Why Marketing to the “Long Tail” in Search Makes Sense

[mandy]

...most shopping sites still depend on PPC rather than organic traffic and it’s a bit sad. Each site already has all the information in their site’s logs, it’s just digging though it all and matching it up. It’s true, long tail traffic is lower when you look at individual phrases, but the conversion and bounce rate is much higher. When thinking about title tags and on-page content, think about what your users are searching for. If necessary, put multiple versions of the product in the title tag. You should be able to optimize for 5 to 20 long tail terms per page. If a site doesn’t have time to optimize for the long tail, they can supplement traffic with a comparison shopping engine. However, learn from what they are doing so that you can use that in the future. Also, look at your affiliate sites to see how they are optimizing for the long tail.

...shorter URLs get 2x the amount of clicks than long URLs get. Focus on title tags, h1 tags and URLs for quick and easy updates. Also, use the nofollow tag on any links that you don’t want to rank for. Links like ‘page 1, 2, 3″ or ‘previous - next’ as these are not phrases you want visitors coming in on...

full article: http://www.toprankblog.com/2008/08/long-tail/