We at FindLaw stress that "Content is King" and when written properly allows you to be found for a variety of search terms. This is the essence and power of the long-tail search terms. To be brief, long tail is the description of the graphical representation of of frequency vs. search term. The graph has a very long tail as a result of the unique terms that dominate. It goes on ad nauseum.

I generated the graph on the left using real keyword data combined from two successful personal injury websites. There were over 25,000 different keyword combination searches used to get to these sites - as you can see, the list has a very very long tail (I only included the first 1000 in the graph).

• The top 100 keyword terms were 9.7% of the total.
• The top 10 were 4.3% of the total.

Clearly, the value is not concentrated at the left side of the graph.

Bill Tancer of Hitwise (an Experian Company) has published some similar results on his blog pertaining to general searches (not legal specific) that show the long tail.

The analysis:

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

Another development reported is that the use of longer search terms is on the rise -
Four-word queries are up 12% since 2007, and five-word queries are up 16%.

So what would you want your website to capture? "Personal injury attorney los angeles" or "child injured on backyard swing need lawyer in santa clarita" Of course, both would be best.