“Want traffic, have content” - Long Tail Optimization

There’s lots of large websites which hardly leverage the power of their vast amounts of content. One way to increase traffic with existing content is to optimize for the long tail. Most believe they do this very well already, but there’s few simple techniques that aren’t being taken advantage of very often. Here’s what I’ve had great experience with:

Sort your content in various ways

Most sites with large amounts of content have a way to list it. Almost no matter the kind of content you have and how you list it, you should be able to come up with additional ways of sorting it. E.g. instead of just sorting it by date with the newest content first, you could also provide it sorted alphabetically, by author, by price and many other ways depending on the kind of content. These sorting methods could also be listed both as ascending and descending.

To make all these content lists bring traffic from long tail keywords, you should show a snippet of the content along with the listing. This could be the first 300 characters of an article. If you have 1000+ articles and list 20 articles per page, then with 6 different ways of sorting the lists you’ll have a bunch of new semi-unique pages.

In my experience such pages will be unique enough to avoid duplicate content issues. But be aware that it takes decent link popularity to use the technique or some of the new pages could end up in Google’s supplemental index.

Create tag pages and tag your content

Nowadays tags are so popular. And for good reasons with one being that tag pages are good for traffic. Tag pages are typically made as an supplement to categories and searches. But since they’re often targeted very broad, the mixture of content is only somewhat relevant. Meaning that the mixture of content on tag pages will, just like using various sorting methods, result in a more or less unique combination of words and sentences.

So just as you’d make lists of your content sorted in different ways, you should make lists of your content based on which tags you assign to it. With a bit of creativity and programming it’s possible to automate the process of assigning tags to the content.

Insert snippets of related content on pages

It has always been good usability to link to your other pages that are related to the one the user is viewing. If you’re not already doing it, this is another good reason to get it implemented. Because when showing links to related pages with a small snippet of the content from the related content, you’ll be adding relevant words that maybe never would have been there. So by doing this you’re increasing the chance of getting search traffic from long tail keywords.

Are these techniques legit or in the gray area?

Whether or not these techniques are legit, really depends on who you’re asking. But consider that many blogs and “web 2.0″ sites do all this in some way or another, and they’ve been doing it for quite a while. If you don’t do it too excessively I’d say that it’s perfectly fine. But well, I’m not Google, Yahoo or any other search engine, so my opinion isn’t necessarily valid. The one thing I can say is that I’ve never experienced any problems due to the implementation of the techniques. In fact I’ve always seen increase in traffic after implementing them.