SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Google performed a study of web page design in December 2005. Based on a sampling of one billion pages from popular sites, it extracted data on various areas like popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. All the statistical data is broken down into easy to read sections.

Useful for noting what standards the search engines currently expect as well as future compliance standards in HTML5.

Search Engine Watch has a great article covering the “long tail” of search.

Bottom line: The long, long tail of search not only is where things get difficult, but also interesting and profitable. Advertising in the tail will differentiate you from your competition and allow you to find conversions at a great value. But savvy search marketers realize that chasing the tail requires time, effort, money, solid analytics and, yes… patience!

Basically, the long tail of search looks much like a exponential distribution graph. The far left side of the graph contains the largest volume of searches, followed by the fairly popular searches as you move to the right, followed by less frequent searches as you move even further to the right, and finally the one-of-a-kind searches on the far right of the graph.

In PPC, this works to a savvy marketers advantage by creating ads that target low traffic keyword phrases. Low traffic, in most cases, translates to low bids and possibly even no other ads being displayed or no competing bids. Just on PPC alone, there are tens of thousands (of not hundreds of thousands) of opportunities to make money in niches and niche keywords that no sophisticated marketer competes in.

So, how does this work to the advantage of an experienced SEO besides just PPC targeting? A search engine marketer will undoubtly profit from optimizing for these low traffic terms. Like PPC, when there is little traffic, there is usually also little optimization. Responsible SEOs will optimize their clients sites for terms that contain a reasonable amount of traffic relative to the level of competition and not those terms get searched few times a day, let alone one-of-a-kind searches. Many people are simply too lazy and don’t want to spend the time to work on optimizing for dozens, let alone hundreds of keywords. Human nature is also by virtue – greedy. People want the larger slice of the pie rather than the crumbs. Well, in optimizing for these keyword phrases, you can bet that it’ll be fairly easy to rank them – and fairly quickly too. By spreading keyword phrase optimization over dozens or hundreds of keyword phrases, you create a massive stream of income equivalent to that of going through the even harder work of trying to outrank established competitors for highly trafficked keywords.

Google acquires dMarc Broadcasting, a company that places ads into radio stations for up to $1.1 billion. They intend to distribute AdWords via radio.

With this acquisition and partnerships with newspapers, Google rapidly transforms itself from a technology company to a multi-media advertising agency. Google ads will likely be a pervasive part of our lives in the near future covering many of the traditional advertising mediums today.