Targeting Popular Search Terms - Bad Idea? Perhaps...

Robert -

"... look at the misspelling variations and throw keywords for those." 

This tactic will help until the precise instant that search engines decide misspelled words are a quality indicator. After that, it will work against you. It's my view that you should focus on high-quality content because that approach is forever sustainable, and tactics are not.

bf 

Jennifer:

"I get all my traffic from two search terms."

Hmmm, what if a few competitors spend a bunch of time and money and pushes one of your terms of a high ranking? Will your traffic be cut in half overnight?

"That accounts for 75% of my organic and pay per click."

Is it possible all your traffic is centered on those two terms because your site is optimized only for those two terms? This reminds me that most website owners create a self-induced bias based on what they percieve reality to be. You might want to consider the liklihood that you are biasing your web marketing strategy and rulling out visitation from any other axis of information.

We have clients that get 97% of all search traffic from thouands of unique phrases - each tightly focused on specific subjects - subjects that each visitor is most interested in reading about - e.g., they're likely to be more qualified. Imagine the benefit of not depending on any specific optimized phrase - competitors could steal a phrase here and there, but they can't easily steal the long tail of your search presence. And the best part, most competitors aren't even looking at long tail strategies - the tail represents more than ten times the traffic found through PPC and short tail tactics.

Well, there you have it; one more data point that suggests the more your content appeals to specific, long tail phrases, the more likely you'll get closer to very qualified leads.

How do you rank for "mortgage broker milford ct cheap rates 5yr fixed"? ;-)

Jonathan:

You don't target the long tail, it targets you. ;-)

The long tail (by definition) is unpredictable; users create search phrases of all manner and convolution. The best way to "target" it is to not try to target it - simply do what makes sense - create useful, quality content and the long tail will find you.

Blogs are one of the best ways for the long tail to discover what you have to say. They cause you to write focused material and typically (without thinking) you'll write all the right keywords because you are in a conversational mode; a mode that most searchers are in when they query search engines.

Thank's all for the great feedback and positive comments.

"...  i need to retool my keywords!"

Carl - without knowing much about your web systems and startegy, it's difficult to say if that's indeed what you need to do. I'm also not an SEO expert by any stretch. However, imagine a model that allows you to work on the web to communicate with your target audience without ever needing to spend time retolling keywords. Imagine never thinking about "keywords", but just doing what comnes natural - shring your thoughts, ideas, and answers the same way you do with other tools - like cell phone, voice mail, and printed material.

In my view, that's the way the web should work - seamlessly optimizing everything you do. Weblogs - indeed, specific types of weblogs that integrate tags and RSS with other remote web services and search engines have started to chip away at this ideal scenario.

It's my view that a portion of the time spent thinking about keywords should be reallocated to understand how to *stop* thinking about keywords. ;-)

Scott:

 Another way to say that ...

"I would rather people find my content on specific, narrowly focused ideas, because that would make them much more qualified buyers."

I believe your attitude about this leads to greater success, not greater traffic.

bf

Ray: 

"... expensive to truly compile and work with."

 Yes - that's the conclusion if you assume PPC and traditional SEO are the only methods for reaching searchers. However, business blogging begins to chips away at the problem. You continually write good [brief] articles and because you are a domain expert, you naturally optimize for the long tail of search. People are looking for things in exactly the same tone that you are describing them, hence - an ideal way to tap the tail.

Ray:

"And how do you measure it's effectiveness?"

Excellent question and I have no great answers. I *do* know that since blogsites typically cross the line from purely tactical marketing (like PPC or SEO tactics) to strategic marketing (more of a long term and sustainable content plan), these activities are largely difficult to measure.

We use PMetrics for all our customer blogsites and optionally some customers upgrade to VisiStat. These tools can help you measure your blogging activity to some degree, but the challenges are big. Consider that if a user subscribes to your blog in Bloglines and then share's their RSS feed to other Bloglines users, the system will request your content once and cache the content while distributing it potentially to hundreds of other users. This is known as a proxy representative of your blog content and measuring its use can get complicated.

Blogs are useful for many things, but the variety of use cases and agility they bring to the table also create measuring problems. How do you currently track the performance of your business card? The sign on your building has performance characteristics - but how do you measure that?