Long Tail - The Amazon.com SEO Fallacy
One of the buzzwords that SEO scam artists like to throw around is called the Long Tail. These Long Tail SEOs talk about optimizing Web sites for the long tail of search, practically as if they were revealing divine revelation to their flock of followers.
The use of jargon, like long tail, is always intended to block true communication.SEO scam artists like to impress naive people with their use of fancy terminology in hopes that their readers wont think too deeply on the subject. Search engine optimization is not any different from any other field. Use of big words is rarely, if ever necessary.
Those who throw about terms like long tail, rarely if ever attempt to define it. Those who do, do not even seem to agree with each other as to exactly what it is supposed to mean.
Long tail is a statistical term that references the long tail end of a lazy J distribution curve. It was first used in a business setting by Chris Anderson in 2004. Who pointed out that online businesses, like Amazon.com, can make big money from selling small volumes of hard-to-find items on the Internet, as opposed to the usual off-line method of selling large volumes of a small number of well known products.
It soon became a SEO fad concept that was used in 2006 to promote the wholesale creation of a lot of new content on a daily basis by claiming that collectively total hits to your blog would more than make up for your lack of doing well on important keywords for your topic. All you had to do was create more and more content.
Long Tail Searches
Advocates of Long Tail SEO claim that your total traffic generated from all of your combined hits to your site would soon far outweigh what you could have gotten, if you actually just tried to concentrated on the more important keywords for your chosen topic.
Long Tail Fallacy
- This position claims that competitive keywords are always single words. While non-competitive keywords consist of phrases that are two or more words long.
- However, non-competitive keywords or the more precise targeting of your audience means that fewer and fewer will be interested in your topic the more targeted it gets. This is just plain commonsense.
- Now, the question becomes the original problem once again. How well are you actually targeting your more precisely targeted keywords?
- No one in their right SEO minds would target single word keywords to begin with, whether competitive or not.
- Targeting single word keywords would only attract people to your site, most of whom would not be interested in what you have written.
- Targeting single word keywords is just plain poorly developed content to begin with. Words have so broad a meaning that rarely will the use of just one word target your desired audience. Two or three word phrases are always required before anybody can figure out whether or not the topic of your webpage would interest them from their listings in the Google SERPs.
- In reality, people are only interested in very specific or narrowly defined topics. Some keywords, only appear to be more competitive than others due to the nature of statistics.
- The reguired amount of content for long tail SEO assertions to work is never specified and / or proven, for good reason. In reality, your site would only need about 500,000 pages of mushy content. That is a rather significant detail for these SEO quacks to have left out. Don’t you think?
No matter how you slice it, important keywords for your topic will always be important no matter how hard you try to justify your miserable excuse for a poorly written blog. And, natural organic SEO will always be about writing stuff that real people are actually interested in reading.
No matter how targeted you finally manage to define your keywords, natural organic search engine optimization will require you to showcase your chosen keywords on each webpage well enough to actually attract your targeted audience.
Large amounts of content that nobody is interested in reading, because nobody has bothered to search engine optimized it, is just plain garbage. It is poorly developed content that can be compared to the endless amounts of old newsgroup posts available on the Web. You have a lot of words. You have a lot of content. And, you can place Google ads on it. But, it is still garbage that collectively will add up to absolutely nothing unless you happen to have hundreds of thousands of webpages on your site. Good content can rarely be dynamically generated off of a database, outside of simple product descriptions.
