Post providing 103bees users with some background info on our ‘Long Tail’ graphs and statistics.
A small lesson in math to begin with: The ‘Power Law’ is a simple relationship between two scalar quantities x and y:
When plotted on a graph for some negative constant k, you get curves that look like this:
This kind of curve is called ‘Power curve’ and it describes a lot of natural (and virtual) phenomenas such as wealth distribution in societies, book sales numbers or - here it is - website and search term popularity. Basically, distributions that follow the power law are all about ‘a few get tons of xyz, while most get next to nothing’.
Looking at the chart above, it’s easy to spot the ‘Short Head’ and the ‘Long Tail’ part of the curve. The Short Head is the home of blockbuster movies, hit songs, celebrities, a-list blogs and so forth, while the Long Tail is where the niches are. The ‘Long Tail’ of search stands for the countless keyword combinations that are not often used in web search, but in sum account for a whole lot of search traffic.
When drawn using logarithmic scales, power curves become straight lines:
This is important to know, for it will help you analyze the structure of your website’s search traffic.