It's 2007, so it's out with the OLD and in with the NEW.

What's old, in terms of SEO? Obsessively watching indexation numbers and rankings on "trophy" keywords (like the one you know the CEO always checks first thing in the morning). Worrying yourself sick over "duplicate content penalties". Relying on Sitemaps XML files to fix your indexation problems (news flash: your rankings will still suck!). Exchanging links.

What's "in" in SEO for 2007? Truly understanding and leveraging the power of Long Tail dynamics. Becoming a trusted contributor within Wikipedia, Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape, Reddit. Building your network in MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Bebo, MyBlogRoll, and the blogosphere in general and then reaping the rewards of "network effects." Building custom search engines and rallying your community to help improve it. Link baiting.

So how the heck do you measure the impact of this sort of stuff?

These new paradigms call for some new KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Addressing Long Tail SEO specifically, we at Netconcepts came up with the following KPIs (props to my colleague Brian Klais for coming up with a lot of this!):

1. Brand-to-Nonbrand Mix
2. Unique Pages
3. Pages Yielding Traffic
4. Keywords per Page Yield
5. Visitor per Keyword Yield
6. Index-to-Crawl Ratios
7. Engine Yield

For definitions and explanations of these seven new metrics, have a read of Brian's article Beneath the Surface of Search, hot off the presses at Multichannel Merchant.

My company, Netconcepts, is hosting a webinar on the topic of our recently-released white paper "Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search". This presentation will take place on September 7 at 11.00am Central, and is open to all.

If you want to...

1. Discover how large your long tail sales opportunity really is — and how much you may be missing
2. Learn how multichannel merchants are leveraging their brands into unbranded "long tail" keyword markets
3. Uncover the secrets of "Page Yield Theory" and its power to exponentially grow your ecommerce sales

then...

Sign up now!

Yesterday my company Netconcepts released a research report / white paper titled "Chasing The Long Tail of Natural Search." The analysis was based on data garnered from 1.2 million unbranded natural search visits to 5,000,000 pages in January 2006 measured across 25 branded online merchants.

According to our research, here's what the "average" well-branded merchant's Long Tail profile looked like:

• Roughly 73,000 unique, indexed pages. Yet only 14% of those pages yield search traffic. These "yielding pages" each generate search traffic at a rate of 4.6 unbranded keyword visitors per month.
• 189,000 brand searches conducted per month. 80% of search traffic comes from brand keywords and only 20% from non-brand terms.
• Total market potential for unbranded keyword traffic exceeds 7,000,000 searches per month, roughly 100 searches for every unique page, and 38 times greater than total brand searches.

"Brand searches are a small minority of searches conducted every day. Yet most E-tailers rely on them for their natural search traffic. Imagine taking to your next management meeting, a concrete prediction of the value of search traffic available from non-brand searches. Until now, it has been difficult to find the numbers to justify investment in natural search optimization or quantify a site's potential search traffic."

We've come up with a concept we call "Page Yield Theory", a method for estimating the potential value of the unbranded natural search tail. We believe it's possible to make a robust and scalable prediction of long tail potential. We've even devised the scientific equation to calculate it:

[2.4 KPP x 1.9 HPK] / 4.7% CTR = 100

It's solid research; months of hard work and deep thought went into the analysis. I think it's a must-read for any online retailer. Download the report now »

Discussion forums encourage customer participation, getting customers and prospects to stay longer which means more interaction with your brand. They drive repeat visits too. Some customers become "regulars" on your forums -- which should, hopefully, lead to you being top-of-mind more often when they are in the market for products that you sell. In other words, discussion forums make your site sticky. Not a bad thing!

Woot.com is a great example of an ecommerce site that encourages participation with forums. They consistently get dozens of comments per day; frequently it's even hundreds. For example, this blog post from a week ago generated 1200 comments in their forums! Their weekly contest is brilliant: they get customers to Photoshop images to a particular theme (which changes week by week) and then post their creations to the forums. Viewing the submissions is a lot of fun.

Online forums also generate wonderful search engine fodder. If the forum is architected correctly, each forum posting will become a separate page that ends up in Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. And each of those pages will have been engineered to rank well (the HTML, the URLs, the anchor text of the back links, etc.).

We set up a forum for Van Dykes Furniture Restorers for their core customers (furniture restorers) to collaborate, share tips, ask and answer questions, etc. This user-contributed content is written in the language of the customers. For example, if a post is written about "gluing wood to metal" and that's the language that furniture restorers are using, rather than the product-focused industry lingo that the supplier is using, then that's new search engine visibility that hasn't been captured before by the online catalog. Multiply that effect out by the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of forum posts and you've got the beginnings of a Long Tail search optimization strategy.

Well, it’s been six months since his last State of the Blogosphere address, but Technorati’s Dave Sifry has been busy tracking and mapping the latest trends, comprehensive results for which are to be found in his latest five-part blog post series.

Part 1 on Blog Growth reveals the number of weblogs out there has been doubling in size every five months. The folks at Technorati have found a burgeoning 14.2 million weblogs and over 1.3 billion links. 80,000 blogs are created daily and a new weblog created every second, and 55% of new bloggers are still posting three months later. Those receiving top marks for attendance are the 13% of blogs that are updated daily (yes, I am aiming to be one of them, but haven't gotten there yet... sigh!). Dave’s report on Blog Growth here.

Whether a single post is a long essay or a short entry, each qualifies as a post. The State of the Blogosphere Part 2 reports on Posting Volumes, the aggregate number of posts per day. As at July 2005, 900,000 posts were being created daily - that’s 37,500 per hour or 10.4 per second, with obvious spikes during world events such as Live 8 or the London Bombings. The full research findings on Posting Volume here.

Over 25 million blog posts now use tags for categories or topics. 12,000 are being discovered each day, and photos and links are now being tagged too. The State of the Blogosphere Part 3 Report on Tags here.

Part 4 Spam and Fake Blogs dwells on the darker side of the blogosphere – created to influence results on a search engine by filling the results with spam or fake postings, usually to some advantage. here

In Part 5, Dave Sifry reports on the The List and the Long Tail - the impact of weblogs on mainstream media, the A-list, and the measure of influence or authority of a site or blog by the number of people linking to it. here

All interesting stuff and a great place to check out if you love statistics, graphs, and a one-stop update on The State of the Blogosphere.

Sad but true! We don’t control the search engines. All we can do is endeavor to create content that the search engines will find worthy and rank accordingly.

To rank for the most generic (yet still relevant) keyword possible, your page content needs to be focused on one (or possibly a couple, but certainly no more than three) central keyword theme. Each page of your site should "sing" its own unique "song" (keyword theme) to the search engines.

Ian McAnerin, founder of SMA-NA had this to say about keywords at the MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit on SEO:

There are several basic types of keywords. There are what you call your volume keywords, things like pharmacy, online pharmacy, buy pharmaceuticals. If you rank well, they will very often bring in a ton of traffic but sometimes a very low percentage of actual buyers. But that percentage, based on the amount of traffic, can be significant so you certainly don’t want to avoid that. But it is also important to point out there are other types of keywords that you can aim at too.

For example, you can aim at niche keywords, where there may be just 20 or 30 a month on each, but almost every one converting into a paying customer. If you are selling things like cars, 20 or 30 a month is a pretty big thing.

What Ian is describing here is the "long tail," a critical area for search marketers to mine. (There's a great blog entirely dedicated to the long tail.)

So, if you're only targeting a handful of keywords, you're missing the boat.