Off the Page talks about Pinterest & The Long Tail

We hope you enjoy this newsletter. If you don't please feel free to unsubscribe.

Hi *|MERGE1|*,

Spring is here! It's time for spring cleaning - not only in your home, but on your website. It's a good idea to check your links on your website once in a while.

Often times when a site gets redone or updated, pages get renamed, moved, or if an article is old it gets archived. It's very frustrating to click on a link and not have it go anywhere.

W3C offers a free link checker. Just paste in the url of the page you want to check and click 'check'. It will let you know if you have any broken links on the page. It's faster than clicking each link if you have multiple links on a page. Here's the address: http://validator.w3.org/checklink

The Latest Craze

Pinterest

Pinterest is a virtual bulletin board.Lets say that you've decided to redecorate your living room, but you're not sure what you should do. You can go online and surf to see if you can find some ideas. When you come across an image you like and it has a 'Pinterest' button, you can pin it to your bulletin board. All these images will be saved to your 'redecorating' bulletin board as images. These images all contain links back to the original site, so if you decide you want to go order that lamp you spotted earlier, you don't have to remember where it came from.

Pinterest has many great uses such as planning a wedding, creating a recipe book, getting ideas for crafts, baby shower planning, kids activities, etc. The ideas are limitless.

You can share your bulletin boards, follow someone elses bulletins, comment on ideas, and connect with others by sharing your pin on facebook or twitter. You can browse other bulletin boards to get ideas and repin to your own bulletin board.

Pinterest is by invitation only. You can get started by going to their website and requesting an invitation http://pinterest.com/. Adding the pinterest button to your website is just a matter of generating the code, and then adding the code where you want the button to appear. http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/.

Check out the site to see how everyone else is using it http://pinterest.com/. I've gotten some great ideas and recipes just by looking!

SEM Tip #8

The Long Tail

Since I spend a fair amount of time reading articles about SEO, one topic I rarely mention is what's referred to as the "Long Tail". Mainly because there are several different views on what it actually means. In short, the long tail is a specific keyword phrase consisting of more than 3 words that carries low search volume, but offers high rewards.

Let's say you offer "LCD TV's" for sale. To rank at the top of the search engines for this 2 word phrase would probably take a long time, and cost more money than you might make from selling the tv's to begin with. A more realistic strategy would be target the user while he/she is closing in on their purchase.

A typical seacher will narrow their search down to knowing they want an LCD TV, at least 46" in dimension, 1080p display, 120Hz, and manufactured by Sony. So the user might use the search phrase "Sony 1080p LCD TV 46 inch 120Hz".

So now if you've read my previous articles (particularly the one on "Content is King") It would make sense that the key to rank well for this phrase would be to have the words I just mentioned listed on your websites page that features this TV for sale. The search engines can only index your page for words that actually appear on them. While we're at it, lets add the model number to this web page along with "HDMI", because the next searcher might use "Sony KDL46BX450 TV 46 inch with 2 HDMI inputs".

You never know what people will search for, so the more specific you get, the better the chance of someone landing on your site!