Most people mistakenly believe that people find their site using only a handful keywords. The truth is visitors find your site using hundreds, even thousands of unique keywords every month. To illustrate this, here’s some actual keyword data from web analytics tools of our clients.

Last month, there were 3,549 keywords phrases that referred people from the search engines. The #1 keyword only referred 126 visitors, or 4%. The top 10 most popular keywords referred 691 visitors, or 19%. That means the 2,736, or 81% of the visitors came from keyword phrases that were not in the top 10.

This is because the majority of people use what is known as “long tail” searches. Long tail searches are keywords that are rarely searched for. However, they’re very important. For example, of those 3,549 keywords searched, 2,849, or 80% came from a keyword that was searched for only once. 80%!

The fastest way to optimize your site for these long tail keywords is by writing and adding more content to your site. You can do this by creating more pages or by adding more copy to your existing ones. Either way, you improve your chance to be found for those obscure keywords.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 1:57 pm and is filed under General, Industrial SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.