Over the years, I’ve done many introduction to search marketing sessions
where I talk about the value of having good, descriptive pages. Those let you
tap into the search tail, the
"onesies and twosies" terms, as I’ve called them, that might come up only once
in a month. Add all those up, and
they can outweigh or
be as important as the top terms you deliberately target. Today, I had to
chuckle at one particular query that brought us a visitor that illustrates the
search tail concept:
why did google have the scream
That was the query that brought one person in
from
Google. We currently rank around second for it, for this page:
I didn’t deliberately aim to rank well for that query. I didn’t write on the
page something like:
Why did Google have The Scream? You might not realize, but today was the
birthday of Edvard Munch. To celebrate, Google made its logo similar to his
painting The Scream. So if you’re wondering why did Google have The Scream, now
you know why did Google have The Scream.
Instead, this was an unanticipated visitor, a visitor using a string of words
I didn’t think of. But that’s not a problem. Good textual content, reinforced by
good descriptive title using some of the key terms let us tap into that search
tail query.