Nuthin' New Except Search Terms

Is there such a thing as brand new search term? Something that has never been typed into a search engine box before. Yes, I know. I didn't think it was possible. The whole "nuthin new under the sun" thing. But it is. If fact I have seen stats on it, but can't remember where right now. It's not important. Somewhere in the range of 40% of the keyword phrases typed into a search engine's box have never been used before. Now that's a search engine statistic that will get you thinking.

It will get you thinking that going to Overture an typing in a generic keyword like "reciprocal links" and then optimizing your page for the results will get you nowhere. Well at least it will get you a shot at 60% of the search engine traffic. The 60% percent that everyone else is competing for. But what about that 40%? The 40% that you have no competition for because no one is optimizing their site for them. The 40% that are the real search engine users. The 40% that are ready to spend, if only they could find what they are looking for.

I realized the importance of this 40% this weekend when I was searching for a simple script that could count the words and phrases on a page and return the amount of one, two, and three word combinations on that page. A simple script that I did not have the time to write.

But in order to find this script, I had to push my way past a bunch of black hat seo pages to get to anything close to what I was looking for. By the time I had found what I was looking for, I had about seven search terms in the Google search box and a few quotation marks just to narrow my search down to what I was actually searching for. Now that was a new search term. But only one of the types you may run into.

Another type of terms are the shooting star types. A key phrase, a name, or a term that becomes a buzz very quickly. I created a site just to test how many hits I could get related to the top 200 search terms from Wordtracker. I expanded these terms using Overture's keyword tool and then gathered related RSS feeds and place them on my site.

I then just sat back and watched mainly because I had no idea what would happen. What happened was I received no less than 2000 hits from the search engines containing the term "Kari Ann Peniche" this moth. You know, the pageant winner that lost her crown by appearing in Playboy. Now this is something that I didn't expect from a website that was just an experiment.

I couldn't have expected it. I just picked up news feeds that contained her name. She created a buzz. A buzz that my RSS feed based site caught a week before anyone else did. The site is now gone, because it put a strain of the service I was using to find RSS feeds for me. But it showed me something. You can't optimize your site for everything under the sun. In fact, if all you are doing is looking at website stats, you are going to miss the boat.

So what am I getting to? Hope, maybe. Hope that if you write the way you speak, if you fill your website with the type of content that you would like to find instead of useless, spammy, "optimized" text, you can find the visitors and hits you are looking for. Or rather, they will find you.

Or you can optimize your site for last month's keywords and compete with everyone and his brother for customers that are already angry at sites using black hat seo.