How Much Longer Can We Hold Onto the Long Tail?
A new study reported on Slashdot suggests that the amount of value in business associated with the “long-tail”—that is, dealing primarily in smaller quantities for niche markets—is less a wonderful thing for businesses than recently assumed. In short, greed and fear play a big role here just like it does in everything economic. People love the idea of being involved in a windfall and are afraid of picking the wrong niche and not getting enough demand, so they all try to follow the next big craze or compete on harder turfs.
What this means for SEO is that companies aren’t going to want extremely specific keywords with low competition; they want to go head-to-head with established brands. This means that rather than spending time being creative in keyword generation, search engine optimizers have to spend a lot more time paying close attention to the little tweaks which were at one point the icing on the cake to just picking the right landing page. In essence, they really have to shift their efforts to be much more detail-oriented, and extremely disciplined in our algorithm-related SEO knowledge. This will be a definite area for competition among SEO firms, especially if the trend does start going towards popular terms rather than long-tail ones.
