BlogKing December 23rd, 2007
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SEOMoz.com has a funny post about unusual long tail terms that have resulted in hits to their site.
My favorites are:
How to read minds - as if Google could tell the answers to that.
Better than google - as if Google would tell the answers to that.
How does google see my site - Yes, as a outlet for Adsense ads of course.
Now, some gems from my own site:
Blog nightmare - really my site isn’t that bad is it? I can explain. I posted about this cartoon by Dilbert.
First time buyers picky picky - almost like a James Bond movie from the 60’s
Close encounters of third kind sound bites - well, I know blogging is alien to some people but come on, it doesn’t bite. It is strictly vegetarian. : )
BlogKing August 18th, 2007
This recent post by Mike Levin at HitTail really nails why you need to be using this long tail SEO tool.
One of the amazing trends I’ve discovered in watching the HitTail discussion on the Internet is how Google Analytics and HitTail so often get invoked in the same breath, such as comments from The-Secret and shopgirl.
While Google analytics is statistics, which gives you the typical top-10 lists, HitTail is on the other hand, based on anecdotal and empirical evidence –working much like a private eye piecing together clues. Recently, I was slammed by a HitTail user accusing us of not really being a longtail tool, because we stop 350 keywords in, and the long tail hardly even starts at that point. I humbly reminded him that the “My HitTail” tab was only one of five –and actually the least-important one at that.
That’s right!
We only made that long tail graph to demonstrate to people how things JUST START TO GET INTERESTING in the tail, and how much attention is improperly spent on the head, where you’re already performing well! So, I added some text to the bottom of the chart to make sure people get the subtle message of how the data displayed in the chart is actually UNIMPORTANT!
The fact that we’re not Web analytics software, applying statistics to the data is what makes people so addicted to HitTail. We’re not insulating you from the data or interpreting it for you. We’re merely zeroing in on serendipitous events that happen to be handing over competitive intelligence. It’s not some derivative of this event that’s important. It’s the event itself–that someone found your site on such-and-such a term, but they worked really hard to find you–usually deep in the results.
This tells you two things:
- You CAN be found on that term. Hence, the value of identifying the first time anyone ever found your site on a particular term. It demonstrates POTENTIAL–like surveying for new oil fields.
- There’s a bunch of crap ahead of you in the search results that likely did not satisfy the searcher, or else they would have stopped sooner.
So, merely by virtue of using HitTail, you’re simultaneously surveying for new fields of website traffic “oil”, and you’re verifying that no one already has a strong claim to that property. There’s no waiting for the polar icecaps to melt to claim your Internet gold. You don’t have to battle Russia, Canada, the U.S. and Denmark for North Pole natural resource rights. All you have to do is choose an already-search-optimized publishing platform, such as Blogger, SquareSpace, TypePad or WordPress, and take HitTail’s writing suggestions.
It’s that easy.
BlogKing May 17th, 2007
Acording to James Lamberti of comScore, AOL gets the highest percentage of paid clicks at 24%, followed by Google at 13%, Yahoo at 11%, and MSN at 8%.
From this basic data, a high ranking for any given query in Google is worth roughly four times that of a visible AdWord link for the same query. Stated another way –
You have to show four PPC links to create click-through opportunities equal to one organic ranking.
Imagine you were trying to decide where to spend your online marketing budget – do you spend 100% of it on a PPC campaign (arguably predictable, more measurable, and guaranteed) or do you balance it with alternative SEO expenditures to create organic results.
Imagine though you could create tens of thousands of unique key phrases that rank organically high. Could you achieve the same in a PPC campaing? Probably not, and if you could, what would be the true cost of such a plan?
Blogs tend to create tremendous visibility in the long-tail by helping authors focus on specific subjects for each post. Indeed, they are one of the best solutions to creating organic visbility. And for every way that your blog posts can be found (and are found), they are roughly four times more valuable than PPC equivalents.
Read more at Blogging for Organic Visibily vs PPC Campaigns
BlogKing April 19th, 2007
Amy Chow live blogging experiment from Web 2.0 Expo was a success. She captured some great concepts from the presentation by David Berkowitz of 360i .
Highlights: Business Week survey says executives believe investments in search marketing has the best ROI of all marketing activities.
Blogs are the “human voice of marketers”.
Long tail optimization. David shows us HitTail. I’ve come across this too, and want to implement it as soon as I can. It monitors your search terms, and mines the fragments…the search phrases with one or two hits…and identifies the trends in these aggregated, unique phrases. Looks very useful, and last time I looked it had a free basic version. I expect it is much easier to use and more effective than the Excel app I built last semester to aggregate and categorize keyphrases from my AWStats.
Search is more than having good keywords and site structure. The “inter” in internet is becoming a powerful force, and behaving in ways that we didn’t see just a few years ago. It’s an evolving, rich area of challenge and opportunity that warrants a little extra homework creative experimentation on the part of marketers and business owners.
Social media integration. Possible linkups could be search, to the official site, to the blogs, which goes back to the site. The site may lnk out to social networks, which link back; likewise with the video sites…and they ALL go back to the search engine. Did you get that? The point–there is no single path to you, and no single source for your information. Tie it all together and increase the chances that people will find the things you want them to see.
Think outside the search box!
Good food for thought. That reminds me. Have you set up your LinkedIn profile yet?
Read this tip sheet from Guy Kawasaki on how to maximize the traffic to your site with a properly set up LinkedIn profile. Hint: it’s all about the anchor text.
If you want some link love let me know. I have 1.3 million in my network. I’d love to hear your experience with LinkedIn so please comment away.
BlogKing April 9th, 2007
For those who are not that familiar with the the concept of the long tail and it’s effect on product distribution this seminal paper by Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired from December 2004 is the best easy read to get a good grounding.
A key aspect of long tail success is piggy backing on the hits. Hits are not going away. But they are not the only game in town anymore. Chris uses examples from Amazon showing how they use analysis of buying patterns to recommend other books or songs you may like.
IF YOU LIKE BRITNEY, YOU’LL LOVE…Just as lower prices can entice consumers down the Long Tail, recommendation engines drive them to obscure content they might not find otherwise.
What does this have to do with business blogging?
A key maxim of Internet marketing is to tap into what people are already searching for. Let the “MSM” or “mainstream media” generate the awareness and inquiries. That is their forte. The business blogger can find out what is hot related to their field by monitoring an alert created in Google News. If you can tie into a general news item all the better.
See, you have a secret weapon. While other SEO’s are sweating over optimizing static pages for past historical high volume keywords you are in instant karma mode. Read the news that morning, write a post in your blog about it and the relevancy to your business. Be sure to title the post using the same keywords that would bring up the original article.
Wham! By afternoon you post is intercepting the same keyword searches.
Even better, use HitTail to monitor the long tail search traffic this post generated and use its suggestions for another round.
Free organic traffic, at your beck and call.
Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
John Lennon
