Makaveli2007 - 1:12 am on Jul 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

Everybody is saying optimize for the long-tail b/c less competitive and higher conversion rates. Sounds great.

However, I've also heard (from a web analytics perspective) that the main 15-20 keywords bring in most of the traffic (ok 15-20 probably contains a couple of long-tail searches).

What I'm wondering is this:

Say a build a website on how to learn Widgets and want to focus on the keywords "learn Widgets" and "Widget language". Or well not focus on them, but that's where I want to start and go into long-tail keywords (the top of my "keyword pyramide")..as obviously trying to rank for a term such as "Spanish" would be hard and probably not yield great conversions.

Would you expect that if the site is in the top 10 for those 2 phrases that all other long-tail phrases combined would far outnumber these 2 keywords?

I'm wondering if this is different from keyword to keyword. I assume for a field such as "Widget language" or "learn Spanish" there might be a disproportionally high number of long-tail searches, whereas for another field a few main keywords might get most of the traffic.

What do you guys think about this? How many percent of searches will usually come from all the long-tail searches combined in comparison to say the 2 main keyword phrases - do they usually outnumber them?

And does it differ a lot depending on the field/keywords?

[edited by: mona at 2:15 pm (utc) on July 11, 2007]
[edit reason] no specific kws - thx! [/edit]