The long tail of search engine rankings is ranking for terms which usually have a few words in them, have little traffic for them but are easy to rank for. The more content you have on a website, the more chance you have to rank for these 'obscure' keywords and gain traffic via Search Engines for them. Sites that allow user generated content for this tend to work the best; for example, group blogs and forums can create literally thousands upon thousands of pages of content, spelling mistakes, and unique discussions and topics that are just begging to be searched for by someone. 

So what's so fun about long tail?

There are so many reasons the long tail is the fun tail, and here are a few:

• Testing ~ I love to test, that's what I do most of the time spare that I have from ViperChill. If you don't test, you don't learn things for yourself. You have to take things into a new niche from time to time.
• Income ~ SEO clients want better rankings for a reason, and it can be no different on your own sites. That extra traffic means extra potential income.
• Learning ~ Although testing is kind of learning, testing is just part of it. You learn what kind of rankings bring what kind of income and what kind of traffic. I've ranked no.1 for the most popular proxy terms, apparently non-searched for terms and some obscure terms you would never think people search for. You begin to underestimate those keyword tools out there and judge things yourself for you and your clients.

Examples, Please!

I personally find that people learn better with examples, so OK I'll post some. I spent a month in the proxy industry last month, earned about $400, then sold most of the network for $1100. I focused on ranking for popular proxy terms, yet it seems that people aren't happy with mid-traffic rankings. Take a look at this Wordtracker result.  It was only showing 665, so obviously it looks like the market has increased, but I ranked no.2 for that in 3 days. That is not exactly a long tail keyword, but it is in essence because theres barely any competition--I only had a title tag, and I earned $80 in the first week thanks to that initial ranking then more as it continued. Oh, don't worry, this isn't to brag about earnings, they are relatively small. It's just to show that if you get out there and Test, Learn and Tweak, it's easy to increase your income. Apart from the small financial gain, I have learned so much from testing in a new industry.

It's fun looking for terms that you can rank for, get traffic from, and earn from just as quickly as you can get indexed. Go and rank for "facebook proxy," trust me. There are so many keywords and key phrases out there that nobody hadstaken advantage of, but it won't last forever. This is something I like to do when affiliate marketing as well, but that's another blog post. ;)