Alert readers know about my pal April Moore, a writer from Colorado with a fascinating blog about condemned criminals: Folsom’s 93.

April recently dropped a guest post by yours truly about the prison smuggling technique known as keistering. What you’re imagining right now is probably accurate.

April and I learned something about SEO from that post. Her blog is getting a lot of traffic off of search engine queries for that word. Who knew so many people were interested enough in keistering to search for it?

Long-Tail SEO and In-Tail Smuggling

In truth, it’s not really that many…but also there aren’t that many websites with relevant content. It’a a supply and demand concept called long-tail SEO. Here’s how it works:

If you search for “pizza” or “Viagra,” you’ll be just one of millions of searches daily — and there will be hundreds or thousands of websites trying to  get a piece of that action.

If you search for your home address, you may be the only person doing it that day. You’ll come up with few websites, most of which will be directories pointing at your house.

Long-tail SEO is based on the middle ground. “Keistering” has a moderate number of searches, but no major chains offering services and advice. This means a website offering keistering-related goods and services (the goggles, they do nothing!) has a great chance of hitting Google’s top page.

It’s sort of like being a favorite local restaurant. Your potential client pool is small, but you do business with most of them.

Small businesses who blog will do well by finding long-tail SEO search terms relevant to what they do. A local burger joint won’t win with “hamburger” or “kids’ meal.” McDonald’s and Burger King have that cornered. But “local area fast food” or “school mascot special” will get a lot of bang for your blogging buck.

Just figured I’d share. Thanks for listening.