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THIS ISSUE:
Did you overlook a major marketing coup?

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Editor's Note

Season's greetings and welcome to the premiere issue of SEO Insider from SearchEnginePatrol.com.

SEO Insider is a monthly digest of news, perspective and the most effective Search Engine Optimization strategies, tools and techniques—all presented in easy to understand terms.

Our mission: help your web site rank higher in the search engines so it generates more traffic and succeeds in today's competitive online marketplace.

You can also count on SEO Insider to serve as a valuable filter in differentiating relevant SEO knowledge from web clutter that's 1) hype; 2) mis-information; 3) overly technical or 4) out-of-date.

We look forward to serving your needs. If you have any comments or suggestions, please send them to
SEOInsider@SearchEnginePatrol.com


News

How many key words in your web searches?

In the past, if you were like most web users, your web searches usually had two words or less. Now, research shows a third or more of keyword searches contain three or more words.

Search engine users have learned they can get more relevant results by making their search queries more specific, and that often means adding more words to their searches. A recent article in Clickz highlighted this new search behavior in detail. (Although the article’s main focus was on paid inclusion programs.)

The article references the number of keywords typically entered by searchers in LookSmart, Ask.com and Teoma and concluded:

• Approximately 40 percent of queries in LookSmart have three or more words.
• About 32 percent in Teoma have three or more.
• Ask Jeeves has an even higher skew, nearly 62 percent, because of its natural language focus.
• Within FAST, the database that powers Lycos and others, the average is 2.5 terms. That suggests a similar frequency distribution to LookSmart and Teoma.

It's realistic to project that this research is representative of searchers' behavior with all search engines, which is why anyone interested in getting higher search engine rankings should review this article.

Read the full article text here:
http://www.clickz.com/search/opt/article.php/1464891

Commentary

Google defines ethical SEOs, sort of…

Google recently made news by defining, from their perspective, what constitutes as ethical or, conversely, questionable practices of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies.

You can find this info on Google’s site:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

What's SEO Insider's take? Overall, very positive.

First, Google gives credibility to legitimate SEO providers such as SearchEnginePatrol.com by clarifying their stance on SEO practices:

"Many SEOs provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted."

Second, by clarifying their stance on SEO practices, this will add further momentum to the initiative of establishing overall industry standards and practices for SEO.

Third, we share Google's vision of all SEO customers being well informed. In fact, Google’s advice on how to detect "unethical" SEOs, and what questions to ask before signing up is eerily similar to a page we developed on our web site a while back called SEO truths.

Fourth, Google recognizes the unfair reputation SEO has suffered from with their comment:

"There are a few unethical SEOs who have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results."

Here’s where we disagree with Google.

When evaluating an SEO firm, Google suggests the potential buyer should "ask other SEOs if they would recommend the firm you're considering." Now this may be fine in an ideal world, but SEO is an ultra-competitive business and we don't send potential customers elsewhere just to be good sports. We're running a business here.

We also disagree with Google is their statement, "For your own safety, you should insist on a full and unconditional money-back guarantee." This is a totally unrealistic expectation in the world of professional marketing services.

Having worked at ad agencies earlier in my career, (including the ad agency for Motel 6, Home Depot and TGI Friday's), ad agencies don't offer guarantees to their clients, so why should SEO companies?

We work with our clients, setting mutual SEO goals so we're all on the same page as far as expectations and results. We do guarantee that we will keep working on our client's behalf until we have obtained a specific number of top 30 rankings, which in most cases, we handily exceed.

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Featured Article: Did you overlook a major marketing coup?

A coup, according to one dictionary definition, can be described as "a brilliantly executed stratagem; a triumph."

Well, it seems many marketers, faced with slower sales and tighter budgets, discovered the same strategy for a "coup."

These marketers, in many cases put all their marketing resources into building market share via better search engine rankings.

How did they do it? Some hired professional optimization companies like my firm, SearchEnginePatrol.com. Others used Pay-Per-Click (PPC) services like Overture or Google AdWords. Still others did it themselves.

I’d like to call this a coup because in many cases, their competition didn’t see it coming. And many still don’t.

It's estimated there are over 10 million web sites. Of those, approximately 60% are commercial web sites. Yet, less than 10% do any search engine marketing with less than one percent of marketing budgets going towards search engine marketing.

All this despite a 2001 Overture report which stated that search engine marketing represented only 3% of all media spent, yet generated 70% of all leads when compared with direct mail and the yellow pages.

Even so, some ongoing concerns remain as to why SEO is not a significant part of a company's marketing budget. These reasons include:

• Awareness. For some companies, SEO is so new to them, it's not even on the radar screen.
• Credibility. Everyone has been spammed with ridiculous SEO claims. That makes it all the more difficult to state the case for legitimate, professional SEO firms.
• Mis-information. Many believe SEO is only for e-commerce web sites.

SEO = the ultimate online matchmaker?

Say you're watching TV, listening to the radio, or leafing through a magazine or newspaper. And what happens? You're interrupted with, you guessed it, an ad. And most likely the ad had nothing to do with what you were interested in to begin with.

Now consider Search Engine Optimization. The situation is totally different. That's because the buyers are seeking the sellers. These are potential customers that are already interested in a particular product or service. So much so, they're searching for it.

In that context, SEO plays matchmaker by bringing potential buyer and seller together.

Checklist: how can SEO benefit you?

There exists a misconception that SEO is only appropriate for e-commerce or retail-oriented sites. While it's true e-tailing sites benefit handsomely from SEO efforts, it's also true that SEO serves the needs of the traditional advertiser as well.

Perhaps this lack of respect regarding SEO can be traced to a lack of knowledge over what SEO is—and isn't. SEO is not an overnight sensation or a miracle cure. It takes work, time and money to yield results.

So is SEO right for you? Well, SEO has proven (despite it's "Rodney Dangerfield" image) to be effective in the following areas:

Of 21 different online activities, search engine inquiries ranked second only to email.
A survey by eMarketer of popular online activities among US Internet users showed that 93% used email while 79% used search engines.

And while SEO may not get the respect it deserves now, that does appear to be changing. Paid search is the fastest growing online ad medium and by 2008, paid search on pay-per-click search engines will reach $5 billion. (DM News, November 25, 2002)

Did you like this article?
If you did, you'll also appreciate our archived articles which you can resource here:
http://www.searchenginepatrol.com/articles.html

Insider tool: Wordtracker

Any successful SEO campaign lives or dies based on the strength of its keywords. And often choosing the right keywords comes down to more than gut reaction or limited research. It means using the right tools.

So how do you find the right keywords? Here's what we recommend: your log files (what were web searchers looking for when they found your site? What words did they use to find you.)

• Internal search logs (if you have an internal search engine, use that data)

• http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
This shows you a rough number of searches for the previous month. Make sure the key word or phrase is getting some traffic.

• http://www.goodkeywords.com
This software is free and can be downloaded to your computer.

• http://www.wordtracker.com
This web-based software is the perfect tool for brainstorming key words. It shows you popular keywords as well as how many other sites you'll compete with over those key words. There is both a free and paid version.

Often, people will use Overture's term suggestion tool to see if a certain keyword phrase is popular. While this is an excellent "first-pass" at keywords, it's only the start. That's because it only shows you the tip of the iceberg—gross number of searches. What it doesn't tell you is how many sites you'll be competing with over those key words. And it won't suggest other key word phrases to any great degree.

Wordtracker: the ultimate keyword resource

What's unique about Wordtracker is that not only will it show you popular search terms, it will suggest other search terms you didn't think of and then assign a numeric score to each keyword/phrase based on the number of searches vs. the number of competing sites with those same keywords.

Here's a sample of what a Wordtracker report looks like:
http://searchenginepatrol.com/reports/rwmcasters/keywords/

We highly recommend Wordtracker as a resource in determining your best key words.

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