Based on Hitwise’s top search terms for September 2008, the most popular terms in the ‘Shopping Rewards and Directories’ category were (in order):

coupons
grocery
coupons
free samples
black friday 2008
black friday
free stuff
consumer reports
free coupons

‘Black Friday’ is a reference to the Friday after Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. This traditionally marks the first day of the shopping season.

While ‘Black Friday’ may be popular at this time of year… the terms ‘coupons’, ‘grocery coupons’, ‘free samples’, ‘free stuff’ and ‘consumer reports’ are consistently popular terms in this category. They were also in the top 10 for the same category in January 2008… and similar terms appeared in the top 10 back in June 2007.

If you run an online business, knowing the most popular keywords used by your target market is certainly relevant. But not just for search engine optimization (SEO) reasons. It’s also relevant in terms of knowing the ‘trigger’ words that are likely to attract your prospects’ attention and interest in what you have to offer.

In other words, knowing such trigger words will enable you to use them in your copy - again, not just for SEO purposes, but to resonate with your target market. Simply because you are using the words that are on their minds.

So how do you find out the trigger words for YOUR target market? Well, just like Hitwise, you could research the most popular words used by search engine users looking for the kind of products or services you offer. To do that you need one or more keyword tools.

The free Google AdWords Keyword Tool is one such tool you can use. Another is Wordtracker. I’ll explain Wordtracker – and why we use it – tomorrow.

Source: ClickZ, “Top 10 Search Terms in 10 Categories”, October 2008, ClickZ, November 20, 2008

A guest post on the Hitwise blog by search engine optimizer / analyst Dustin Woodward, suggests that the long tail of search might be much longer than most of us expected.

Woodard evaluated a data set of search terms used in the last three months, and found that the top 1,000 search terms only accounted for about 10 percent of all search traffic.

Indeed, the Hitwise’s top 100 search terms account for just 5.7 percent of all search traffic, while the top 1,000 search terms only account for 10.6% of all search traffic. Even the top 10,000 search terms drive just 18.5 percent of all search traffic.

What does this mean for Internet marketers? Well, it does NOT mean you should try to optimize your site for all those long tail keywords. Together they may account for a lot of searches, but if anything, Woodard’s analysis confirms the fact that long tail terms are infrequently searched on i.e. they are likely to be ‘one-offs’.

There may still be opportunities to pick up traffic for such one-offs, but trying to target such keywords is unlikely to pay off – simply because such words are unlikely to be searched on next month.

So it still pays to optimize for the most popular, relevant keywords you can afford to target. And if you want to be creative, think into the future rather than the past. In other words, instead of targeting last month’s long tail keywords, think about what keywords you think will become popular, based on trends in your market or industry.

Source: Frederic Lardinois, “Hitwise: The Long Tail of Search is Much Longer Than Expected”, ReadWriteWeb, November 7, 2008

According to data from Hitwise, Yahoo News was the news site with the most election day traffic, followed by CNN, MSNBC, Google News, Fox News and the Drudge report.

Here’s a list of the top 10 election news sites, in terms of Hitwise’s estimate of market share:

1. Yahoo News
2. CNN
3. MSNBC
4. Google News
5. FOXNews
6. Drudge Report
7. The New York Times
8. FOXNews.com Elections
9. USA Today
10. ABCnews.com

Source: Erick Schonfeld, “Hitwise Ranks Election Traffic To News Sites,” TechCrunch, November 5, 2008

Online search intelligence firm Hitwise has released the top 10 searched on words for September 2008.

The ClickZ Network has published the top 10 in various categories. The top keyword for the IT and Internet category was ‘paypal’ and the top word for Net Communities and Chat category was ‘netflix’.

Check out the list here.

Source: The ClickZ Network, “Top 10 Search Terms in 10 Categories, September 2008″, The ClickZ Network, Oct 27, 2008

If you’re familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) you’ll know that getting QUALITY back-links is critical to moving your website up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Getting a few links from trusted and authoritative websites beats getting a lot of links from “junky” or irrelevant websites every time.

So too, as SEO expert Michael Gray says in a recent blog post, most SEOs would define a good back-link as:

“a keyword rich link from a well linked/important/popular page on a trusted and authoritative website, that is preferably topically relevant to your site.”

Mr Gray goes on to point out the major problem with a definition like this: there is no publicly available or agreed upon metric for what is a “trusted and authoritative website”!

While search engine optimizers will point to sites such as the New York Times or the Wall
Street Journal as trusted and authoritative websites, that isn’t much help to webmasters who have little hope of ever getting a back-link from such news sites.

Consequently, Gray advises webmasters to:

1. Do your research and consider all the available metrics – such as Page Rank, Alexa, Compete, Technorati, Quantcast, Hitwise and Feedburner - looking for correlations between such metrics; and

2. Consider the blogs in your space to see who is getting the most links.

I would also add this:

3. Consider the content of the website. Does it strike you as being of high quality?

If a site scores highly on all the above-mentioned metrics, has tons of links, and is of a high standard… chances are it’s considered reasonably trusted and authoritative by the search engines.

And if you get mixed results for a given site, do what all search engine optimizers do: use your judgment!

Source: Michael, Gray, “Teaching Advanced Link Building and Why Pagerank Will Never Die”, GrayWolf’s SEO Blog, August 13, 2008

While it still trails behind MySpace in terms of visitor market share - MySpace has a 72 percent share to Facebook’s 17 percent share - Facebook’s U.S. popularity is certainly growing.

The latest Hitwise data indicates that Facebook grew 40 percent in terms of U.S. website visitors over the last year, while MySpace’s U.S. visitors declined by 6 percent over the past year.

Facebook users are also beginning to spend more time on the site, with the average Facebook user spending 10 minutes on the site. However this is about half the 21 minutes spent by the average MySpace user.

Source: Frederic Lardinois, “Facebook Keeps Growing - Still Far Behind MySpace in US”, Read Write Web, July 23