No matter how many pages your website has, it's too small. Ours has around 100 pages and it's way too small. Sound Crazy? Let me explain.

As we discussed in yesterday's post , you can really only optimize for one or two key words or phrases per page. This has been the best practice for a while but a late 2010 change in Google's search algorithm made it a necessity. If you try to optimize for too many phrases per page, you've optimized for none of them.

This puts you in quite a bind. How do you choose? You don't, you cheat. There is a phrase in statistics which smart internet marketers know well, it's called the long tail.

On the left are the terms EVERYONE fights over because they are the most popular. Terms like "Kindle books" "eBooks" etc. Those are such popular terms that having a high ranking in them can be worth a ton of money and whenever money is there to be made, there is no shortage of competition. 80% of total eBook related searches will boil down to a few terms which are fiercely contested. Does that mean you shouldn't waste your time going for them? NO! Absolutely go for them. An extremely small piece of a huge pie can still help you out.

The reason I showed you the graph though is so you can see that sweet, sweet long tail. The dumpster diving of the SEO world. As people tack on more words to their search queries, the results get more limited. 368,000 people type "eBooks" into Google each month. You know how many people type in "science fiction eBooks"? 480. There are literally thousands of terms out there like this. They are way too small to be noticed by the big boys on the block fighting for terms, which leaves them ripe for the likes of us to swoop in and capitalize.

You may be saying "So what, the numbers are so small who cares if you get them". Once again, look how LONG the tail is. Let's say you write science fiction books and you make a page on your site which is optimized for the term "science fiction eBooks". Since you did a good job optimizing and there isn't much competition, you make it to the middle of page one on Google results for that term. Let's say each month that page brings in 20 visitors. That may not seem like a big deal, and by itself it isn't. but remember, the tail is long and there are thousands of terms just like that one.

If every week you found a term, made a page and forgot about it, what would that get you in a year? Let's be conservative and say each page brings in 5 new visitors a month. If you made 52 of them in a year, that's 260 new visitors to your site each month from your efforts. Depending on how much traffic you currently get those numbers may excite you, or they may make you yawn. But now, in my best tv salesman voice, "WAIT! there's more!!". Think about what type of traffic those pages are going to bring in. You know what people who type in science fiction eBooks are looking for? Science fiction eBooks! If they go to Google and end up landing on the page you made (We call them landing pages for that very reason) and you're offering them sci fi eBooks, there's an extremely good chance their going to want your book. That is the goal right? You don't want a ton of visitors, you want a ton of readers.

There are a couple of caveats to this strategy. The first being, with all these pages won't you're site look horrible?? Not if you do it right.

I made a page yesterday targeting people looking for free young adult romance novels. Did you see it? I'm sure you didn't. It was a post just like this one, except I checked a tiny box at the bottom telling my site not to put it on the front page. If I post it to the front page every time I make one of these things, the site would look like a cluttered mess. Let me be 100% clear though, while you probably don't want these landing pages to play prominent roles in your sites design and user experience, EVERY PAGE ON YOUR SITE MUST LINK TO EVERY OTHER PAGE. Why? Because if you don't care enough to link to your own page, neither will Google, if they even find it. When Google see's your main page is linked to 10 other pages but not "those 20″, it won't care about "those 20″.

How do you link to 100 pages without sacrificing your site's layout? You stick them in the corner. Julia Crane's site is gorgeous, messing with that sites design would be a crime. So what does she do if she decides to try to capitalize on going after the long tail with a lot of landing pages? She probably sticks them in the corner like I do. On the right hand side of this site we have some ads, a banner with some of Lizzy's books a few links to other sites, etc. And then below that is a link to every post that we've ever made. We don't have that there thinking anyone is going to use it to navigate the site, that's what the buttons at the top and the search box is for. I set up my WordPress site to auto link every post in that box and put the box in the bottom right of every page. I never have have to worry about linking my pages, it's done for me.

Are you just hosed if you don't use WordPress? Are you going to have to add a link to every page every time you make a new one??? Not at all. There are several ways you could do it, the easiest would probably involve an iframe to one link page that you just updated. If your curious on how to do that and you want a techie how to article on the subject let me know and I'll add it to my list.

The last caveat for the landing page/long tail strategy is one I can't help you with, time. Is it worth your time to do this? Only you know. We have a pretty good division of labor here. Lizzy writes, and I worry about things like this. If you're an author and a one person operation, you have to seriously weigh the results of anything you do other then writing itself. If you have no books to sale, none of this really matters.

Even if you're not going to employ the strategies we've talked about here, they are worth keeping in the back of your head beacuse they influence decisions about how you create your blog or your website.