The reason the long tail concept is most applicable to online businesses is that the concept is practically built for search. Why? Well, think in terms of your own site’s keywords plotted on a graph. The graph would reach its peak at the most popular term, and trail off gradually for the less popular, more infrequently search terms. Yet the lion’s share of the site’s traffic, not to mention the bulk of sales or other types of conversions, are likely comprised of these less frequently searched long tail terms.

Take an online hardware store, for example. “Hardware” might be the single most popular term used to find the site in search results. But customers who actually intend to purchase “hardware” are few and far between. Actual sales and revenues are generated via searches for “Phillips screwdriver,” “spackle,” “duct tape,” “Allen wrench,” and similar long tail terms.

It’s not that our hypothetical hardware store doesn’t want to rank for the term “hardware,” of course, or the name of the business—let’s say it’s “Acme Hardware Supplies”. But from a search optimization perspective, it wants to rank for, and capture traffic from, the hundreds (if not thousands) of infinitely more profitable long tail terms that are its actual revenue drivers.

Optimizing a website for long tail terms requires planning, not only in terms of keywords and phrases, but also site architecture and navigation. Products, information, and keywords should ideally be organized by themes, such as the following:

...and so on.

Rich internal linking and breadcrumb navigation helps users and search engines alike burrow into the long tail terms. And on each long tail page, don’t neglect the following elements:

Does it sound like a lot of trouble to dedicate this much time and attention to each and every small component of your offerings? Well, sites optimize for long tail terms because they’re profitable, in no small part because there’s so much less competition for them. Let’s return to our original example over at Amazon.com. Unless your brand or online presence is of similar size and scale, optimizing for a term such as “harry potter” or “harry potter book” is a formidable challenge indeed. Between the book sites, movie sites, fan sites, and all the other Harry Potter content on the Web, you’d be lucky to rank at all. Go down the tail and optimize for something genuinely obscure, though, and you can much more easily find your audience.

The same holds true for paid search, of course. Bidding on terms as competitive as “Harry Potter” or “iPod” can result in a stratospheric cost-per-click. Go down the tail, and you’re much more likely to efficiently find an audience for, say, “refurbished iPod Nano.”

As a concept, the long tail is easy to understand as it applies to retail websites, but that doesn’t mean the concept can’t be applied to business-to-business or publisher websites. A solid understanding of long tail terms coupled with a content strategy is key. Perhaps a blog utilizing long tail terms could be part of that strategy. Many firms post white papers and case studies on their websites. These, too, can address long tail terms and attract relevant and highly qualified, self-selected traffic.

And that’s the traffic that matters. Moments ago, I searched for “books” on Google. Mighty Amazon.com ranks sixth in organic results, below the fold in my browser window. But when I searched the one-word book title that’s currently on my night table—not a bestseller, but a novel by a young and relatively obscure writer—the Amazon results shows up in the number-two slot, just under the book’s Wikipedia mention.

What can your site do or offer that’s rare, unusual, specialized, or off-center? What makes your product, service, or offerings unique and distinct from the rest of the pack? The more specific the search, the more highly qualified the searcher, and the further down he is in the purchase funnel.

You owe it to yourself to develop a long tail strategy as part of your SEO campaign.