Monthly Archive for March, 2010

Choosing the right size of keywords (Long Tail vs. Short Tail)

There is some practical stuff that you can do to help your website gain a better ranking in search engine. For example, choosing the right size of your keywords whether it is going to be short or long can make a huge difference. Other people recognized it as choosing between broad or narrow keywords.

The term “long tail” was coined by Chris Anderson and is used to describe the strategy of targeting less-competitive niche markets rather than hugely competitive broad keywords. A long tail keywords is something like “Website Design Company in Seattle” while a short tail keyword is something like “Website Design.”

When you compare the two keywords, “Website Design” has about 30-40 times as many competitors as “Website Design Company in Seattle” but “Website Design” also gets far more searches each month.

A small number of broad terms such as “Website Design” account for a large proportion of searches but an equally large proportion of the searches are made up of millions of more specific search queries such as “Website Design Company in Seattle.” This search distribution can be understood through the following graph.

Which one to choose? There is less competition with “long tail” keyword so you can rank on the first page of Google far easier than ranking for short tail keywords. Moreover, visitors or clients searching for long tail keywords know exactly what they want, be it “Web Design Company in Seattle” , “Web Consultant in Seattle” or “Half Price Armani Suits.”

Whether you can achieve high rankings for competitive keywords or not, long tail keywords could be highly beneficial for you.

If you have a website selling “Armani Suits” but can’t pull any search engine traffic, rather than targeting the keyword “Armani” or “Armani Suits” try targeting more specific keywords such as “Armani Mens Suits”.

Hopefully you will see an increase in conversions and sales.

What is Social Media?

What is Social Media?

Social media is a phrase being tossed around a lot these days, but it can sometimes be difficult to answer the question of what is social media.

The best way to define social media is to break it down.

Media is an instrument on communication, like a newspaper or a radio, so social media would be a social instrument of communication.

In Web 2.0 terms, this would be a website that doesn’t just give you information, but interacts with you while giving you that information.

This interaction can be as simple as asking for your comments or letting you vote on an article, or it can be as complex as Flixster recommending movies to you based on the ratings of other people with similar interests.

What Are Some Social Media Websites?

Now that we have answered the question of what is social media, we can move on to social media websites. Because social media is such a broad term, it covers a large range of websites. But the one common link between these websites is that you are able to interact with the website and interact with other visitors.

Here are some examples of social media websites:

  • Social Bookmarking. (Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Simpy) Interact by tagging websites and searching through websites bookmarked by other people.
  • Social News. (Digg, Propeller, Reddit) Interact by voting for articles and commenting on them.
  • Social Networking. (Facebook, Hi5, Last.FM) Interact by adding friends, commenting on profiles, joining groups and having discussions.
  • Social Photo and Video Sharing. (YouTube, Flickr) Interact by sharing photos or videos and commenting on user submissions.
  • Wikis. (Wikipedia, Wikia) Interact by adding articles and editing existing articles.

And these websites are not the only social media websites.

Any website that invites you to interact with the site and with other visitors falls into the definition of social media.