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.

• http://www.jason-v.com/2009/08/01/have-you-googled-your-name
• http://www.jason-v.com/2009/08/10/web-presence-update

To give a bit of re-cap the site was started and the first post went up on July 30th, 2009. At the stage a search for my name on google didn’t turn out to well, and that is to be expected. So how have things gone in this short period?

In the graph below you can see how I’ve gone on a month by month basis. It might be a little early to tell but you can see a steady trend in the amount of visitors to site each month. If you double the current month (roughly halfway through it) this trend continues.

The amount of bandwidth being used though hasn’t been steady as I’ve seen this go up and down. Recently I started uploading more images and photos which has seen the amount of bandwidth being used jump up a fair bit (realistically though it is such a small amount for a website). It might be worth mentioning that I now have caching working on the site as well as a few other optimisations done with some help from Shane (Hosting Guy).

Monthly websites statistics measuring the amount of hits, visitors each month and bandwidth used each month. - 16th October, 2009

So how searchable is my name? Has it improved? Below is a list of searches on two different variations of my name. Jason Van Dyk & “Jason Van Dyk”. I’ve also compared to the results taken on the 10th August 2009.

• Search on www.google.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 6th & 7th vs. 18th & 19th (Improved by 12 spots)
• Search on www.google.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 3rd & 4th vs. 25th & 26th (Improved by 22 spots)
• Search on www.yahoo.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 1st, 2nd & 4th vs. 1st, 2nd & 7th (Maintained 1st & 2nd, Improved by 3 spots)
• Search on www.yahoo.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 1st, 2nd & 5th vs. 1st, 2nd & 6th (Maintained 1st & 2nd, Improved by 1 spot)
• Search on www.bing.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 2nd & 4th vs. 3rd (Improved by 1 spot and added an extra hit)
• Search on www.bing.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 1st vs. 1st, 5th & 10th (Maintained 1st, lost 2 hits)

In summary doing a search for my name will either bring up my site, a profile on a social networking site or some other form a hit which is directly related to me. The results have improved dramatically to have top 10 hit amongst all search engines. This is great and has meant that achieving my goal is working.

How have you gone? What are some of the steps you’ve taken to increase your web presence?

I’ve committed to my goal and have reached it within the time frame. You can now google my name, and results appear. So what is going to happen now? Well I will be posting less about Enterprise 2.0 related topics and instead will broaden the topics to cover more of my interests.

Your blogs (66 enrolled)

–        17 enrolled but no blog URL provided (26%)
–        31 blogs look inactive (only 1 or 2 posts) (47%)
–        18 blogs tracking well (27%)

The results above at this stage mean that 73% of students who have enrolled (INB346 – Enterprise 2.0 @ QUT) are in trouble at this stage and there was a bit of discussion on this before the lecture started.

In reply to the discussion I thought I would post some of my opinions and some hurdles I’ve come across. Tips to get your site out that and hopefully get you in the right direction. I’ll keep it fairly generic so this can be applied in other areas, in other situations.

Site platform: What to use for your website? Is it free? Should I get hosting? What about a domain name?

There are a lot of choices out there. Perhaps that can be a bit of a problem. I decided before looking what to use I was going to buy a domain and host the site on the web. To purchase the domain I went to www.godaddy.com entered in a few details and there it was. I already had hosting organised, so it was fairly easy for me to point the domain to the correct name servers and other stuff.

My next choice was to pick what software to use. Open Source, stable and already established. I could quickly short list this to: Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Blogger, Mambo. As I knew Blogger was owned by Google and didn’t really allow full control I crossed that out. Mambo was a fork of Joomla made a year or so ago and Joomla itself did a fair bit more than blogging so I took that off the list. That left Drupal and WordPress. WordPresshad a great write up and had both hosted solution (of their domain) and a version you could download and host yourself so I gave that a try (and stuck with it).

Once I had purchased the domain and installed WordPress. My main goal was to make my site searchable. Now that it was on the web, getting it on the search engines was the next challenge. This brings me to the second hurdle.

Content: Remove standard content, writing posts, integrating twitter, categories, tags

Removing the standard content such as “hello world”, the standard links and all that for me was a must. I didn’t want Google searching my site and identifying it as a generic installation that is going no where. I didn’t want to “give the wrong impression” and get black listed as such. I quickly changed the about me page, knowing that this can be changed later. I wrote up a first post (and edited it a few times after it was published) and I was on my way.

So how do I pick what to write about? I attend the lecture and listen to Jason Watson talk and if I get some thoughts going on a particular topic I wrote some points down. I look at the workshop activities and take things from there. Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 concepts are everywhere, and we interact with them daily. I know some students voiced that they didn’t want to get shot down in case the said something wrong. Instead I think of it is an opportunity to voice what I know where someone else can agree, disagree or even provide feedback to further my knowledge (best case scenario).

Categories and Tags. To be honest this is something that I might not have done the best at this stage, but one thing I make sure I do with every post is to make sure I put it in a category, and I tag it with key words which summaries the post. This way you can find that article by looking in a specific category or specific tag. Having more ways to find your content, and search for it isn’t going to hurt.

Integrating twitter – well first I had to join which was easy, and the next step was getting my updates to display on the site. This took a bit of searching around but in the end I decided to go with a plugin called ‘WordPress’. It does what it says, and after installation it was very easy to set it up as a widget on the side of my site.

Web Presence: How am I increasing my web presence? How to give yourself feedback?

One of my main goals is getting a web presence and the site on to google.com and very high up there in the rankings when you search for my name. I believe this is achievable so I’m going to achieve it…. and I’m monitoring my progress so I know if I’m getting closer or further away. This is one thing which I set up from the start with my Have you googled your name? post and have followed up on it later with a Web Presence Update post. This is a way of personal feedback and I way to assess how your blog is going. If you get the feeling of movement and progress you might find you get a bit of snowballing effect. I also have stats running on my site “called AwStats” in the back end which monitors who visits the site, time of the day, what pages have been viewed, etc which allows me to judge where I’ve gone right or wrong. This is how I found out that my Negative Web Presence Example – Abbey Sherwell post was suck up by Google and spat out in the search results.

Exposure: How will Google find my site? How will my search engine ranking increase? Comments? Pings? Trackbacks?

Very similar to my last hurdle, but I thought I would break it up.

So how do you get your site on Google? I bet most of you haven’t thought about actually telling Google have you?

1. It does sound crazy, but once you got a few posts on your site tell Google it is there. You can do that by clicking here and adding your URL.
2. Pings – your WordPress site also sends out pings when you publish a post – More info here, but if you’re not using WordPress it might be something you can look out.
3. Add your blog to the Google Blog Search (yes there is a separate site on Google to search blogs) – by clicking here
4. Submit to other sites like Yahoo! (I didn’t do Yahoo! but my site has come up there already), Bing (click here), others?
5. Trackbacks – If your post is related to someone elses, or you link to someone elses post make sure you “send trackbacks”.
6. Links – Link to other peoples posts, site. If you join up to another site (twitter), make sure you’ve put your website in your profile.
7. Comment – If you comment on other peoples site (leave url link in the URL field if possible) and you might get comments back. Network
8. Keep the content going. Search engines need a reason to keep coming back to your site and you need a reason for people to come back also!

Other: Something I’ve missed? Forgotten? What about comments?

Well these were some of the first hurdles I’ve had, and I think this is what other will come across too. One thing mentioned in the lecture was comments. We all like comments and like to here feedback (I know I do) but this shouldn’t be a crucial aspect of your site. Think of it as a bonus if you get any. We also have a fair amount of students in this subject, so once you get the ball rolling have a look on other students site and leave a comment. If you receive a comment, try and return the favour. If I’m going to comment, I try and add extra value to the original post which I would like to recommend my readers in doing.

Outro:

There are plenty of tips, how to’s, screenshots, guides, tutorials, posts and resources on the net to help you get started. I’ve only touched on on a few things here but if you feel like there was something I’ve missed let me know and I can update the post. Also if you are struggling to get started let me know and I might be able to assist (or point you in the right direction).

I thought I would give everyone a bit of an update of what is happening behind the scenes with my site. One of the key objectives was to entertain the idea of creating a web presence. So how will I know how I’m going and if I’m heading the right way?

Monitoring with stats, checking search results and finding out where I stand. As there are fellow QUT Students doing this, and a few have decided to create their own domain I thought it would be interesting in sharing:

• First Post – July 30th, 2009
• Total Number of Unique Visitors since the site creation – 182
• Most Popular Post – http://jason-v.com/2009/08/05/negative-web-presence-example-abbey-sherwell

The last one took me by surprise, not only is it my most popular post it ranks on the front page of www.google.com when you do a search for “Abbey Sherwell”. I’m quietly happy with that, and I’m not going to complain about the 100+ hits it has received (hits are different to Unique Visitors I mentioned above). This also means that the google bot has been trawling my site for some google juice.

So I thought I would share some results (searches on Jason Van Dyk & “Jason Van Dyk”):

• Search on www.google.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 18th & 19th
• Search on www.google.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 25th & 26th
• Search on www.yahoo.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 1st, 2nd & 7th
• Search on www.yahoo.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 1st, 2nd & 6th
• Search on www.bing.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 3rd
• Search on www.bing.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 1st, 5th & 10th

It would be safe to say that I’ve clearly entered the web and my rankings are on the rise (considering there were next to nothing).  I plan on writing a post to highlight some of the things I’ve done and things which you can do as well to increase your exposure but first I wanted to be able to say that “yes” it does work, and it has worked because my site is there.

I would be interested to see how other people have gone, and the steps taken by others to get them name out there.