If you are on the mailing lists for Area51Marketing or read Dan Thies blog who is on the faculty of Stompernet, then you may well have come across a little ‘toy-throwing’ about the concept of long tail search and whether you bother to optimise for it or not as a small business. Just to clarify, the generally accepted concept of long tail search is where you get visitors arriving at your site due to a very specific and statistically uncommon phrase. So if you are for instance selling chocolate, then an (extreme) long tail search would be something like ‘Where can I buy a chocolate fountain’.

So back to the spat. I see something similar in my involvement with football blogs in that two supporters from opposing teams see incidents in the same match  match entirely differently. It’s almost as if they were not watching the same match at times. This is what I see happening here. Nancy contends that optimising pages for long tail search results is a waste of time and Dan says not to write off long tail search results so easily. In fact what he is saying is that the basis of the argument from Area51Marketing is that they are creating a phony issue which they then can sell a remedy for. Trouble is they are both right. You really wouldn’t want to spend time optimising your site for every possible long tail search result as a lot of them won’t yield sales. Dan says, you do want to modify your website copy on the basis of what searches are bringing visitors in although it is true that you may not get more sales from it.

Taking the above chocolate example, if a visitor typed that search in, they may be looking to buy or just compare prices. This is the nub of long tail search optimisation. It is also where you have to use your intelligence. Do you think including this in your copy would help create more sales or not? If you think it will, you include it and test to see what difference it made. So both are right, but coming at it from different angles, I suggest you take what is good from both and ignore any posturing. Something which did disappoint me was the tone of Dan’s posts on the subject which could easily be described as condescending, and the very blatant (and simplistic) spin put on his comments by Area51Marketing in their video. Shame really, they both have a lot to teach anyone in the Internet Marketing game.

If you want to check it out for yourself, Area51Marketing and Dan Thies are the places to go, but you will have to give up your email address to Area51Marketing to see the second video where they attempt to answer Dan’s post. Now I don’t suppose it’s a list-building exercise, or am I being a tad too cynical?

For anyone running a website who is not completely obsessed with their subject, creating usable content is probably one of the biggest challenges, after all good website content is what gets you ranked high in Google and makes visitors come back. It’s easy enough if you have a hobby or interest you can blog about, I know since as a longtime Arsenal Football Club supporter I have plenty of opinions to use on my blog Arsenal FC Blog.

But what if you don’t have an interest or are a web designer working for someone who “wants a bit of content” on their site but you have no or little idea of the subject matter. You could Google a keyword and shuffle through all the sites that come up, after all it sometimes only takes a nudge and the words start coming. Not so good if you are working to a deadline though.

You can come up against the same sort of issues if you want to use article marketing to promote your site. Say you have identified a potentially lucrative niche but know little about it. You can of course pay someone else to create articles, but if you are just starting out or your budget is limited, you may not have that option.

Similar sorts of problems, but the same solution. I recently came across a program that I now find invaluable for just these situations. With Instant Article Wizard you input a suitable keyword or keywords and it trawls off into the Internet to get sentences that include your keywords. The results are ordered so that the phrases that start with your keywords are at the top with the rest below. You then get to choose your phrases to place in an introduction, a conclusion and sub-categories and save as a text file or copy to the clipboard. Obviously it still needs intelligence to choose suitable sentences and you should rework the copy a little to give it your own style. The good thing is that what you produce is genuinely unique copy that is only as good as you make it, rather than a scraped article that may have been used on numerous other sites. Of course you can always create an article specifically to submit to the article directories yourself and promote your site through it being used on other sites.

It is worth noting that this is a .Net program which requires that Microsoft .Net components be installed, so pre-XP systems will require a download to be installed first.

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For many people these days, how you create a website banner or logo is a real headache. If you have multiple websites the headache intensifies. You really have two choices, pay someone a bunch of cash to create them for you, or do it yourself.

Right, I hear you say, with my graphic talents they’ll look wonderful, not! As someone whose ideas commonly exceed his talents, I was faced with the same thing, and there’s only so many usable headers you can use in those massive web graphics programs. Enter stage left the quite remarkable Logo Creator program from the wonderfully titled Laughingbird Software company. Right here I have to declare a bias. Whatever you may think of the header graphic for this site, it was created using this software, in fact it took only a few minutes from start to finish.

So why is it such a good product? Well it’s focused on doing what it does, and it does it well. It isn’t a meg-graphics do-all program, but then it doesn’t pretend to be. If you want a piece of software which produces all manner of logos with point and click usability from a professionally designed templates, you have to buy the Logo Creator. What’s more, there are a number of different versions to choose from dependent on what sort of graphic you are aiming at, or you can get the whole lot in one great package.

• Create incredible logo designs that look like a professional spent hours on!
• Get a portfolio full of logos that you can modify and customize yourself.
• Create a new revenue stream, sell the logos you create to your own customers!

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Do you sell products or services that are ‘download only’ like software, eBooks, or subscription services? Do you offer your customers a newsletter? As an online publisher you may need graphics to illustrate your products. Laughingbird has that covered as well with the excellent Website Graphics Creator. You can now create your own professional virtual 3D Box - with your own custom images. Increase sales and bring attention to your ‘virtual’ products.

Design software boxes, CD jewel cases and eBooks that your web visitors can SPIN on your website!

• Create a front and a back to the image.
• Have your visitors view your eBook in 3D!

If you want to get your website noticed, you can also create flip books. A Flip Book is a set of images (that you create or import) that are placed in a ‘virtual book’ that your web visitors can ‘flip’ through. Pretty impressive!

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Just to finish off the tour around Laughingbird Software, create instant Flash ads with the Flash Ad Creator and create matching Business Cards, Letterhead, Logos & Envelopes with the Corporate Identity Creator.