but it’s impossible to plan for. You can’t know what random string of weird words someone might search for in the future. The only way to “optimize” for the long tail is to have a lot of content. The more words you have, the more combinations of words you have, the more likely that you’ll have that one odd phrase or word-string that someone is looking for.

For those of you still “thinking about it,” it’s time to realize that blogging is the easiest way to get lots of good long tail (and tall head) content.

Real Content

The cheapo boilerplate content that some companies pedal for SEO purposes wipes out any longtail usefulness. It doesn’t matter if someone reaches your sight after searching for “wp plugins that keep people on my sight” if the page they land on is schlocky seo fodder.

Blogging, especially thoughtful blogging over time, provides useful landing pages for all those weird, long tail searches.

Make sure that your blog theme (or template) is set up so that every page is a worthwhile landing page.

Focused Content

While more blogging is better than less blogging, it’s a good idea to focus your blogging on topics related to your business. This seems kind of obvious, and yet lots of business owners think that posting about their cats is a worthwhile use of time. (It isn’t.)

The more you blog about your business and your industry, the more those long tail searches will be potential customers or subscribers, because those searchers will find that they’ve arrived at a blog that they actually care about.

Big SEO opportunity

Clearly, there are no sandwich shops that have bothered to optimize for “meatball sub.” This seems like a huge opportunity, since there are over 8,000 searches each month for “meatball sub.” I’d be happy to work with any sandwich shops on this matter.