Most of us know the basics of long tail searches.  I am reminded of this every month when I am checking the statistics on my web sites and I see the wide variety of referring search phrases. On some of my sites, these search phrases are very narrowly defined.  Good for me - my content is on target. But the more varied your content, the more varied the resulting search phrases.

On one of my personal sites I write about anything and everything under the sun, whatever it might be.  One day it could be a rant about the local school board, the next it could be a commentary on a recent graphic novel.  I'm all over the place.  It's MY site.  No commercial intent whatsoever.  Not even a block of Adsense. It is also a neglected site.  I only post to it periodically.  And, out of frustration, I abandoned a rather striking design and reverted to whatever standard ugly template ships with MovableType.

However, this month I discovered that, completely inadvertently, one of my pages is ranking in the #1  or #2 position for what I would consider a fairly desirable commercial term (along the lines of:  St. Louis jewelers). This is the result of a strange joining of words in my website that I didn't intend to mean what I believe the searchers are looking for. I probably won't do anything with this, but the opportunity is there.  Whether I wanted to place ads on the page as it is or 301 it to something a little more commercial, there are definitely options available to me.

None of this would have been possible if it weren't for just regular run-of-the-mill content. I wasn't writing for a search engine.  I wasn't worried about keyword density - or even keywords at all.  I was just writing about something in the news that reminded me of a Batman storyline.  Combine that with some other phrases on my blog and I'm getting a huge amount of unintended traffic. I almost feel an obligation to the people the search engines are sending my way.  If nothing else, I should at least list some alternate sites where they might find what they are looking for.

I've had the same thing happen on other sites where all I did was post industry-related press releases.  No editing on my part.  Just press release after press release.  Occasionally, once every 10 entries or so, I'd link to some relevant article in a newspaper.  But other than that - I did nothing. (I wasn't doing anything nefarious - I was just seeding the site hoping to get it indexed and out of the sandbox for when I was ready for it.) Because of duplicate content issues and the like - I was sure this wouldn't result in anything.  But I was wrong again.

Search engines love content and they'll return it when a search is done for some klunky but relevant phrase. As a result, long tail searches outnumber narrower searches all day long.

And my traffic has grown accordingly.