For example, for any client, you'd probably advise:
For example, for any client, you'd probably advise:
But do you actually apply these techniques for your own work or business? How much time do you spend:
For instance, while I always aim to find ways to provide value to the client, such as examining every situation and case and applying the principle there, I don't obviously spend enough time on my site. I really should be writing and posting more.
I'd say that if you are a pretty busy person, your website hasn't been drastically improved for weeks, months or maybe years.
A very good example would be a website of Ammon Johns. It's been only recently redesigned and while it only has masterpiece content, the amount of articles is very modest and probably hasn't increased for weeks/months.
Sorry to out you, Ammon, but I think it shows how good an Internet marketer you are that you are always working for the people (I think that's a good excuse I can use about my site, too :p). By the way, Ammon won't be writing a blog. You can always find him at Cre8asite Forums, though.
To give credit to Ammon, though, his site does rank high for web marketing and web promotion. Not to mention local searches. I think that's an outstanding achievement, since the work has been done elsewhere (or so it seems to me).
So, in essence, when it comes to SEO, I'd gather that
is always limited by the amount of time you spend on your customers. And the site can get really, really overgrown with vines and other ilk of the past design eras.
So, apart from the initial question,
Thank you for answering.
]]>Ammon Johns is one of the few SEOs that have been around since the dawn of the Internet days. His knowledge is so broad and advice so deep and useful that if your question is answered by Ammon, consider your problem solved.
]]>Ammon Johns is one of the few SEOs that have been around since the dawn of the Internet days. His knowledge is so broad and advice so deep and useful that if your question is answered by Ammon, consider your problem solved.
But Ammon doesn't have an active blog (that I know of), though he does have his Internet marketing website, as well as the company he's a senior SEO strategist of SEO blog. He did take part in SES London in '07, though (and probably many other conferences, I suspect.
The thing is, you can find plenty of advice from Ammon on the forums he frequents:
Cre8asite threads, largely enlightened by Ammon:
More info about and from Ammon:
Enjoy the reading!
]]>Given that potential search marketing clients know even less, than the professionals (or just enough to be dangerous), it is pretty hard not only to find a good SEO, but also to get one for a good price.
]]>Given that potential search marketing clients know even less, than the professionals (or just enough to be dangerous), it is pretty hard not only to find a good SEO, but also to get one for a good price.
Rand recently posted about why it is hard to pin a price on search marketing services.
In the post, he says:
- It's nearly impossible to compare vendors side by side
- Sourcing multiple vendors is incredibly challenging
- Press mentions and fame don't neccessarily equate to quality
- Knowledge of how the industry operates and how to judge vendors is knowledge that's nearly as hard to come by as the search marketing techniques themselves
- Incorrect assumptions about the practice abound
- The engines themselves provide little to no guidance on the issue
- A neophyte has almost no chance of separating fact from fiction in claims of services, value, ROI, effectiveness, etc.
- Information about effective techniques (and even techniques that are accepted vs. frowned upon) take months or years to permeate through the consulting industry
- Reliance on references often leads to overpricing
But Rand,
I'd also add:
What can I say. The above is true for a SEO client, but it doesn't mean that it can't be done. Obviously, by partnering with a knowledgeable SEO professional, you can not only find a good SEO expert/agency, but also get the price right.
And that's the first thing to do before hiring a SEO agency/company: hire a SEO consultant. Not a SEO firm, but a consultant.
The consultant would:
Most importantly, the consultant would save plenty of time, hassle, worries and increase chances to get substantial results.
Of course, the client could do some training/advising himself, but that's left entirely to the potential SEO client.
As Rand says, the core of the problem is lack of transparency. We, as SEOs, could provide the following information:
Technically, just spreading the word how efficient SEO is will not only make it easy to choose the right expert, but will also improve the image of the search industry, because it'll make it more evident that SEOs are reliable and result in more profit.
Also, I have previously written about when and how to find a good SEO. In short, it goes around:
Of course, it takes time to learn about a company, but it is worth it. You'd rather spend a couple of hours reading SEO companies' blogs, than wasting money and time on one that doesn't have one or because you wanted to act now
Though it may be very hard to distinguish a good SEO company from a so so company that gets you to pay through the nose yourself, you can simply hire a consultant or contact a SEO blogger to help you find the company/expert just for your site/budget.
As an alternative, you can learn SEO yourself, but it'll take months at least.
]]>However, what they don't take into account is how much time and money it will take to get noticed online.
As search engine optimization provides certain improvements in visibiity, it is no surprise that it may lead to products becoming popular and widely used. But can SEOs make an unknown product popular?
]]>However, what they don't take into account is how much time and money it will take to get noticed online.
As search engine optimization provides certain improvements in visibiity, it is no surprise that it may lead to products becoming popular and widely used. But can SEOs make an unknown product popular?
As a matter of fact, it will depend on a SEO as long as he makes sure the product is absolutely useful and has numerous benefits. If no marketer was consulted during the creation of the product, the degree of product success will be largely dependant on its quality.
If the product is marginally useful, can be replaced by already existing competing solutions and people can find ways to live without it, it has little chance to survive.
Sure, a SEO will get some visitors to a site and promote the product as much as he can, but he can't make people buy semi-useless junk and spread a positive word about it.
Thus, if you want to get results from a SEO, make sure your product is useful.
As SEO's success is largely determined by the product and other restrictions that higher management puts in his way, the main job is to ensure that everything required online happens. A site appears, it works, converts visitors and a large number of visitors come to site regularly to buy stuff. Sales come and go and everyone's getting their salary paid.
Nothing spectacular? But without someone experienced online there'll be nothing to talk about. It takes immense knowledge to do things right from the start and achieve results, especially on a new website.
Though certain experienced individuals can get spectacular results, this can mostly be explained by a good product.
Another reason, of course, maybe that they have mastered the art of creating great content. But even if the site has great content and many visitors, it'd make no sense to have a mediocre product on it, which wouldn't sell.
In essence, SEOs and marketers, if given no control over the product, simply make sure that there is enough audience to make the company profitable with the product. Sometimes, it may seem just ok, sometimes it may seem outstanding. But either way, if you don't get your SEO/marketer to improve the product (or create a better one), you'll only get the audience your product deserves.
Partly, it may be justified by the fact that some SEOs may not take up products that are not useful and possess no remarkable values. Some may even only take on projects that interest them personally.
Another thing that many people go wrong with expectation on SEO is that everything can be done fast, cheap and of high quality. Naturally, this is impossible.
In fact, you expect to get only two of the three (either fast and cheap, or cheap and high quality, or fast and of high quality, but not cheap).
Let's take a hypthetical example. You are a shoe seller. You have a more or less running e-commerce website, but you feel like something's lacking. So you hire a SEO. What he will do?
Most likely, the work will involve:
The first two can be done in a couple of weeks, or a month, depending on how knowledgeable is the expert.
On the other hand, creating content and promoting the website can be done perpetually. A month of work may be noticeable, but it'd rather be 2-3 months to get significant results with long-term effect.
If you take visitors and conversions seriously, it'd take some time to study the web analytics and tweak the site accordingly. Considering it may take a week to get results in each iteration, the final site version may be very well weeks or months ahead.
Thus, it'll be at least 3-4 months before your shoe sales will see significant (150%-500%+) boost from an already existing website.
Sounds like an investment dump? If you consider the ROI that such significant efforts may bring, time should have little importance (apart from procrastination, of course). Especially, when there are numerous examples of offline businesses, which online presence gives them 30-50% of the revenue.
So, you want to make sure you don't argue much with your SEO about time spent on the project and results. Then you'll need to consider the following:
Read more about things a SEO client should remember.
If you want to save time on negotiation and maintain good mental health during the project, consider having reasonable expectations of what and how fast you can get from a SEO.
As you are hiring an expert, consider doing everything as he says. He's the expert and that's why you are hiring him. Talk about how much time and money it'd require to achieve certain milestones. If anything, reconsider hiring him, but do not force him under strict time and results frames - otherwise, it'll be just another project management nightmare.
]]>Back in the days, Jacob suggested creating a search-engine proof website: a website, created, as if there were no search engines, and which would get visitors no matter what the search engines come up with. I have investigated this point a bit more, too.
]]>Back in the days, Jacob suggested creating a search-engine proof website: a website, created, as if there were no search engines, and which would get visitors no matter what the search engines come up with. I have investigated this point a bit more, too.
Lately, I've been coming across many articles on creating defensible websites. In them, it means not only surviving the search engine algorithm shifts, but also market changes.
In both cases, however, it means getting people to talk about your website and use it, because whenever people go, search engines and customers will follow.
In short, it means:
Here's a short list of posts on defensible traffic:
In general, this all means paying attention to your customers and delivering what they want is not an option any more. It is a requirement for a successful online business. In fact, it may not be enough, when it comes to link building.
Given the fact that Google takes domain age and link trust into account, it makes sense to focus your efforts on one site. If you are thinking of launching a separate site, think if you can tie it to one of your other sites - generally, if the target audience is the same, it'll work out well.
Read more from Andy Hagans: Finally, "the Big One".
In reality, creating a strong, defensible website is a smart marketing move. Taking all the risks and values into account, you'll be able to build a much stronger online presence, than your competitors. Smart marketing, defensible traffic or building strong websites, it is a sound strategy, which will be more important this year (as predicted by Todd).
]]>Given that an Internet marketer (or a SEO) can't control:
Given that an Internet marketer (or a SEO) can't control:
there is a lot of left out of his or her hands. Given this situation, it is really pressing to discuss delivering solid results to a client. And a SEO should rather have solid experience behind his/her back, too.
Another part of risk is expectations. If you expect great results for doing nothing, you take a risk by deceiving yourself and relying on whatever business tactics you think will bring decent results.
That's why it is often good to have a good ole friend, who is a SEO professional, or a SEO forum, where you can ask what and how to do about your website.
The thing is, risk in SEO is nothing unusual. There is risk everywhere: from eating fish/cherries to speeding on the way home to investing a hefty sum in developing your business.
When you do something for your website, there's no 100% guarantee that it'll work as desired. Only when you do, test, redo, test and so on, things start to run smooth.
Not to mention when you enter such new areas as blogging and social media. There's no guarantee about them at all, because everything's about people and quite a handful of people can boast about knowing how people will behave next.
Risk is not something that can be completely avoided. It is something that can be reduced. And it can only be reduced by doing all the work beforehand. As minimizing the risk is a part of a SEO's job, it has to be paid for.
A starting SEO can never have high paid jobs or contracts, because he/she can't guarantee results. And while he can do nearly the same job as a seasoned SEO (researching keywords, finding other related sites, creating content), he'll still get paid less. Why?
Because an expert SEO knows everything beforehand:
Having the experience of what works and what not, and how to be careful on the job, a seasoned SEO can very well have minimal risks involved. He can choose the right path from the start and guarantee at least medium results. And it is much better, than breaking even or getting nothing in return on your investment.
However, no one can guarantee a fixed amount of visitors, conversions and income, because every business/website case is individual and results are different for each.
That being said, ROI can be guaranteed by keeping working. This means that something needs to be tested, improved and so on. This way, when you invest your time and money into your website, you are bound to get a return, because that's the goal to continue working.
Let's take social marketing, for example. No one knows why exactly one viral marketing attempt has brilliantly succeeded and why the other failed. Sure, experts may have an idea or two, but even they fail sometime. Does it mean that they are a bunch of quacks?
No, it means that they can get results with much less tries, than you can.
For example, a social marketing expert can succeed in one of 1-6 attempts. Does that mean that it is not worth hiring him? No, it means that you need to hire him to do the six attempts and you are bound to get an astounding return on investment. Of course, if all or most of the virus infections work, so much the better.
So, if you come across something risky, do everything to minimize it - possibly, by becoming or hiring an expert. Afterwards, work hard to achieve results: learn from others' and your mistakes. And then, you'll need to accept that in any situation, there's a risk of not performing to the maximum, because there are things out of your control. Such is life, I guess?
This post can be considered a continuation of a post, "SEO and ethics: why SEO isn't scam".
]]>Before we list things to do on your site to improve your local search engine traffic, we need to define what we want. This will help us to actually get what we want.
]]>Before we list things to do on your site to improve your local search engine traffic, we need to define what we want. This will help us to actually get what we want.
Local traffic denotes visitors, who searched not only for a general keyphrase, but also used a geographical term (a country, state, a town or any other geographical location). From this, it can be easily assumed that to get local search traffic, you need to have both the general keywords and geographical locations on your site. At best, you'll want the search engines associate your site with the industry you are in and with the specific location your shop is situated at.
Once we know that we need to identify our business site with a specific geographical location, let's see what factors play a role in helping the search engines associate you with your local area.
Naturally, those would be the search engine ranking factors (both on-page and off-page). But the additional factors would be authoritative sources for each location and factors that determine the authority of the source as well.
To sum up, here are the basic things you need to have in mind to build local traffic:
Here are types of pages that can help the search engines understand your business location:
(added from a post by Bill Slawski at SEO Refugee.)
So along with the basic factors that should be taken into account, a location authority page should have the following:
Generally, try to find out how the local people call your product, the area, the shop and what all words they use. Use the words on your site and in your advertising. This is the laser-targeting approach to local product promotion, promising great reach and conversions for anyone mastering it completely.
Also, it is important to cover a wider range of keywords by which your customers may call your product or service (it works world-wide, too, of course):
In another post about Google local search ranking patent from Bill Slawski tells us what exactly Google estimates to be the location of a business. In a nutshell, the score is based on the amount of times a business is mentioned along with the location. While it doesn't mention links, it doesn't mean that they'll hurt here.
A recommendation, based on the above information, would be to get your business listed and mentioned on as many places as possible, hopefully, not only with an identifiable business name, but also with properly formatted (phone: 124 456 7) addresses.
Quite a number of local search ranking factors means that you need not only to have address on all of your pages, but also the most specific address information you can provide.
Apart from simply mentioning the address on your site, you may as well use your location-specific landmarks on your site. Though the description of visual driving directions patent doesn't relate to local search, I don't see why it can't be used for it either.
Providing your location identifiers both to your site visitors and the search engines is vitally important, if you have a shop or provide services in your local area. However, specifying your location is also important even if your customers are not restricted to a geographical location. This will allow you interest those people that prefer to have business with people from your location.
Though there may be a temptation to include your physical address for the search engines, you'd rather focus on providing it for your visitors. It increases your credibility greatly, especially if you have a specific physical address and a phone number.
As a side note, you can add your site to Google Local Business Center (discussed at Cre8asiteforums), but don't expect throngs of visitors from this.
Another opening opportunity is to being available to the people, using the mobile phones to find local shops, restaurants, service providers. It is no secret that mobile phones are pretty popular and it is only a matter of time before the local Web becomes highly visible to the mobile phone users, either through Google Mobile, Google Maps for Mobile or anything similar.
While optimizing the site is important, you can also get noticed outside your website:
You can also use local marketing companies, such as Quigo for paid search distribution in the local media.
While marketing yourself to the local community, pay attention to using local names for products and areas. Make your promotion connect with the local people. (It is also important to tie your offline and online promotion to your website - or have corresponding information on it - but it is another story.)
Of course, only those who have local physical presence from associating their site with a location, such as:
This list is by no means full and can be filled in by anyone, wanting to get local customers. Even nationwide companies can benefit from a more noticeable presence in the area around their shops or offices, such as charity organizations, for example.
That being said, from the recent analysis of keyword data by Mike Blumenthal, it is clear that real estate agents, car dealers and lawyers can benefit most from local search. Not only they will be getting more customers, which is natural, they'll highly profit from being able to sell more of their high cost products and services.
Such results don't mean that other industries won't profit from broadening their reach, it is just that they will probably need to be more proactive about it to be successful.
While there is an opinion that the majority of the site's traffic can come from the general queries, it has also been reported that on a properly optimized website 33% traffic can come from both general and geo-targeted search queries (the last 34% being from direct referrals). Thus, it is highly beneficial for a local business to adjust their website to their location.
As much as location-targeted traffic is an important part of overall search engine traffic, so is the traffic, coming from Google Local, Google Maps (including traffic from the spot above organic results on the SERPs) and other local search oriented online services. So it is also important to cover these resources in your local site marketing strategy.
In the semi-recent post by Bill Slawski, Local search at Rest, and Local in Motion, there are sixteen reasons why it is unlikely that Google Local will be able to replace other local-oriented resources. The most common being unawareness of local businesses of the opportunity to reach a new market of highly targeted customers from their own location. However, those sixteen points can be taken advantage of by applying them to your local website and business.
That being said, once a local business can get into Google Maps (and it doesn't have to own a website), it has a chance of appearing on the #1 spot above the organic results for a general phrase with a geographical location. While it is certain that Google Maps and Local are not used as much, it is yet another way to get more visibility among the potential customers. It has been reported that a business, listed on the #1 Google Maps position got a lot of contacts.
While it is obvious that site promotion for general phrases will help your geographical site promotion, your local site marketing will also help general site promotion as well, so it is a win-win-win situation, for your overall results, local traffic and your local customers.
Whether Google Local and other local search initiatives will be popular and bring customers to local businesses depends not only on Google et al, but also on the businesses, who use local search to their advantage, and also savvy Internet marketers, who promote local search by explaining the benefits of local search and providing local (SEO) services to their customers.
Thus, it is a matter of being early to adopt very efficient techniques to get more local customers - thus, possibly, gaining a fatal advantage over your rivals - and capturing your local market.
One more thing about local customers is that you not only get more customers, even from a single area, it is that, while providing value to them, you'll inspire them to talk about you and recommend you to their family, friends and such, thus building a strong community of customers and a strong business brand.
Learn more on other resources, covering local site optimization and promotion:
Of course, SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization" and is usually referred to the industry or a process of optimizing websites to be well interpreted by the search engines. A SEO is a SEO expert or anyone practicing search engine optimization.
]]>Of course, SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization" and is usually referred to the industry or a process of optimizing websites to be well interpreted by the search engines. A SEO is a SEO expert or anyone practicing search engine optimization.
But those were the basics. Years ago, SEO was used to make sure the site ranks well in the search engines by placing the keywords strategically throughout the page, and it was natural to understand SEO as 'optimizing for the search engines'.
Years have passed, the search engines became more sophisticated, the people began to realize that search engine traffic alone is not equal to online business success and SEOs started paying attention to other things, influencing online people behaviour.
Nowadays, it is common for a SEO specialist to pay attention to web design, copywriting, usability and accessibility in addition to search engine optimization.
In essence, search engine optimization has become a more holistic approach to website optimization and promotion, taking into account not only website crawlability and search engine rankings and traffic, but also conversion rates, social marketing and customer retention rate.
Now, I am more inclined to compare a solid SEO with an internet marketer, who knows the current trends not only in the search engine industry, but also in usability and acessibility, follows the latest web design techniques and knows what is going on around social bookmarking.
If you want to get more search engine traffic to your website, you may be willing to optimize your site(s) yourself. To learn SEO, you need to:
(Learn about more SEO resources)
When studying SEO, you need to be patient, because this is not something you can master in one day. If you are absolutely new to the Web, you'd rather practice on your hobby site (create one, if you don't have it), instead of working on your business site.
If something works on your hobby site, you can implement it on your business site. However, if you apply something to your site and it breaks (or stops bringing traffic), it'd rather be your hobby site, than something that you (and others) live on.
If you don't have months or years to learn SEO from cover to cover, you'll probably need a SEO specialist. Even if you do decide to get one, you will still need to know basic SEO things to be able to estimate the professional level of the person, you will be partnering with. Generally, it may be wise to use the SEO services on a small project (or a part of the website) to see the results and proceed from there.
At first, you may be better off hiring a starting, yet skillful SEO professional, who will be able to fix the most stuff on your website and not charge an arm and a leg for it. Later, when most of the options to get more customers are exhausted, you can try more expensive professionals.
Overall, if you are looking to get a SEO expert now, you may very well get into the social marketing thing with him/her - as it is the latest craze and has not yet been spoiled by the masses (it is beginning to smell, though).
As I said earlier, back in the days SEO seemed to be a pretty straightforward job of including your keywords in some meta tags, while now it requires a thorough understanding not only of how the websites are built, but also of the people. As only people buy from you, you'd rather pay attention to them, while keeping the search engines in mind, when creating your website.
One astonishing thing about this whole approach to SEO is that every aspect of it aids the old SEO. If you research your customers, you learn the words they use, when referring to your product, and you use the words on your site. Thus, you get more targeted search engine traffic.
By knowing how people view websites and what motivates them to buy, you will be able to restructure your pages and remove the unnecessary clutter, thus increasing your sales from the same amount of visitors
Additionally, an accessible website will be accessible not only to the people with disabilities directly and through accessibility search engines (and US and UK websites are required by law to be accessible), but to the search engines and mobile visitors, thus bringing you even more customers.
In the end, you will not only be serving a larger amount of people, but they will be able to make their decision faster, enjoy buying online and being your customers. Need I say that joyful customers are more likely to become your loyal ones and refer others to your online shop?
Though, currently, SEO still remains a pretty focused field on optimizing websites, it is already becoming a part of the overall online marketing strategy and, possibly, in the future will be absorbed by marketing completely.
Read more about the place of SEO:
There are different types of directories: paid directories, free directories and free reciprocal directories. Each of them differs in how much value it can give to you and how much they take from you.
]]>There are different types of directories: paid directories, free directories and free reciprocal directories. Each of them differs in how much value it can give to you and how much they take from you.
Paid directories are supposed to be of higher quality just because not everyone pays to get in there. They also have editorial control, which makes them more respectful than free non-reciprocal directories. But the pages that link to you from the directories don't have much relevant content on them and almost no visitors, too. What paid directories can give is links, though.
Thus, buying links from paid directories isn't as good for the above reasons, but if you have a large budget, entering paid directories may be worth it to give you a slight boost. Some argue that buying a link from Yahoo! is worth it, too.
Free directories are different from paid directories in terms of quality control. Some may even accept anything. Most will link to anyone requesting a link. That's why directories aren't trusted much by the search engines.
Free directories have even less traffic than paid directories, so don't expect any visitors from them.
There is a couple of quality free directories, such as DMOZ, but they are rare and you need to follow their guidelines strictly to get in. Submitting your site to DMOZ is a whole another story altogether, too.
If you have extra budget, you may want to get someone else submit your site to directories, but don't count on a huge impact from it.
Reciprocal directories are different from the free ones that ask you to link to them. Since you'd rather not link to someone who links to anyone, these should be avoided.
If you do decide to submit to directories yourself or using directory submission services, you need to know a couple of things beforehand.
It is best to know your keywords before submitting to directories. You'll use them in the titles. But don't overdo with them - write human friendly, keyword rich titles.
If you get many links with the same anchor text (title descriptions in directory submission), those links may seem suspicious, if you don't have a heavy internal linking background. So a good advice would be to use as many unique titles as you can, probably around 3-10.
Spending months on submitting there is a useless waste of time for a business owner, so you'd rather use some directory submission service.
Some services are reliable, such as www.addurl.nu of Jim Westergren, and cost quite a bit ($250 here for 500), other services mostly have no reputation but cost about $100-125.
As mentioned earlier, directory submission may be one of the cheapest way to get links. As it is, it also gives one of the types of least valuable links as well. If you want to provide value to your customers, you'd rather spend your time and money on more constructive activities.
As a matter of fact, one of the most efficient ways of getting links is creating unique quality content for your site. This is the best linking and targeted traffic strategy out there and it'll be for a while.
This is mainly done by doing a keyword research and creating content for the keyphrases.
For instance, if you get a freelance article writer, you may get about 10 quality articles on your topic for $100. (Just check the articles aren't a mishmash of other articles or a copy..that's another topic, I guess.) If you get about 30-50 interesting, in-depth on-topic articles for your site, you'll be getting a noticeable amount of traffic and links.
Of course, if your site is new, you'll need to promote your site with other methods as well.
]]>First of all, let's define what the Long Tail is when it comes to SEO. The Long Tail of search defines the non-competitive, usually 3-5 word keyphrases that site visitors use to find websites. A broader definition would also include the type and topics of content, word phrasing and such that attracts visitors, using the Long Tail keyphrases.
Generally, the Long Tail keyphrases can be seen once or twice per month in the server logs, but because of the sheer amount of such keyphrases, sites with a log of great content can get pretty decent traffic.
Normally, product site gets visitors by several types of keyphrases:
While it is obvious that a company should make it is easy for visitors to find its site by the first group of keyphrases by simply knowing where to place keywords and also make some effort to cover a more broad, second group of general queries, by doing some keyword research and providing good product descriptions, most companies simply don't know there is an opportunity to cover a much larger potential market, don't know how to do it or are reluctant to invest resources in it.
That's why there are still niches without a competent leader and you can be one of them. Especially now that every competitive advantage has been studied to an extreme, siezing the Long Tail of your search engine traffic may be the one that will bring your competitors to their knees. It'll require some work, of course.
To cover a broader market, more efforts are required, when compared to basic SEO optimization (in fact, no effort is required to rank for a website or company name, mostly). To market the Long Tail, the website owner or the webmaster should know what his Long Tail of search is comprised of to have something to start with.
As the Long Tail keyphrases are less relevant to the website, there is a wider field to cover. But as it is quite broad, you'll need to know what to target, because you don't need any untargeted traffic.
The magnificence of the Long Tail of search is that you don't know it untill you have optimized your site and have some content on your site to attract it. Sure, there will be some Long Tail queries in your logs, but it will be only a tip of the iceberg.
To conquer the Tail of search, you need to create a rich foundation of content to be found. The tricky part is to know what content to create. If your focus is on providing value to your customers, it'll be easier for you.
To capture the long tail, you need to create content that not only is relevant to your product or service, but also which is related to your producr or service or even remotely related. You do this because you need to target not only people who know about you and your product, or just what they need - that's pretty simple - but you need to attract people that have the same problems, as your target audience, who are looking for a solution, a solution not only in your field, but also in a related one.
Let's study an example of men's, for instance. Sure, you need to write basic product descriptions, the benefits of using your socks over others, but you will also need to provide tips on keeping your feet comfortable, how to keep mens feed healthy, how to pick a suitable pair of socks for a constume and for which occasion, and so on.
This way you not only attract people who are interested in socks, but you attract people with a wider variety of topics, related to socks. All of the above will have a chance to buy from you. (Check this more detailed example of content ideas).
By looking out of the box, by attempting to do your best to provide value to your potential cutsomers, you are able to find new ways to think of how your product may benefit them. This approach will open new ways of marketing your product as well. And lastly, this will allow you to get more visitors to your website. If you do everything right, this will be just some icing on the cake.
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