• Top Rank , Wednesday, August 20, 2008 12:30 PM

Panelists at this SES San Jose session aimed to debunk 5 SEM myths--including the idea that the long tail continues (and will continue) to grow, that search continues to be opaque, and that everyone should do SEM. (Yes, that's only three, but head over to Dana Larson's post for the full rundown).

First up is the myth of the long tail. According to Chris Zaharias, the long tail phenomenon has started to reverse itself. "Searchers now go in and look up the names of websites they want to go to or the actual brand ad style of shoe they want to buy rather than performing multiple searches on different keyword phrases to ultimately find something worth buying," Zaharias said.

Terry Whalen said that search is transparent because the Internet is transparent. "If you are a smaller company just starting out with SEO or PPC, there is a lot of competitive data out there that is relatively easy to find," he said. "Within a few minutes, a small business can look at competitor PPC ads and find out what keywords the competitors are buying, what their ad messaging strategy is and review their landing pages for relevance and messaging."

And lastly, not everyone needs to jump into the paid search pool. "Dave Rodnitzky came up and stated flat out that SEM may not be a good tactic for certain products, such as those with latent demand," Larson says.

Read the whole story at Top Rank »