SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Businesses with products to offer can now market them through a service called Google Base.

What is Google Base?

Google Base is a place where anyone can easily submit all types of online and offline content that Google will host and make searchable online. Google Base enables the user to add attributes that better describe the content so that others can easily find it. Depending on the relevance of items, it may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle, Google Base and Google Local. There is no cost for this service.

Users may list items for sale and buyers can pay using a Google Account just like using it to pay for services such as Google Video and Google Earth.

The Google search engine results pages (SERPs) are already offering a search box for Google Base. This is another great opportunity to list items you have for sale and have them promoted for you through this free service.

Google released their AdWords keyword research tool and making it accessible outside of AdWords accounts.

You can search using a variety of methods such as seasonal search volume data for global and local searches, data by match type (ie: broad, phrase, exact). You can also view keyword popularity, global traffic trends, cost, and predicted ad position. Data can be easily exported via a .csv file.

Get more information about their features from their help page.

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.