What is a Long Tail Title

We are all familiar with many types of tails; fairy tales, puppy tails, and of course those cute little bunny tails. But, today we will only discuss "Long Tail Titles" for the purpose of writing and marketing online; however, keep in mind as you see by the picture I have chosen for this article, having an interesting image is a very good idea when trying to grab a readers attention! Once you have the best image in place, you have taken your first step towards a great Long Tail Title and overall optimization of your work.

Knowing just how important your HubPages title is and how it motivates customers to pick your hub over another is one of the most valuable aspects to writing online. Like writing anywhere else online, coming up with the right Long Tail Title is an art. Knowing what a Long Tail Title consist of will help you create titles that will bring customers to your articles, find customers that are looking for your niche topic, and welcome customers who have been hiding among the search engines seemingly neglected searches.

Defining the Long Tail idea:

"Long Tail" is in reference to the marketing strategy that purposely works with the profit possibilities of those items that are not by themselves popular, but when combined together, make-up profit that can compete with the most popular, or top selling individual items. Long Tail is most commonly known as the "niche" market.

The actual words "Long Tail" refer to the Long Tail look of a graph when measuring the frequency of distribution of products. The most popular 20% of a company's items usually make up far more than 20% of its sales. While the least popular items, the bottom 80%, when combined together, can create just as much in sales as its top 20%. In businesses like online money making ventures where overhead is very low and warehousing a product is not required, this bottom 80%—measuring in the Long Tail of the graph—gets marketed making for significant profits, and bumping up the number of digits found in your bottom line.

If you don't take the time to understand Long Tail techniques, you may find you are actually handicapping your really amazing hubs. When you are thumbing through waiting room magazines at the hair salon or tune-up shop, you get drawn-in by the snappy titles that trigger your curiosity. While the magazine title has done its job of getting you to read the article, while working perfectly for magazine marketing purposes, this type of title has proven to be the demise of many great HubPages Hubs. This snappy magazine title approach fails time after time for searchable online terms.

A perfect example of causing the demise of great hubs is this; I was having difficulties getting found with search terms. It was brought to my attention (thank you Simone Smith of HubPages fame) that I had great magazine titles, but they were not helping me to be found online by search terms, or keywords. My hubs have great content, high word count and nice layouts, but the titles were killing me. Simone suggested I take a peek at the HubCamp section of the HubPages Learning Center. So I did, and it is outstanding! I found videos, great teaching by HubPages CEO and First Lady, a clear breakdown of how to achieve a really good hub title, finding good long tail words and so much more. I've been on HubPages for about 8 months. Since I took the the time to learn and apply the techniques taught in the HubCamp Tutorials, my hubs have been read over a quarter of a million times (266,155 as of Feb 3, 2011, to be exact) in my 8 month HubPages stint. This may not seem like much for HubPages long term writers, but for me, a newbie to the community, it is a huge amount of growth!

Below is an example to detail exactly what I am talking about:

Magazine style Title

Vegetarian Appetizers, Rockin' The Green In Your Diet - While this title is intriguing and may get someone to read the magazine article, it isn't really something someone would type in as a search term. You may get some hits from the "vegetarian appetizer" portion of your title, but then who is looking for "Rocking the Green in Your Diet?" This title is too broad for a searcher to get to you in one-quick-click. If your searcher wants to make an easy vegetarian stuffed mushroom recipe, they are going to miss your hub all together, even if you do have the best recipe for stuffed mushrooms.

On the other hand...

Vegetarian Stuffed Mushrooms

Originally I wrote this Vegetarian stuffed mushroom hub with a title similar to a magazine style title, Vegetarian Appetizers as Meals. With this title the hub was found when searched for a total of 187 times over a lengthy period (published over 6 month ago) and was read mostly by the HubPages community (which speaks volumes as to how awesome this community really is). Once I changed to the long tail title, searcher's were able to find my article by inputting what they were searching for, in several different ways. The search terms below are from my hub that has the title revised for long tail niche marketing, and shows the actual search terms found within the hub status tool. These are the terms used to find information on stuffed mushrooms, allowing my hub to get found over 1230 times (and climbing pretty quickly since the title revision).

Summing it up for you, the original title was found 187 times over 6 months, while the new revised Long Tail Title has already been found 1230 times. You just can't argue with the effectiveness of having a good long Tail title.

No modification have been made to these terms. They are exactly as they appear in the HubPages statistics windows for the "Vegetarian Stuffed Mushrooms" hub.

• stuffed mushrooms vegetarian
• healthy vegetarian stuffed mushrooms
• vegetarian stuffed mushrooms main course
• vegetarian stuffe mushroom
• the best vegetarian stuffed mushrooms
• simple stuffed mushrooms veg
• vegetarian spicy stuffed mushroom recipe
• how to cook healthy stuffed mushroom
• easy stuffed vegetarian mushrooms
• easy stuffed mushrooms recipe healthy
• bean vegetable stuffed mushrooms

When you look at the long tail graph located at the beginning of this article, you will see that a notation has been made in green which makes it pretty clear, the further out on the Long Tail you get, the higher the probability to convert your searcher into a buying customer becomes. Here's how this works;

Most stores, in the real world, can only carry and stock a certain number of items, usually the most popular items (top 20%), because of real space restrictions; they only have so many shelves and rows to display products. This means that the unpopular products (80%) get passed over and are not marketed effectively, if at all. But, in our world of never-ending virtual space, we can advertise this larger portion and more defined group of items (niche market) without constraints. Detailing and dialing-in each individual niche item to fit the searcher's narrow needs. Let's take this idea one step further and think of it this way:

WalMart carries several bikes. But even WalMart can't carry them all. They can only handle so many bikes because of space availability. So they will carry the top 20% or the popular bikes, because these tend to sell quickly and thus make room for more of the even newer popular bikes. However, if you are a customer who wants to find a woman's Raleigh mountain bike that is also white, WalMart may not have this particular bike in stock, because this bike may not be in the top 20% of the popular items. So, what does this customer do? You guest it, she goes online and searches for a "woman's white Raleigh mountain bike". Where does she find it? On your hub that is titled "Women's White Raleigh Mountain Bikes." Because your title is way out there on the Long Tail graph, it allows you to capture the searcher of the less popular bike. No way!

What you have actually managed to captured is the searcher who knows exactly what she wants, and you have it right there for her to buy on your perfectly Long Tail titled hub! You have converted this niche searcher into a real long tail buying customer.

To conclude this Long Tail Title article, I will stress my point. Before you write another hub, go to the HubPages Learning center and watch the video's from the HubCamp that teach on the Long Tail advantage. I am certain you will find as many helpful techniques as I have. After learning the Long Tail skills, and putting them into practice, sit back and watch your hubs sore to the front page of the Google search engine. It is likely to be the best HubPages tutorial you will encounter. It's easy to understand, it is clearly defined, and it is full of the most up-to-date SEO tips and advice.

NOW GO GET LEARNING!

^{Image of long tailed critter compliments of bootsintheoven.com}

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