There is a lot of buzz about the "search long tail". You might also have heard it called the "search tail", "keyword tail", or simply "long tail". Here is:

• a nutshell introduction to this phenomenon,
• a summary of why it is important to your forum success, and
• a summary how the positive benefits are magnified by vBSEO

The concept of the "long tail" was popularized in 2004 in a Wired magazine article by Chris Anderson, and subsequent book title called "The Long Tail - Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More".

The book investigated how large online vendors (like Amazon, Netflix, or eBay) with huge selections of products, are actually generating the bulk of their sales from the total combined sales of less popular items... instead of just selling a huge amount of only their most popular products.

That means selling a few copies each of thousands of different items, adds up to many thousands of sales.

For forums that equals getting a few visitors for each page for thousands of different pages, adds up to a huge amount of traffic!

Forums are perfect habitats for the long tail species. This is because of "user generated content".

As your forum grows, your members create all of the content. Over time, the content grows and many thousands of different keyword variations are discussed.

So the content is covered. The only question is, how you can help encourage the long tail effect?

Fortunately the solution is quite simple: You must optimize every page of your forum individually only for the keywords it contains.

The idea is to try to get ranked for many terms that will deliver a small amount of traffic each. If you focus solely on your top 5-10 keywords, and optimize each page for these terms, you will NOT achieve long tail results. Not only that, you're unlikely to have success with search engine traffic at all.

vBSEO provides the solution you need for long tail results. Our software instantly optimizes every page on your forum individually.

The result is striking. Install vBSEO and you will notice that your traffic will begin to grow. However, check out the # of different keywords that are behind that traffic growth. You will find the number of keywords will start to grow each month!

Discuss long tail search here:
http://www.vbseo.com/f4/how-long-you...ng-tail-22108/