So you want your website to show up in as many different searches as possible.  That is of course ideal but not realistic.  Yoru website will not show up in every search being done.  What is realistic is if you have a well optimized site, your site will show up for the thousands of very specific and unique phrases that people actually looking for a lawyer will use.  For example, someone looking for a Personal Injury attorney might use the vanity phrase "personal injury attorney" and this particular phrase might get a lot of uses but more often used will be these long tail searches or phrases like "back injury while driving work truck in denver".  Now this particular phrase might only get used once but guess what, there are going to be a far greater number of those one off long tail searches than the vanity phrases being used.  Not only that but when someone is using such a specific phrase they most likely have a very real issue that needs an attorneys help.  So while it is great to show up in when someone uses a vanity phrase it is also very important that your site shows up on the long tail searches.

Let’s take a closer look. Who do you think is further along in the hiring process, the person who searches for:

“Personal Injury Attorney”

Or the person who searches for:

“neck injury work related denver”

My guess it would be number two – he seems to have a pretty good idea of what he wants and now just needs to find the right attorney to hire.

You see the flaw with traditional SEO is that the really good keyphrases, the long tail key phrases, really didn’t exist. When you’re optimizing a webpage for a specific keyphrase – like say “Children’s Sunglasses”, you’re trying to keep the page extremely focused on that particular phrase, so you consciously avoid straying from the focus of the page. In other words, those great long tail key phrases simply don’t make it to your page. Remember, in this scenario, the old-school process of SEO is the brick and mortar record shop – you know the one with the severely limited amount of shelf space –that can only house the most popular records –the records that everyone wants. Well the “records” in this case are the key phrases; traditional SEO can only fit so many key phrases on their shelves (the web pages).

So what changed? What caused the Long Tail of SEO? Well, people started blogging! A blog by definition is kind of an anti-SEO environment. You see, the blog is designed to give anyone who wants to, the ability to publish on the web. With the advent of the blog, anyone who had something to say (or thought they did), could start publishing, quickly and cheaply. These new publishers gave no thought to SEO (many wouldn’t even have known what it was) – they’d simply say what the wanted to say, the way the wanted to say it. So now, all the richness of language that the old-school SEO’ers had squeezed out of the internet was now being dumped back in and the search engines devoured it. Suddenly these web sites started showing up in the SERPs – for those long tail keyphrases that no one was optimizing for.