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.
