Often when you optimise your website for a given keyword, you are inadvertently optimising your content for more than one keyword. You may find that for the keyword you optimise for, you receive 100 unique visitors a day, yet for 200 other keyword strings you receive one visitors a day. This is the longtail effect of SEO and is something well worth remembering when copywriting for the web.

Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine first coined the term Longtail in an October 2004 article. He was referring to the effects where products in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.

In his Wired article, Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.

The same thing is true of keywords, and the effects on traffic to your site can be significant, particularly on a content-oriented site, such as a News network.

An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.”