Focus on Quality Over Quantity

If you are just starting out in the blogosphere, you may be tempted to churn out as much content as possible to keep people coming back. Common blogger knowledge dictates that more content encourages return visits. In addition, active sites rank better than stagnant ones; frequent, regular updates train the search engines to crawl your site often. Unfortunately, quantity over quality doesn’t produce stellar articles, and the Web is full of mediocre content that is generated at high speeds. If you want your users to come back, share your content with their friends, blog about you, link to you, and most importantly convert from you, you need to stand out.

If you need figures to back up this presumption, take a look at this blogger, who claims a single, well written page from 2004 has drawn in over $50,000 over time. This content was carefully optimized for both search engines and readers, and continues to pay off even six years later. While writing this type of solid, detailed, helpful article will take more time, it clearly pays off. Creating high-quality content will increase readership and conversion, and that is really the ultimate goal of any blogger. Don’t cut corners; spend the time to generate content that serves your audience, and you may see returns for years to come.

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Optimizing for the Long Tail - A Brief Overview

While it can be tempting for the SEO to focus on a few primary or “trophy” keywords, this ignores a significant chunk of all keyword referrals known as the long tail. The long tail is made up of those key phrases that are only searched a few times, but collectively make up a significant portion of searches.

Those trailing keywords, which can be thousands or tens of thousands strong, are actually responsible for far more traffic than the head keywords because of their sheer numbers. Bill Tancer of Hitwise concluded they make up nearly 90 percent of search traffic.

Clearly, the long tail should not be ignored in optimization. Should an SEO attempt to focus on thousands of individual keywords? Returns diminish quickly when optimizing for too many keywords. Even a thousand is too many to effectively cover, but according to Tancer’s research, even the top 10,000 keywords only bring in 18.5 percent of searches. So what is an SEO to do?

The key is to focus on keyword groups. By targeting one primary keyword and its variants per page, that page can be optimized for thousands of related tail keywords all at once.

Start by carefully planning the site with keyword grouping in mind. Mark Nunny of Wordtracker suggests categories as a great way to build around primary keywords. Each category then targets a specific primary and secondary keyword. Write a long article (1,000+ words is suggested) focusing on each of these keywords and their variants, and the tail keywords will appear naturally in the copy. Be sure to put the primary and secondary keywords in prominent locations such as the page title, headlines, and links.

By targeting the long tail, you probably won’t rank first for any trophy keywords. You will, however, gain access to considerably more potential customers through a broader variety of searches.

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