eBeat

‘You’ve probably heard about the “long tail” in search engine marketing — the numerous, highly specific, less popular keyword phrases that are a great source of targeted, low-cost and high-converting visitors. Executing a “long tail” strategy is critical to campaign success, but don’t let it distract you from the power of search’s “short head” — that handful of keywords that drive most of your cost and conversions.

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Based on a study by Engine Ready, the five highest-spending keyword phrases in a typical [pay-per-click] account comprised 52 percent of the total account spend. The takeaway is to allocate your time and testing resources based on the potential return and not get carried away by the seemingly endless possibilities of the “long tail” at the expense of your highest-spending “short head” keyword phrases. To read the entire study, visit www.engineready.com/company/managing-search1.html.’
— Brian Lewis, VP of marketing, Engine Ready

‘Nielsen/NetRatings reported that 69.2 percent of Americans were on the Internet as of March 2007, a growth of more than 25 percent from 2000. As more and more people flock online, it has become crucial for businesses to establish an online presence. With an estimated 3.9 billion searches conducted at Google in June 2007, it’s important to consider how many of them pertained to your industry and how many of those industry-specific searches pulled up your site. You can always improve your site’s conversions — increase calls to action, tweak your copy, write enticing title tags and meta descriptions, do keyword research. But you can’t think that simply having a Web site is enough for your business; rather, it’s only the starting point.’
— Rebecca Kelley, search marketing consultant, SEOmoz.org

‘Do you know what your customers are saying about your brand? There are many good reasons for monitoring your online reputation, yet many businesses don’t because they believe it’s too complex. It doesn’t have to be that way, and tracking these conversations can be done with the use of RSS or e-mail. If you’re a fan of RSS readers, simply head to Technorati.com and search for words that match your company, products and executives. Technorati allows you to save the search query as an RSS feed, meaning you’ll get instant updates the moment any blogger mentions your brand. If you prefer e-mail, head to Google.com/alerts, where you’ll be able to subscribe to receive e-mail alerts the moment Google finds a match in its index for search, news, blogs or groups. Your business is being discussed every day, so make sure you listen in.’
— Andy Beal, editor and Internet marketing consultant, www.MarketingPilgrim.com