So what is the long tail and how is it applied in the web? Well to be honest, the long tail doesn’t have to apply to the web, in fact it wasn’t originally but in more recent times it has been used to describe the strategy internet companies have taken to leverage the online market. Some examples are Amazon, iTunes, eBay and Netflix are great examples.

The long tail describes a wider range of products that are more specific getting sold less often, rather than the ‘head’ being more common/generic products being sold more often. A great image create by leftclick can be seen below:

Effectively the dinosaur represents a curve on the graph, where there more generic or common a product, the increase of the results. On the other end the more specific the term, the less results occur. Following the example by leftclick, how would you leverage the long tail in web 2.0?

If you were in the hotel business and you had a resort you could describe yourself as a ‘hotel’ or perhaps even the location your hotel was. This would be a very generic term, and really ‘the head’. If you were more specific, you could use key works such as ‘accommodation’, ‘Queenstown’, ‘backpacker’, ‘wheelchair access’, ‘pets allowed’ and the results would be fairly narrow. Putting this keywords into Google may give you the results of a few million (the head), to a few hundred or less (the tail).

The more specific your key words, the more specific your audience – leveraging the long tail can yield lower costs in advertising while also increasing your conversion rate.

By doing the following you can target advertisements on the long tail in the example above. This also means you will have lower costs (because there is less competition) and have higher conversion rates (because the target audience is looking for services similar to what you offer).

Another great tip is from leftclick is focused pages, targeted at these specialised search terms. What this basically means is, don’t rely on your advertisements bringing in visitors, create pages or content so the search engines results will list the page (in in turn bring them to your site). In the above example creating an online guest book, or encouraging user reviews (even better if they blog about it and link to your site) are a few good ways to create content.

So what if your a site like Amazon? Similar approach works but there is a few more tips which you can use. If you have a large product range, once the visitor is on your site you might want to direct them towards more generic items you have for sale. The products are more popular and as a first time vistior you might be more interested.

Perhaps you’ve become a member of a site like Amazon and bought a few items. Soon you wont to direct your members towards a little more ‘specific’ material. This will have the opposite effect in that existing members who have seen the common/generic stuff can get pushed towards the more specific terms. By doing this you are encouraging existing users to branch out more.