According to Onestat, only 11.4% of all search queries are one-word phrases. 3 and 4 word phrases make up more than 50% of all queries (via Blog SEO). Surprisingly, even 4 word phrases surpass 1 word phrases by almost 50%.

It is also interesting to notice the cultural differences in the research – Canadians top search queries are 4 word phrases (24.02% of all queries) followed by 3 word phrases, while Germans clearly prefer 2 word phrases (making up 40.05% of all queries) followed by one word phrases.

All in all pretty strong proof that search engine marketers should invest primarily into multi-keyword phrases instead of standalone keywords.

[Tags: sem seo search engine marketing online marketing]

Forgive my ignorance with SEO techniques and the like, but as we are starting to get a fair amount of Google search referrals to our blog I noticed some strange things worth mentioning.

First off – the largest number of searches that result into a hit to our blog come from a misspelled word – “funy”. While I caught the spelling error early on, Movable Type software had decided to archive the page as “/too_funy_devolu.php” – so even though I fixed the spelling error, the search engine is still categorizing the page under “funy”. It is funny to watch how many people misspell the word funny – or why anybody would look for “funy innovations”. Maybe a good seo trick would be to go look for the most misspelled words and then have two separate page entries on your site for those terms – that way you never loose the search traffic from those bad spellers. Ok – as I said before, I am no SEO expert – so try this at your own risk…I am not doing it.

Next is the bagel chain that I wrote about in this post. I do not want to increase the Google juice for this one by mentioning their name in this post (and maybe I am doing just that by linking to it)…but to me it was amazing to realize that if you search for their name using Google my post shows up in second place…talk about the influence of a small dissatisfied blogger. The other intriguing part is how many people are searching on that bagel chain’s name – Gabe thinks it’s all the people from their legal department…yikes.

One last thing for which I have no explanation is the high amount of referrals we get from Google images – if anyone can shed some light on that – that would be great.

[Technorati Tags: seo search engine optimization search]