SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Ignore the Tail at Your Peril! from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

The long tail can be applied to both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) management alike.

I have seen many clients and SEO/PPC agencies alike who target the “fat head” and/or “chunky middle” (see the video for an explanation), even sometimes just the “fat head” – but they do not consider or even recognize the long tail.

As Rand explains, up to 75% of all traffic can come from the long tail. Therefore if you are only targeting the “fat head” and/or “chunky middle”, you are missing out on most of the traffic that could be coming to your website, and the most relevant traffic at that!

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Email Marketing and SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Not only are there differences with English from one country to another – England, Australia, America – but translating from one language to another is generally a bad idea.

For example, were I to say hello in England I might say “Good morning old chap”, in Australia I may say “G’day mate” and in America I might just say “Yo!”. Each country has specific keywords which are searched for more often and which have more competition due to their popularity.

To learn more, read this article on “Translating Keywords Should Never EVER Happen“.

Selling SEO Projects Against PPC Campaigns discusses the easy part of selling PPC, the hard part of selling SEO and finally, selling your SEO product.

Although this article is not so much for clients reading about whether SEO is a better investment over PPC or vice versa, it does offer some interesting information for the client on why PPC is easy to sell, and why SEO is more difficult in comparison.

The five tips explained in greater detail within the article are:

1. Country-Level Domain Name.
2. Country-Specific Domain Hosting.
3. In-Market External Linking.
4. Language Revision
5. Localized Blogging

Again, we are reminded that having a country specific domain and hosting within the country that your products or services are sold or located is very important in gaining higher visibility in search engines.

Mark looks at some important aspects that will determine if you have any chance to make an impact on the web with your current or proposed web site. Key areas which Mark takes a look at are:

• Help People Find Your Web Site
• Make Sure Your Home Page Resolves Correctly
• Create Quality Content — and Lots of It

Of course, remember that every website is reletive to its competitors. If your competitors are ranking high in search engines and offer the same or similar website content, services, products or layout to yours, then there is probably no reason why you, too should not be able to rank high.

• Most executive management teams don’t yet fully understand the economics and far-reaching business implications of SEO.
• Search engine marketing’s transformation of legacy enterprise profitability is in its infancy.
• Most people outside of the search engine community do not fully appreciate the magnitude of the shift from push to pull marketing.
• Management teams must understand SEO to effectively manage it.
• Measuring SEO is still an imprecise art form, which Google appears determined to prevent from becoming a science.
• Search engine marketing might be the largest change management project in history.
• Executive recruiting needs to look beyond the job title to hire effective search engine marketing leaders.
• Search marketing-centric organizations will outperform.

“[Visitors] will come only if you’ve structured your information in a way that’s easy for visitors to navigate, and for search engines to understand.”

Herndon gives you six steps to follow in order to structure your website in the most ideal way:

1. Start with an audit of your product offerings.
2. Take your list to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
3. Compare your findings to your product list.
4. Classify your products.
5. Leverage your products.
6. Race to the bottom.

Read the full article on “SEO Friendly Site Structure – If You Build it, Will They Come?“.

1. The Speed of the Hosting:
   • When a visitor arrives at your website, you want them to see your content instantly. The worst thing is to arrive at a website and have to wait for it to load up content. Waiting for images to appear or waiting for a flash file to load will deter your visitors – they may actually leave before your site loads up.
   • The same goes for a search engine. When a search engine comes to crawl your website for indexing in its search engine results, it wants to get your information fast. Why? Well a search engine does not have the time to wait for your pages to load – it has billions of other website pages to index and therefore needs to move on as quickly as possible. If your website takes longer than a second to load, a search engine will simply leave your site and either rank it very low in its search engine results or perhaps not even rank it at all due to the fact that it would return a poor user experience for visitors and therefore it may not be worth indexing.
2. The Location of the Hosting:
   • If your business is located in a specific country and you sell your products or service to people living withing that country it is highly recommended to also have hosting within that country. The reason for this is that the IP address (each computer has an IP address which defines where in the world it is located) of your hosting account will tell a search engine which country it is located in. If your company is located in France, you sell services to people within France, but your hosting is in China (perhaps because it is cheap),  then a search engine may look at the location of your hosting which is in China, and therefore rank it higher in China because it must be more relevant to that country, as that is where the data is stored.

When a search engine determines the ranking of your website, it does look at where your website is hosted (in which country) to determine to which people it would be the most relevant. So if your business is located in Hong Kong and sells products to Hong Kong people, then your server should also be in Hong Kong to get the highest visibility in search engines for people who are by default searching on www.google.com.hk for example.

Equally important is the speed of the hosting to ensure that your website loads quickly and returns a positive user experience both for users themselves and for search engines.