What’s better than free, targeted traffic to your website? If you’re a site or business owner, not much. While the sessions at PubCon offer up everything from general to painfully detailed advice on organic search, here are the “ABC’s” of search from presenter Carolyn Shelby:

1. Analytics
   - Don’t rely solely on keywords that are already driving traffic; seek out other possibilities for new insights.
   - Go through your 404’s (people that have incorrectly typed domains in a search bar) to see what people are looking for (but not finding) on your site. This will shed light on what the user expectation is when they visit your website.
2. Ask
   - Don’t assume that real people understand industry jargon and buzzwords. You understand it; they may not.
   - Ask non-industry people about your product or service. Take note of the terms and phrases they use to describe things and incorporate those into your keyword lists.
3. Brainstorm
   - Invite people from throughout your organization to brainstorm on how they would search on the internet for your product or service. Their fresh perspective may reveal valuable insights.
4. Crunch your numbers, Cull your lists, and Create your keyword lists.
   - Once your research has yielded workable lists, it is imperative to evaluate which keywords and phrases are yielding the desired conversions.
   - Pull keywords that are not productive and focus on ones that are.
   - After honing in on the keywords and phrases that work best for your site, you should be able to build and nurture very effective keyword lists.

By no means do these “ABC’s” cover all that is important with SEO. They do, however, bring to light methods that oftentimes don’t immediately come to mind.

With today’s announcement of the Google-Twitter search deal and the Bing- Twitter search deal, it is more evident than ever that Twitter should be an important part of your SEO strategy.  Why?

Well, if Twitter results are going to appear in Google and Bing search results, don’t you think it’s a good idea you get your important information on Twitter?  Google is going to pull in what people have tweeted on Twitter. For example, if you search for “online advertising” in Google, you may see some tweets in the Google search results that relate to this search, and possibly even some of this http://search.twitter.com/search?q=online+advertising integrated into the Google search results themselves.

It will be interesting to see how Google displays the tweets in their search results. Will they display them within their regular search or will it be a side option? I have concerns about spam issues. The spammers know how to hijack all the Twitter trending topics with their spam links. I hope Google has a good way to filter this stuff out.

So for all those who argued Twitter has no importance for SEO – think again.

Google+Twitter = important for SEO.
Bing+Twitter = important for SEO.

Welcome to “real time” search!

Oftentimes, internet marketers will steer away from PPC (pay-per-click) advertising such as Google AdWords.  Running PPC on competitive searches can get expensive, but for this discussion I would like to look at this from a different standpoint.  Rather than discussing how PPC advertising can bring you traffic and sales, I would like to discuss how it could help you analyze and improve your site.

Running PPC to find long-tail keywords
Running short lived PPC’s on a competitive search phrase can shed some light on what long-tail search phrases people are using around that competitive short tail.  For example running a PPC on “Dallas Homes” will most likely bring in traffic for a ton of more specific searches such as “3 bedroom Dallas homes”, “Dallas homes with a pool”, etc.  If you have analytics installed on your site, you can see which of these are converting and decide from there which searches you should optimize your landing pages for.

Running PPC to determine which keywords convert
Have you ever spent tons of time and effort optimizing your site for a search phrase and after you finally get it to rank organically, you find out it just doesn’t convert into paying customers? Running a short lived, low budget PPC campaign on a search phrase will help you determine how well that search phrase converts.  If it converts well, then it is most likely a good idea to spend the time and effort in organic SEO.  If it doesn’t convert well, you can decide to change your landing pages and content, or may even decide to target something else.

Running PPC on multiple landing pages
Running a short lived PPC campaign pointing to individual landing pages can help you determine how that landing page converts.  A high conversion will tell you that your landing page is setup well.  A low conversion may be an indication your landing page needs some work, or show that you could be targeting the wrong keywords for that landing page.

So, even if you don’t have the budget to run ongoing PPC campaigns, it can still be a great short-term tool for discovering the best (paying) keywords and phrases for your site.

I am a big proponent on targeting long tail keywords.  Sure, a single long tail phrase may bring in less traffic than a single short phrase, but long tail keywords are so much easier to convert.  The screenshot below shows just how powerful long tail SEO is.  This is long tail “organic search” traffic that came into one of our sites for a campaign we did for a client.  As you can see from this screenshot, this campaign drew in 8,424 visits from 8,186 different search phrases in 1 month.  Yes you read that right – 8,186 different search phrases all from long tail.

Following are a few reasons why I am such a big fan of long tail

• Specific multi-word search phrases are much easier to rank in search engines than generic single keyword or short keyword phrases.
• Long tail, from our experience, has higher sales conversions because the visitors find exactly what they are looking for.
• Google loves content.  Creating lots of different pages targeting many different long tail keywords gives Google and other search engines more pages to index.
• Easier to rank + higher conversion + lots of indexed pages = increased bottom line.

Note: make sure your targeted pages are not duplicate content and are very specific to the long tail you are targeting.  Your targeted pages should be useful to the visitors that land on them and give them exactly what they are looking.

Google has recently added new search options.  There is now a “Show options” link that appears above the Google search results.  Clicking this link opens up a left panel with additional options.  You can display video results, forum results and reviews.  You can even narrow it down by time.  This is something all web marketers should pay attention to when creating and optimizing their online material.  The ability to narrow down search by time (past 24 hours, past week, etc. ) is very powerful and something web masters should take note of.  Many searchers will want to see most recent content first, so it is even more important for websites and blogs to generate fresh and relevant content.  I was happy to see that we place #1 in a video search for one of our target search phrases.  This convinces me that creating videos is important in your online marketing efforts.  Check out Google’s video below explaining these new search options.