This is a best practices type of thread for building your ranking on long-tail queries for large sites. Imagine, for instance, you are some travel aggregator (Orbitz, etc) and have lots of pages for hotels. You can't really optimize for perhaps hundreds of thousands of hotel pages and even more queries. However, you maybe do happen to know that queries on Google are of the form "X hotel", "Y lodge", "Z Inn". Can you build authority for terms like "hotel", "lodge", "inn" in the long-tail? If so, what do you think are the best practices to do so?
I think you should look at travel aggregators like Orbitz, etc. and look at the way they are doing things and using keywords. The enormous amount of content they use/aggregate probably helps with rankings as well.
I don't know that the travel aggregators, such as Orbitz, are doing this well necessarily. There are many such aggregators in various spaces. I'm more wondering if anyone has put thought into long-tail SEO and cultivation of authority around certain terms. I can imagine on-page optimization is key, but I'm more wondering about off page stuff. What strategies do you think are best?