Our thoughts and knowledge on all things Internet

A little keyword research goes a long way

It's always surprising how keyword research can throw up strange results that completely challenge your assumptions on the phrases internet users search on.

For example I've just been doing some keyword research for some projects of our own, in the areas of E-Commerce and Copywriting. However this could be the last time I write these two phrases like that, because of the results I found...

Copywriting Keyword Analysis:

Despite my previous assumptions, it turns out that hardly anyone writes copywriting as one word, as I always have. Taking the phrase copywriter as an example, Google tells me about 776,000 searches for 'Copywriter', but an incredible 14,900,000 searches for the phrase 'copy writer'.

E-Commerce Keyword Analysis:

The same happens for E-commerce, which I have always written as e-commerce. However a different keyword research tool we use tells me that there were 2,108,083 searches for 'e-commerce' in the last month, less than half the 4,722,786 searches for 'ecommerce'. And as for 'e commerce', there were just 1,069,935 searches.

Suffice it to say, the results of this quick analysis can have pretty major implications for web site design, content, headings, link structure, back links, and even PPC advertising.

Yahoo! release a new crawler

New crawler offers a 25% reduction in requests and bandwidth

Yahoo! have today announced that there is a new crawler in town. The new Yahoo! crawler (Slurp) is built for speed and will now consume 25% less bandwidth.

The new crawler has apparently been about for the last couple of weeks, working in tandem with the old version. The old crawler has now been fully turned off, which will mean a lower load on website being indexed.

The result of this new crawler will mean that there will be a possible reshuffle of pages in the search results and the number of pages in the index. This will certainly explain the issues that some webmasters/site owners have been having with their pages and rankings being dropped.

I personally will be glad not to see old slurp crawler so much! For more information visit the Yahoo! blog.

'The Mid Tail' three and four keyword phrases are gold

Single keywords just don't cut it anymore

A new report from OneState.com shows that surfers are searching with one keyword less and less. Two and three keyword searches have increased. You can view the report here.

  • 2 word phrases - 28.91%
  • 3 word phrase - 27.85%
  • 4 word phrases - 17.11%
  • 1 word phrases - 11.43%
  • 5 word phrases - 8.25%
  • 6 word phrases - 3.68%
  • 7 word phrases - 1.59%

The importance of Keyword Research

This report just goes to show the importance of good keyword research and how without it you could be losing out on valueable visitors. Generally searching with long keywords is called 'The Long Tail', but looking at these figures I would say that the money is in 'The Mid Tail', with four and three keyword search giving nearly 45% of the  searches.

'The Long Tail' References

There is a lot of theory behind 'The Long Tail' and for those that are interested:

Sorry, there are no 'The Mid Tail' references as I coined the phrase!

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