A guest post on the Hitwise blog by search engine optimizer / analyst Dustin Woodward, suggests that the long tail of search might be much longer than most of us expected.

Woodard evaluated a data set of search terms used in the last three months, and found that the top 1,000 search terms only accounted for about 10 percent of all search traffic.

Indeed, the Hitwise’s top 100 search terms account for just 5.7 percent of all search traffic, while the top 1,000 search terms only account for 10.6% of all search traffic. Even the top 10,000 search terms drive just 18.5 percent of all search traffic.

What does this mean for Internet marketers? Well, it does NOT mean you should try to optimize your site for all those long tail keywords. Together they may account for a lot of searches, but if anything, Woodard’s analysis confirms the fact that long tail terms are infrequently searched on i.e. they are likely to be ‘one-offs’.

There may still be opportunities to pick up traffic for such one-offs, but trying to target such keywords is unlikely to pay off – simply because such words are unlikely to be searched on next month.

So it still pays to optimize for the most popular, relevant keywords you can afford to target. And if you want to be creative, think into the future rather than the past. In other words, instead of targeting last month’s long tail keywords, think about what keywords you think will become popular, based on trends in your market or industry.

Source: Frederic Lardinois, “Hitwise: The Long Tail of Search is Much Longer Than Expected”, ReadWriteWeb, November 7, 2008