For a while now, it has been the perceived wisdom that you should be targeting the long tail in PPC campaigns, but for SEO it has always been about targeting the few keywords with big search numbers.

However there has been a growing school of thought that you should also be interested in the long tail for SEO too.

A recent look at our Webstats started to make me think there is something in this. Over the last month, almost 50% of the keywords resulting in visits to the site were highly relevant, but not ones we had optimised for!

So how do you respond to this new knowledge, as traditional SEO on page techniques are not practical for the long tail?

The answer is to build high quality, interesting, relevant content that people will want to read, and then to build good quality links into your site from high page range pages (which should be quite possible if the content is good).

In other words deliver what Google want.

Although I am not suggesting that you should forget the on-page optimisation for the key phrases with big search numbers, what I am say is that you should not discount the value of the long tail in natural SEO.

If you want a quick way to check what backlinks a site has, go to the Yahoo search engine, and type the following into the search box:

linkdomain:www.domaintocheck.com -site:www.domaintocheck.com

where domaintocheck.com is the domain you are checking backlinks for.

the -site:www.domaintocheck.com removes any internal links, so you check only for external backlinks.

Found this post on the UK Business Forum, and thought it was worth sharing. Although SEO moves quickly, and the article is quite old, looking through it there is some good info in it, so it is definitly still worth a read.

seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

I was at an SEO seminar recently and was told of some reseach the speaker had done to determine how page rank was distributed & how it could be managed within your site.

In a very simplified version, here is what he said.

Page rank will basicaly filter down from pages linking to your site, so in simple terms, if a page rank 8 site has 1 link from it, the site it is linked to will also be given a page rank 8, 2 sites linking & they will both get PR4 etc.

However if you use the nofollow tag on internal links, these links will not pass PR, and the rank will be distributed exlusively to other links from the page. See the diagram below:

Thus by using no follow links to less important pages internal links can be built to favour your most important pages from a PR perspective.

Interesting, I thought.

Following yesterdays post, I decided to check a couple of the forums listed to see if they did use nofollow, and in fact some of them did.

So if you find that others are no longer not using the nofollow tag, please feel free to post a comment to the effect.

My research suggests that Site Point & Webmaster talk do not use nofollow, but others (including Search Engine Round Table) do now use this tag in their signatures

Found this thread on the Digital Point Forum and though it was interesting enough to share.

The discussion raises the question “why do we as marketers take the time to post on Forums?” I believe that one good reason for posting on forums is to help to generate back links, and thus support your Search Engine Optimisation as part of your web marketing efforts.

In my opinion these is nothing wrong with this motivation. Assuming you have something intelligent and relevant to say, when you take the time to browse forums and offer answers to questions, you are rewarded for your time by the forum delivering a good backlink to your site. However increasingly forum & blog owners are starting to use the NoFollow tag in signature links, depriving posters of valuable backlinks.

The post I found listed forums that do not use the nofollow tag, so I thought I would share it:

* Digitalpoint Forums
* v7n Forums
* SitePoint Forums
* Harmony-Central Forums
* Search Engine Round Table
* Submit Express Forums
* Start Ups
* Webmaster Talk
* Comic Book Resources Forums
* Web Design Forum
* Marketing Chat
* Earners Forum
* TriPHP Forums
* 360 Gamerscore
* Acorn Domain Name Forums
* Book and Reading Forum
* Ableton Forums
* The In Place
* 6Pins
* IQ69
* Hot4’s Forums

I can also add a UK specific one to this list:

* UK Business Forums

This last one is a very active forum, with some good discussions.

I should also point out that we do not use the NoFollow tag in our comments signatures

Link building is (or should be) top of the agenda for anyone who is serious about SEO these days. With this in mind, I thought it would be worth highlighting a recent article in the e-newsletter from the site searchenginewatch.com. It gives some interesting tips on how to track down potential sources of links using your competitor sites.

Read the Full articles on SEO link Building Fundementals

A questing which comes up regularly on SEO Forums is “Where should I host my site if I am targeting the UK?” Although I would always advise UK hosting for many reasons, the SEO issues with overseas hosting are now less significant as Google will allow you to tell it which country you are targeting your site at.

This is done through Google Webmaster tools. Accessed through the My account page on Google, once you have an account, the webmaster tools offers some great stats & info on your site, and importantly lets you set the Geographical target. To do this, go into the webmaster tools for your siet, and select Tools -> Set Geographic Target . This will allow you to associate your .com domain with a specific country.

Note this is only necessary for .com domains, as it will automatically associate .co.uk domains with the UK.

If you are new to Webmaster tools, you can access it via the following link:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

DMOZ listings can be great, but Google will often use the Description from the DMOZ directory in its listing for your site. This is not always desirable, as these descriptions can be out of date. To get around this, you can use the NOODP tag. You will find details of how to use this tag on the website www.free-seo-news.com.

Link direct to the post about NOODP via this link:

http://www.free-seo-news.com/newsletter224.htm