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.

Hitwise is a competitive intelligence service that gives you insight into where your competitors get their traffic from and which keywords drive the bulk of their traffic from search engines, among other things. It comes at a price of course -- to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

I noticed that in a post today Matt Cutts, Google engineer extraordinaire, made a small swipe at Hitwise in his review of the Compete search engine:

ISP relationships [buying user data from ISPs] can be a huge source of metrics bias. For example, some ISPs partner with Yahoo, and users on those ISPs are probably more likely to visit Yahoo. Other ISPs partner with Google. And savvy users that use smaller providers such as Covad or Speakeasy are likely not counted at all.

Because you don't know which ISPs are selling user data to companies such as Compete or Hitwise, you don't know what biases are baked into those companies' metrics--and the metrics companies won't tell you.

Touché, Inigo! (Matt Cutts' regular blog readers will get that)

So my question to Hitwise is... If you won't tell us who your ISP relationships are, will you at least reveal some of your biases? Like which search engine your biggest ISPs are partnered with?