Remembering November 22, 1963 and Remembering the Long Tail

Yesterday was the day of remembering November 22, 1963, as it is a scar in peoples' memories for multiple reasons. Today is the day for Remembering November 22, 1963 and remembering the Long Tail with your blog posts! The Long Tail has become ever so crucial as far as placement with the Search Engines. The goal, when writing a blog, is to have as many people as possible be able to find and read your post. Content and keywords (labels) are very important when writing a post, but, a title with a Long Tail that can be found a couple times in your post is necessary.

Judith Helfand's post titled "Remembering November 22, 1963 and President John F Kennedy's Assassination" is a perfect example of the Long Tail put into practice. When you search Google with the words "Remembering November 22, 1963" Judy's post shows up 4th out of 473,000 hits. The date Nov 22, 1963 is a very historical and for that reason there are many people with websites on or relating to that date. The fact that Judy's blog post shows up before all but three of those sites is amazing, and it all can be owed to remembering the long tail.

Use a Long Tail to get more traffic to your blog post and in turn bring more traffic to your website. The key to being found online is to make yourself more search-able. Five words or more is a sufficient Long Tail for your blog post. When you increase the length of your title while incorporating it into your post, you will increase the amount of people who are able to find your post and your website.

For Halloween I am Going to be Seth Godin: A Story of Social Media and the Long Tail

It's an unlikely tale but I assure you it is all true. It all started when Darin went out and bought this odd contraption to cut his hair. Sunday morning he announced he was going to give it a go out on the patio and cut his hair all on his own. "What do you think?", he asked. "Sure", I grabbed my coffee, shielding it from potential flying hairs and sat up wind to watch the show.

It was actually going quite well. All the tension had left my body and I was resigned to see a normal looking hair cut at the end of this process. Then I heard a click and saw the huge chunk of hair sliced right out of the middle of Darin's head.

It was the point of no return. He had to shave the remaining hair.

We laughed. I said, "You look like Seth Godin." We took his picture. We laughed again. He said, "I should be Seth Godin for Halloween."

Then Darin does what Darin does every time he gets a hold of a goofy picture of himself. He posted it on the internet. Actually, he posted it just once, to ping.fm, titling the post "For Halloween I am going to be Seth Godin". Ping.fm is a new service which will deliver posts to a long and growing list of blogs, microblogs and social sites.

The next day we googled "for Halloween I am going to be Seth Godin". The results are interesting.

"for Halloween I am going to be Seth Godin" with quotations filled the first page with results from his social sites.

for Halloween I am going to be Seth Godin (with no quotations)
Out of 4,190 results 3 of the first page results point to to Darin's social sites.

Our intention was not to rank for these keywords, but what these results illustrate and remind us is that by using the "long tail", optimizing for keyword phrases we can build traffic sources with our blogs and social sites by titling our posts with keyword rich phrases.

For those who would like a little more information on the theory of the long tail and how it applies to SEO here is a video from one of my favorite experts in the field, Avinash Kaushik.

When you are posting to your social media sites and writing blog posts remember the long tail. Your blog titles are important and over time can develop into a key component of your online success.

• What is the single question or problem your customer might be posing to Google?
• Are you using the language of your customers?
• Can you formulate an interesting story around it?

Your social media sites serve as another entry way to your website and by titling your posts with keyword rich phrases you can grow a nice long tail.

I will be waiting for Darin's hair to grow back. For more niche specific advice for how you can grow your long tail with social media contact us at Webconsuls.