Along with many other revolutionary ideas of business, the web is now destroying the concept of the retail 80/20 - the statistic that says that 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your inventory (the most popular 20%). On the web, however, this is proving to be a complete misconception, forcing retailers to re-think their models both on and offline.

In the world of web search, this can be translated to popular vs. obscure keywords. When you scan your statistics tracking, you'll find that (if you're ranking well organically, rather than just for PPC terms) your logs show an equal amount of visitors from your top 20-50 terms as they do for the other 500-10,000 terms that people use to find your website only 1-3 times each month. This is called "the long tail" of search.

How should SEOs approach this?
If you have a website that ranks well organically in the engines, it's time to start building up the content pages to get traffic from those thousands of unique searches. You'll find that just adding 1-3 pages of new content (in the form of a weblog or article system) will drastically increase your traffic over the long run as those pages continue to get visitors from obscure web searches. The key is to get big now, so that another site in your niche doesn't monopolize the opportunities in your sector.