Even My Cats Chase the Long Tail

Web Piecats Mittens and Scooter practice their long tail skills.

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The long tail “refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a “normal” or Gaussian distribution,” according to Wikipedia. Mittens thought that definition was completely incomprehensible. I believe his exact response was “Whaaaaat?”

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Basically, the long tail of search refers to the concept that a very few very large keyword phrases (the head) will each drive a very large amount of traffic, while a very large number of phrases will each drive a very small amount of traffic (the tail). When a site is optimized for the long tail, the total volume of search traffic driven by those many phrases that each drive a couple of visits a month (the long tail) can be larger than the volume of traffic driven by the few big trophy terms that each drive high volumes of traffic (the head).

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While it’s likely Mittens understood my explanation about the long tail, the only long tail he cared about was on his mousie. And Scooter had long since gotten bored and left to take a nap.


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Purina’s “We Are Cat People” Campaign the Cat’s Meow

Purina Cat Chow tapped into both my love for my cats and my vanity with it’s “We Are Cat People” Twitter campaign. That’s a potent combination! They invited people to tweet the reasons why they are cat people, and selected some of those tweets to appear in Times Square. That was pretty neat already, but I was surprised to see that they also took a photo of the billboard and tweeted it back to the submitter. Now THAT is a recipe for increasing engagement! Here’s how it looked:


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Link Stalking the Web Piecat Way [LOLcat SEO]

OK, so this isn’t link stalking, it’s a battle over a box. Cats love boxes. Cricket controls the box, but Mittens is definitely interested in acquiring the box for his own uses. And because he’s aggressive, Mittens does indeed become king of the box.

Link stalking is much the same. It’s about determining which links your competitors have that you might fancy having yourself. Unlike Mittens, your reign will not usually be supreme — the typical successful result is that both you and your competitor now have similar links. If this is the only tactic in your link building arsenal, you’ll likely get closer to your competitors’ results but this alone will not beat your competitor. That’s not surprising since there is no single SEO tactic that will beat your competitor, but it’s worth repeating anyway.

Learn more about the link stalking by reading “Link Stalking with Link Diagnosis.”

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Competitive Research, the Web Piecat Way [LOLcat SEO]

Cricket the Web Piecat spying on the competitionCricket, the most neurotic of the Web Piecats, is not hiding. No, she’s spying, and was none too pleased that I was jeopardizing her cover. I tried to tell her that there are much more effective ways to conduct competitive research for organic search, but she wanted to do it her way.

Here are a couple of effective and free ways to spy on your competitors’ SEO tactics, all of which work much better than hiding under paper packing paper:

  • How about looking at their site for starters, silly kitty. What keywords are they targeting in the title tags and navigation?
  • Crawl their site to collect all the title tags and linking patterns quickly. See 8 SEO Reasons to Crawl Your Sites for more on using crawlers for SEO.
  • Check out SpyFu.com to see what terms they’re bidding on and winning in paid and organic search.
  • Scope their link portfolio with tools like Link Diagnosis or Open Site Explorer.

Like this LOL? Vote it up at http://cheezburger.com/jillkocher/lolz/View/5423868928.


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.