For many, particularly new site owners in popular niches, being able to compete for chosen keywords or key phrases is not easily attainable. SEO and search engine ranking are such a dynamic activity that we can never say never, but it remains unlikely for a new site to achieve solid ranking for non-trivial keywords.
New sites, along with many older sites, must compete for keywords that in isolation are trivial and offer a mere trickle in terms of traffic. However, the cumulative traffic from many of these single trivial keyword searches frequently exceeds the traffic from one or more popular keywords. These abundant, but less popular keywords, are frequently referred to as long-tail keywords.
Targetting the long tail is niche-specific. By their very nature, some niches will have a shorter long-tail than others. Detailed knowledge of trends in your niche, along with a good keyword research tool is your best weapon when developing a strategy to target the long-tail.
Targetting the long tail is also a long-term strategy that should be built up over time. One method I use to good effect in niches that have a shorter long-tail I call the bifurcation method. Here, I begin with an established competing for keyword and write an article or two directly about this keyword. Then I think of two closely related keywords and do the same. For each of these two-second-level keywords, I do the same and on and on until I have a multi-layered diagram of keywords and phrases. This way I build a binary tree of relevant keywords I can easily traverse and interlink and have on paper a good conceptual framework for my activities.
Forum owners were well aware of the power of the long tail. A quick scan at the statistics of a forum I own indicates 250 trivial keywords each with one or two search-engine referrals for April; this equates to about 500 unique visitors. Likewise, for the same month, the principal key phrase for the forum (which has about 64 K global searches per month) for which this forum ranks on the first page offered up 128 search-engine referrals. This indicates the power of the long-tail.
