Front-End Book

What is the Long Tail? How can it help you? The term “long tail” was created in 2003 by author Chris Anderson in his book The Long Tail - Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. For online stores such as Amazon a big part of their income is from hard-to-find items. Because of the size of their inventory they are going to attract a huge number of customers searching for such items. The long tail turns out to be as important as the sales of best-sellers and other items that are of interest to bigger audience. So Long Tail refers to targeting smaller niche markets often. When a lot of smaller niche markets gets targeted, as in Amazons case, this tends to create a big impact on sales.

In Search Engine Optimization the Long Tail can be translated to content creation or targeting on uncompetitive keywords. When targeting a market where competition is fierce, I would suggest that you create a lot of content (user generated preferrably) that touch the subjects and keywords you would like to compete for. Lets say you would like to try to hit the number one spot for a keyword such as “mortgage”. This is not possible without one of three options:

- You have infinite resources of time to put into link building
- You have infinite resources of money for paying for link building
- You do a lot of white-hat SEO combined with some black-hat SEO

So in order to ever rank high for high competitive keywords you must start targeting the long tail. Maybe you will find that while climbing the SERP for your targeted keywords, you actually are doing well with your long tail rankings and this is where you should put your focus. Generating traffic to these types of items will benefit your rankings for more competitive keywords organically as you will get links to your long tail content, and if that content relates to your targeted keywords, you will climb the SERP for those as well. It is a win-win situation. And the key is content that is a niche of your main target. This type of content can be:

- Databases with content that relates to your premium keywords
- User generated content in forums, blogs and social networks
- Products

Using Long Tail keywords has many benefits. There is less competition involved with Long Tail keywords. It is a lot easier to warrant good page rank with the major search engines. I firmly believe that using Long Tail keywords is the way to go because chances are you are reaching the audience that you intended to reach. If you have a new blog, using Long Tail keywords should generate nice traffic for you.

SEO and Online Marketing are entities you have to catalyze using the correct front end architecture. When the different parts building up your front end architecture is built and utilized to its fullest extent, your SEO and Online Marketing will prosper.

Link building can be very time consuming, frustrating and even confusing. However, I feel as though that there is no way around it. Ultimately, it is still the number 1 source to earn high rankings.

Below I am going to provide 5 good ways to build links:

1. Build a top 10 list for a certain niche or category.
2. Create a tip list. These are very easy to link to.
3. Provide comprehensive content so that your message is easy to spread
4. Submit articles to article directories. Write original content that does not appear anywhere on the internet, then submit to multiple directories. Repeat this until you see results.
5. Trade articles with other webmasters