Any discussion of Blogging and Blogsites tends, eventually, to get round to mentioning that a key benefit of a Blog is the SEO advantages of Long Tail URLs.

What is a URL?

Well, first of all lets remember that the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address / location of the web page expressed like this:

http://www.bluefireblogs.com/get-a-blog/

This is an "address" you can type directly into the "Address Bar" of the browser  - and your browser will then open the page referenced.

What is a Long Tail?

The term "long tail" refers to a type of statistical distribution where the frequency of a result gets smaller and smaller until it gradually "tails off" to practically nothing.

In other words, in the context of considering traffic to a website, a few URLs are responsible for the vast amount of traffic to your site - whereas a much larger number of other URLs are responsible for a smaller and decreasing volume of traffic.

So when we refer to "Long Tail URLs", what we are referring to is the collection of URLs that do not attract many visitors  which are in the 'long tail' of  the graph that plots volume of traffic (popularity) by URL.

So What?

Well, it turns out that many "long tail URLs" happen to be very specific webpages.
For example, consider a blog post which has a web address like this:

http://blog.singlepropertysites.com/2009/12/add-sponsors-and-banner-ads-with-campaigns/

This is a very specific URL. It appears ranked highly (#2) in Google for the search term "sponsors banner ads campaigns" (a long-tail keyword term).

Anyone searching for these search terms has a very specific need indeed!
But, they will certainly find this page. And this is where the payback is.

Since long-tail keywords are much more specific than the shorter-tail keywords, the long tail keywords give us a greater opportunity to present extremely relevant information to the consumer, to keep them on our website and hopefully start to engage with them.

The Bottom Line

Long tail URLs can perform significantly better in terms of relative conversions! You can read a report on this effect here.

This is the power of a Blog: The articles that you write will contain many permutations and combinations of keywords, which will create many pages that are Long Tail URLs.

The conclusion is that Long Tail URLs give you an opportunity to engage motivated consumers and ultimately see higher conversion rates.