There are a whole range of news items and goodies that I missed over the past two weeks. Here's a rundown of the ones I think are most valuable:
- MSN AdCenter Labs Tools - Aaron thinks this one is particularly cool and he's got very solid coverage of the whole bunch here.
- One of the best ever posts explaining how duplicate content works from Todd Malicoat.
- Watch out kids, Google's edging up over 60% of all queries - according to Hitwise.
- Ask.com launched a blog search service - and it actually appears to be crawling the web with some regularity! Barry Diller still needs to put come serious cash into getting their web crawl into the 21st century, but maybe this is at least a step in the right direction.
- Google's predictive queries from Bill Slawski is worth reading about - it's a very clever bit of technology.
- Donna pointed to the "must have" SEO tool of the year. I like it too :)
- Not really news, but it looks as though Oilman, DaveN and Graywolf are all upgrading to a more "2.0" interface...
Any other big ones I should be pointing to (other than the obvious ones like GBuy).
Does MyLongTail send data to a third party? I would be a little concerned if it did.
From what I can tell of what it does, it is essentially pulling out all the queries and then trying to identify good ones out of the heap. You can achieve a lot of this if you are already keep a database of the keywords that came to your site with metrics. I made a custom tool at work to drill down into quite a large database from search data (nearly 800K search phrases) and find trends to modify keyword campaigns, create new content, etc.
The thing about looking at the long tail is you often want to drill down into *patterns* of words, and not merely individual phrases. Sometimes one phrase will appear to do well, but when you look at the aggregate of a subject group you might find its not performing as well as you think.
The other thing is that tools like this won't necessarily correlete to internal business metrics like customers acquired, customer spend, etc. Thats where the real game is, IMHO, to attempt and quantify which keywords flow to being your most profitable customers.
For me the big news the past two weeks was Google's further definition on the AdsBot for landing pages. I blogged my thoughts on it. I'd love to hear what others think.
FYI - Jonathan's blog is https://www.optimizeandprophesize.com
MyLongTail is a very creative and promising tool. I'd like to see how well/successfully it performs.
Rebecca,
I have only been using it for a few days but so far I am very impressed. It has located a couple of Long Tail search phrases that I wasn't aware of so I can now further optimize for them.
How long did it take to target a search phrase? I had read some comments that it can take a bit of time for the program to locate some long tail search phrases.
I couldn't get any of the MSN AdCenter Tools to work in Firefox, but they are very cool if you switch over to IE... I would love to be able to play w/ them on a real dataset
If you don't have it there is a handy Firefox extension to open IE in a Firefox tab that makes it more painless.
I wish that MS would realize that this kind of proprietary approach to building their websites does them a disservice as it throws roadblocks in way of the exact same early-adopter crowd they are trying to attract into AdCenter with these kinds of tools.