Derek Semmler dot com - money, motorcycles and cars (with a little bit of everything else)

Many bloggers spend a considerable amount of time analyzing their website traffic and statistics in an effort to learn what works and doesn’t work in terms of SEO and reader enjoyment.

One of the tools that I use in that process is HitTail, which helps me analyze the more obscure keywords that readers have used to find their way to my site. The process of reviewing the keywords that are bringing readers to your site can provide valuable insight into terms that you may wish to highlight on your site.

Long Tail
These obscure keywords are often referred to as the long tail, which is essentially the concept that the cumulative demand for obscure or less popular items can exceed all of the most popular items added together.

Photo Courtesy of HitTail.com

In terms of your website, the long tail would be the less common keywords that readers have used to navigate to your website via one of the search engines. The power of the long tail is that you can tailor new posts or pages to take advantage of those keywords in an attempt to maximize your exposure.

Unique Results
Given that I am addicted (according to my wife) to blogging, I am regularly checking my long tail results with HitTail. It is really interesting to examine the popular keywords and phrases that bring readers to my blogs. For the most part, the terms are relative to the theme of the content on the site.

However, every now and then you will see an off-the-wall long tail keyword pop up in your results. Recently I have had one very odd (disturbing even) phrase appear for my personal finance blog and one for this site that I found somewhat humorous given my list of obsessions.

So, you’re probably wondering what the terms were that I found to be humorous as well as odd/disturbing. Okay, be honest, you really only want to know the disturbing phrase but I am going to share both with you.

obsessed with cheese
Yes, someone found their way to Derek Semmler dot com by searching for an obsession with cheese. To me this is quite humorous given that I had listed cheese as one of my obsessions but never did I think that other people would actually be searching for that phrase. I guess that just goes to show you that you never really know how people will find your site.

Now, on to the somewhat disturbing long tail result…

bang mywife while I help
When I first saw that phrase in my HitTail results, I nearly fell off of my chair and wondered what in the world I would have had on my site that would show up in the search results.

Imagine my amazement when I navigated to the search query and discovered that my site was #3 on the first page of more than 1 million results for that phrase!

While I was happy to see that my post rated so highly out of that many search results, it was still quite shocking to see that someone found their way to my site using that phrase.

Fun With Long Tail
Now I would like to turn things over to you in order to find out what is the most unique long tail search result that you have seen used to find your site.

I’m looking forward to seeing the most unique long tail search results so get yours added now. I’ve got an idea for a little reward to the most unique long tail result that I will elaborate on in another post.

Until then start sharing those long tails!