The term "Long tail" was originally coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 post on Wired. Essentially "Long tail" is the theory that the collective sales of low demand products/services can exceed those of popular demand. The term has taken off in Search Engine Optimization circles with regards to unpopular or lengthy keyword phrases. The old 80/20 rule which states 80% of the business can be obtained from 20% of keywords has actually been proven to be the opposite in many cases. Below is Chris's chart which helps to understand the importance of long tail in the marketplace.
A recent client of ours www.oopermits.com is a prime example of the long tail theory. This is a startup company who's Website became active in early July, and in just under 3 months of operation has had 320 different keywords/phrases utilized to find their Website. I calculated the total number of hits they received from keywords that resulted in more than 1 visitor to the site (short tail visits) vs. those keywords that only brought 1 visitor to the site (long tail visits).
64 Short tail visitors vs. 256 Long Tail visitors As you can clearly see the Long Tails ended up kicking some tail. I usually play devil's advocate and would argue that this example is on a new site, covers a short period of time, and is based upon a single specific site within a niche industry. Sure I'm aware of all this; but it doesn't change the facts that 20% of OOPS's traffic came from short tail and 80% came from long tail.
In short (sorry for the pun), don't forget that while targeting your short tail keywords that long tail keywords can actually be more effective in gathering traffic, conversions, and are easier to rank for in most cases.
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