In doing SEO, which do you prioritize - the heads or the tails? No idea?

Let's start with search engine optimization for the 'long tail.' The concept refers to the extremely long right-hand portion of the distribution graph, usually of an online retailer's product inventory. The term was coined by the Executive Editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson. In comparison, the head occupies very little of the X-axis but is full of the "top hits" and best sellers. Put another way, the head represents the "vital few" and the tail represents the "trivial many."

Anderson argued that the tail could actually add up to as much business as the head for an online retailer with unlimited virtual shelf space and therefore seemingly infinite selection, as is the case for Amazon.com and Netflix.

How do you contrast the head from the tail?

Stephan Spencer, of Practical E-Commerce, has this to say: "When optimizing for the head, the home page and secondary level pages represent your best opportunity, because those are the pages most highly endowed with link juice (PageRank). Therefore, you'd focus your energies on optimizing these top-level pages first, targeting no more than three keyword themes per page. The more popular the head keywords are with searchers, the better. You'd place the targeted search term in the title tag, in the H1 tag, and high up in the body copy. You'd further reinforce that page's PageRank by building inbound links direct to that page and through your internal linking structure. With the internal links, you'd want to consistently incorporate the targeted keywords into the anchor text. With the inbound links, you would not always want the same anchor text, as that doesn't look natural."