Repeated searches vs unique searches (long tail?)

[Atharva]

Going through some analysis of a medium traffic website. (around 2k unique visitors a day) i found the following for google searches

For a daily search out of 800 diff keywords only arnd 150 were repeated, rest of the 650 keywords were unique. Can this be called the long tail?

What would you recommend to make best use of this unique keyword.

[tedster]

Yes, it sounds like the long tail.

What I do is notice the terms and make sure that the page they are going to is a good target page for that term. Sometimes I beef up the content so that the visitor has a better chance of apprectiating the page and converting. Sometimes I create a new page or even set of pages dedicated to a particularly relevant long tail term - and then link to it from the page that is ranking.

And sometimes, the search is so unique that there's not likely to be any additional traffic on it - so I do nothing.

[BradleyT]

I would figure out what the mid-tail or head is for groups of those long tail phrases and target those terms - although you may already be doing that.

Edit to add - target those terms on new pages with links from the page that's already ranking for long tail.

[edited by: BradleyT at 5:43 pm (utc) on Oct. 2, 2008]