Latest Buzzword: LongTail

I’ve known of sites “Longtail” for quite some time but it seems to be gaining popularity over the past half year or so. Just recently I was on vBSEO’s forums updating my reports on how well their content-friendly URL’s have been doing for me and I noticed quite a bit of talk about these Longtails.

Q: What are longtails?
A: Basically just a fancy way of looking at a ratio of your top keywords, compared to all of your keywords that have given you traffic. There are many different ways to figure out your LongTail, but it’s basically just making sure you aren’t targeting just a couple terms, but building a full index with many terms that are worth your time and effort.

Since there’s been a recent surge in interest of LongTails a friend directed me towards HitTail which is a site that has a script which shows you real-time (or close to it) searches, and the amount of hits you receive for each search term. This tool is free if you sign up and it is easy to install, just like Google Analytics and many other analytical app’s, just throw a small script at the bottom of your footer so it loads for each page and the info begins coming in. After you sign up you’ll be prompted to a screen that shows a couple paid options; just X out of that and log in with your free account.