Another SEO Myth

Recently I was talking to a real estate agent who was at a loss wondering how to drive traffic to his website.  He knew about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but he had heard or read that you can only get ranked for one or two terms.

In case anyone else has heard that, rest assured that it is not true.  There are a couple ways that I could understand that idea being passed along.

1. Each page on your website can only be effectively optimized for one or two, and maybe three related keyword phrases. 
   • So, for example, you might want to optimize a page for Atlanta real estate and Atlanta real estate listings.  But, you wouldn’t want to try to optimize it for Atlanta real estate, New York real estate, Chicago real estate and Boston real estate.  There are two many phrases in that second example, and they are too unrelated to one another.
2. Regardless of whether you are doing your own SEO or you’re hiring someone else to do it for you, limitations in time and budget often dictate that you would only try to rank for a couple keywords at one time.  That doesn’t mean you can’t, it just means it may not be feasible.

Remember the Long Tail

Either way, the important thing to keep in mind is the long-tail search result phenomenon.  There are a lot of definitions of the term long-tail, I’ve discovered.  It is actually a term defining a statistical distribution.  For example, Wikipedia defines it this way:  ”The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of some statistical distributions.  In these distributions a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually ‘tails off’.”

In more simple terms, in relation to SEO, the long-tail refers to all the keyword phrases that you never optimized for, but that your site ranks for in the search engines.

For example, using the stats for our site, BuildRealEstateResults.com, for the month of September, 2007, the site was found in the search engines for 869 different keyword phrases.  We’ve only optimized and done SEO on a very, very small percentage of those phrases.

Some of those 869 phrases bring targeted traffic to our website.  Some of them are silly things, like ranking for roaches and water bugs after a Whimsical Wednesday post on that topic.  By the way, we’ve fallen off the charts for that term – it was just a fairly normal phenomenon where the search engines will rank a fairly strong site for a phrase, but then they figure out it’s rather silly, so the ranking disappears.

The bottom line is this:  don’t despair if you only have the time or budget to do active on-going SEO on a couple terms.  The long-tail phenomenon will ensure that you get ranked for a variety of other phrases once the search engines figure out what your site is all about!