230059 Resource 76407 1 1 1239046495697 1239048755601 Controlled Google Semantic Upgrade Enhances Long Tail Query Results

It's no surprise that Google has tilted toward favoring longer querys for better search results. Short-tail keyword strategies are quickly becoming ineffective.

<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Trending Search Behaviors</span></div><div><br /></div> The next time you have the occasion to watch over the shoulder of a search user, study their search behavior; you'll see that they start with a few keywords and when they've found what they were looking for (or they gave up), the query string is likely to have 4, maybe 5, or even as many as 8 keywords in it. Remember that keyword strategy you and your marketing team developed on the whiteboard a few months ago? &nbsp;Yeah... the one that lists 20 or 30 terms each with one or two keywords? How valuable do you think that approach really is for improved organic search or PPC campaigns?&nbsp;<div><br /></div><div>Getting a top ten ranking for &quot;security&quot; is admirable, but you should be careful about such &quot;<a href="http://blogsite.com/public/blog/91177">success</a>&quot; - your prospects my be jumping over this term to read your competitor's blog.<div><br /></div><div>Longer keyword strings are necessary because Google has managed to index so much content and for every subject, there is an abundance of information. The web once was a fairly flat plane and content wasn't so abundant, especially on focused topics. Back then you could craft a short-tail keyword strategy and do pretty well with organic findability. But the web has changed, and more importantly search engines and search habits have significantly changed. As a general rule, searchers now understand that a few keywords are far too ambiguous to find the information desired. Search users do not have unlimited time to find information, so they've been conditioned to be more specific - many experienced searchers start with more than 5 keywords; <a href="http://blogsite.com/public/blog/145265">searchers are smarter</a> now.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Long Tail is Increasingly Favored</span></div><div><br /></div><div>The topology of the web, and search productivity, is increasingly shifting to favor the long tail of search, and Google's latest enhancements confirm search behavioral changes. Last week,&nbsp;the company announced on its blog that the new technology will allow Google's search engine to identify associations and concepts related to a query, improving the list of related search terms Google displays along with its results.</div><div><br /></div><blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 40px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">&quot;For example, if you search for 'principles of physics', our algorithms understand that 'angular momentum,' 'special relativity,' 'big bang' and 'quantum mechanic' are related terms that could help you find what you need,&quot; wrote Ori Allon, technical lead of Google's Search Quality team, and Ken Wilder, team engineer at the company's Snippets project.</span><br /></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Bottom line - longer queries will include more text to help you decide which organic search results are worth drilling deeper into. This will reinforce the behavioral trend toward longer keyword queries, thus eroding short-tail keyword strategies even further.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Conclusion</span></div><div><br /></div><div>The future of search is clearly a world with less ambiguity, and that suggests good, articulate, and focused marketing content is even more important. In my view it also suggests businesses should spend less on short-tail [traditional SEO-based] organic search tactics, and more on long-tail [social-based] content development.</div> </div> 9 application/xml long tail query length search keywords semantic search Google has given its Web search engine an injection of semantic technology, as the search leader pushes into what many consider the future of search on the Internet. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/161869/google_rolls_out_semantic_search_capabilities.html If you think a top ten ranking on a popular term is a guarantee for success, think again... http://blogsite.com/public/blog/91177 Search behaviors by consumers are changing in ways that are predictable, but not obvious. Search optimization for terse key-phrases are being skipped over for more focused phrases that produce instant findability. http://blogsite.com/public/blog/145265 false Right now, Google is really good with keywords and that's a limitation we think the search engine should be able to overcome with time. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.53 Safari/525.19 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 $Admin 67.172.146.66 false true false false true 174050 false false true false false false true 253950 Resource 174050 173239 173239 1272412473907 1272412473907 Controlled Long Tail

<p>The bulk of our success in getting in touch with prospective clients has been through people getting to us via long tail searches on very specific topics, &nbsp;I know because I ask and often can see their IP address correlating with the search term. &nbsp;</p> <p>I wonder how this could be better utilized because it seems that variations on a search term increase with the amount of words in it. &nbsp;I know google is fairly good with picking up on variation, but are the other search engins.&nbsp;</p> 10 application/xml true Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.342.9 Safari/533.2 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 98.165.104.182 false true false false true 76407 blog blogsite/Blogsite/web