Posts About ‘long tail’

Making The Long Tail Wag

“Making The Long Tail Wag” at this years A4U Expo was a solo session by Owen Hewitson, Client Strategist at Affiliate Window.

Owen’s presentation was aimed at those merchants who may not realise the benefits of having affiliates who, even though they may not drive the most traffic to the merchant’s site, are still able to contribute to revenue via long tail searches and conversions.  Taking Amazon as an example, Owen argues that if you sell thousands of products, demand for any one of them is never zero so even those affiliates that make you one or two sales per year have their worth. Affiliates who pick up long tail traffic also help the merchant: (more…)

Defining the Long Tail for SEO

The Long Tail

Apparently some SEOs believe that optimising a site for long tail traffic is not really SEO. I disagree, and below I will explain why.

First of all, let’s define what we mean by ‘long tail traffic’. It’s one of those often bandied phrases that tends to mean slightly different things for different people. Wikipedia isn’t much help here: “The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases.”

Not sure I agree with that entirely. Another popular definition of long tail traffic is any search engine traffic that arrives on your site using 4 or more keywords. That too doesn’t sit well with me, as many 4+ keyword phrases are actually very popular and can generate substantial volumes of traffic. (more…)

The Mayday update and its long tail issues: Dave Naylor’s view on it

There has been a lot of discussion lately about what happened with the MayDay update Google has done. Many website owners are experiencing a drop of long tail traffic from 30% to 50%. People are still guessing about what happened and how to solve it.

At

  • Social Marketing: From Offline to Universal (#a4uexpo presentation)
  • 6 killer presentations from #a4uexpo: Advanced Analytics, Information Architecture, Negative SEO & more
  • Launching an Affiliate Business on a ShoeString – A4U Expo London 2010
  • Microformat and Datafeed Optimisation – A4U Expo London 2010
  • Using Your Competitor’s Tactics to Gain a Competitive Edge – A4UExpo London 2010
    • Munich I talked to Dave Naylor for State of Search (www.stateofsearch.com) to find out his views on the matter. In 8 minutes Dave talks about what he saw and what can or cannot be done about it.

    The question now remains: where will this go? Has anybody experienced these drops in traffic? Let us know!