Rand Fishkin has a post on his blog today that looks at the idea of long tail targeting and what he calls the "accidental" nature of the traffic that can come from it. It's an interesting way of looking at things, as you could easily argue that long tail traffic is probably a pretty good mix of "accidental" bonus traffic and of cunningly "earned" traffic to a well-developed content site.

From his post:

I see where he's going with this because a great deal of idea behind the long tail is that it's made up of the phrases that only ever get searched for once or twice. In other words, there's absolutely no way to research the phrases that fall within the long tail, thus, there's no way to write content that focuses on those phrases. Additionally, since the long tail is made up of literally millions of phrases, there's simply no possible way to target all of them.

On the other hand, search engine friendly copywriting is quickly moving away from focuses on things like keyword density as optimizers realize the value of the long tail. With more focus coming in to things like natural language patterns inspired by (instead of directed by) keyword research, I think that sites that purposely target the long tail do so via careful planning and writing. To me, that would make long tail traffic purposeful, not accidental.

The real value in Rand's post is the discussion that he's sparking over the ways to generate these content ideas. From being active in discussion forums to help spark post or article ideas to approaching the same topic from multiple angles, he does a good job of pointing out that proper long tail targeting comes from creative thinking, not from formulaic writing.