Inbound link long tail

"The Long Tail" is a relatively new term to describe a pattern of sales. It was described to me as being the cumulative sales of many low volume sellers against the cumulative sales of fewer high volume sellers. For example Amazon will sell millions of each of its top selling books. However since they also sell many low volume books, the total quantity of sales of low volume books equals or exceeds the total for its high volume books. I don't know if that is actually true for Amazon, but that is the idea. More generically, below is a graph showing how "the long tail" gets its name:

I propose that a long tail also exists for web site traffic. I first suggested the idea at the Small Business Brief Forum. The graph is similar to products but the axis have different labels and I suspect the upward curve would be more abrupt and steeper:

In short, the hypothesis is that the cumulative traffic from small directories and link exchanges could out number the traffic generated from Google, even if the site's Google listing is well ranked. This could also be called the "Back link long tail" since "back link" is synonymous with "inbound link". I think "inbound link" is a more appropriate term because of perspective. We are measuring the long tail for the target web site, therefore the links, from its perspective are inbound.

How other sites link to a destination site is part of the formula search engines use to rank a site. Inbound links are considered to have quality factors. Is the source of the inbound link a quality site? Does the source have lots of content related to the destination site? Does the source have lots of inbound links of its own? Are its inbound links from quality sites?

Another key criteria in determining a search results ranking are keywords. Unfortunately for new web sites, the 'best' keywords for specific categories already have large and entrenched web sites taking up the top 10 search engine positions. A new small business site will have a difficult time breaking into that list and it is unreasonable to expect that to occur in any short period of time. A new site would need competitive content plus relevant inbound links from other very high ranking sites. Most sites are not that fortunate.

One method to meet this keyword issue is to try to match well on a very specific keyword phrase. The result is a match for people searching for exactly what the site offers. It is argued that these are highly qualified visitors. But does the time and effort in doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for 20-30 visitors a day really worth it? One must weigh the time and benefit of SEO. Remember small business web site owners cannot afford a professional SEO service. Most people don't have the time or the experience to do their own SEO. The result is that in following bits of SEO advance they may be missing the parts that would truly make their marketing a success.

What is left for a small business to do? Possibly the best solution is the best of both worlds. Seek out inbound links and wait for the search engines to find the site naturally. Meaning, don't focus on search engine optimization, focus on getting inbound links. There are counter arguments to this: that too many inbound links dilute their quality; that receiving links from directories do not help; that link exchanges do not help; that a site is bound to get unrelated inbound links which are useless. All of these arguments are from the perspective of search engine optimization. But in seeking inbound links, SEO is not the goal, getting traffic from the inbound links is the goal.

Qualified visitors to a web site means that the visitors are indeed looking for what the web site offers and are potential customers. The goal then is to dedicate time to getting inbound links that are most qualified. Directory submissions by category are beneficial. These can be done 100s at a time using automatic submission software. These are scorned by most SEO professionals, however even a trickle of visitor from 1000 directories could surpass the visitors from a 1st page placement on Google. This happened to me with only about 100 directory listings. I once had a wholesale web site which reached the fifth position on Google's first page for a very specific 3-word key phrase. I still only received 20-30 visitors a day. I had more qualified traffic coming from directory listings than this fifth place position on Google. The more focused your keywords must be to land on Google's front page, the more you may benefit from qualified inbound links from the long tail.

Rather than concentrating all of a site's online marketing efforts into satisfy search engine listing requirements it may more advantageous to focus on directories and link exchanges. Listing with 1000 directories could open you up to more qualified traffic and keep you eligible for Google rankings. The advantage of directories is that they let your link be correctly categorized so that it is not a random link. In addition to directories, link exchanges with related content can also be made.

The end goal of directory and link exchange submissions is to generate enough qualified traffic that the benefits of a search engines ranking are surpassed. By keeping your directory listings and links relevant to your site content you would still qualify for a listing in search engines. Potentially then, this strategy can lead to the best of both worlds.

The long tail of directories and link exchange traffic justifies not focusing on search engines specifically. For the small web site owner, focus on getting inbound links then let the search engines find you.

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