I came across an interesting and highly relevant article on MSNBC.com on Wednesday entitled “Grab Customers with Long-Tail Keywords.” Its application to the class merely based on the headline alone should be obvious: in our discussion on the distribution of popularity in networks we devoted a class to referencing the long tail phenomenon. This is the observation that media industry sales in the new millennium are now mostly generated by a huge variety of items that individually are less popular, rather than by a handful of highly popular albums, movies, books, etc.  In other words, in these days of file sharing and online media/recommendation services, it is the niche market—not the blockbuster market—that now dominates the industry.

Media executives know this, and the point of this article is that web designers should be aware of the phenomenon as well, and act accordingly. How? By targeting “long-tail keywords”,  searches that are highly specific (more than four words long, for example, ‘ honeymoon locales Caribbean affordable’ as opposed to just ‘honeymoon locales’), and tailoring the content of websites towards attracting these more precise searches. There are a couple of reasons that author Derek Gehl provides for why individuals and businesses should use this approach. For one, long-tail searches yield fewer results, so it is easier for your webpage to show up among the top websites. Two, people tend to use long-tail keywords when they’re closer to making a purchase, which will obviously pay more dividends for websites dealing with e-commerce.

Gehl then delves into three methods for improving website traffic, but the end of the article isn’t as relevant as the first part, which introduces the concept of the long-tail keyword and explains why it is important to pay attention to. I think it’s valuable to consider the points made about long-tail keywords in light of the question of whether or not search engines are making the rich-get-richer dynamics of popularity more extreme. I believe Gehl would argue that, in this case, tailoring websites to the long tail would make the rich-get-richer dynamic less extreme, as it allows for more “niche” websites to rise in popularity, evening out the playing field.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30477237/