The non-pelican marketer knows that to enjoy a steady lifetime of fish, he needs to do 2 things:

1) He needs to make sure he offers his customers and prospects things that will really improve their lives. He needs to serve customer rather than using him.

2) He needs to develop a marketing system, or plan that isn't centered around one-shot sales. Instead, he needs to develop a line of products that provide him with a steady stream of orders from same customers. How do you do this? You develop a stream of products that all solve your target market's problems.

Using pelican marketing - not developing long-term relationships with your customers, means that you must constantly search for new customers. For long-term business success, it's much more profitable to focus most of your energy on serving existing customers. Then instead of seeking new customer full-time, you spend a small portion of your time prospecting. The majority of your customers will come from repeat business and referrals from your happy existing customers.

Examine your marketing efforts today. Ask yourself if you're a pelican marketer. If you are, open your eyes to fact that this will likely lead to your ultimate demise. This is a fact of life for pelican marketer. This is a fact of life for pelican. The only really old pelicans I ever see are those that hang around fishing piers receiving handouts from sympathetic fishermen.

Motivation of User This factor, even more abstract than specificity, calls for an attempt to understand motivation of a search engine user by simply analyzing his or her search phrase. Assume, for example, that you were a real estate agent in Atlanta. Two of keyphrases you are evaluating are “Atlanta real estate listings” and “Atlanta real estate agents”. Both phrases have very similar popularity numbers. They are also each fairly specific, and your services are very relevant to each. So which phrase is better? If you look into likely motivation of user, you will probably conclude that second is superior. While both phrases target people looking for real estate in Atlanta, you can infer from second phrase that searcher has moved beyond point where they are browsing local homes or checking out prices in their neighborhood- they are looking for an agent, which implies that they are ready to act. Often, subtle distinctions between terms can make a large difference on quality of traffic they attract.

3. Evaluating Keyphrase Performance: Until recently, judging performance of individual keyphrases was a dicey proposition. Although it is possible to tell from your log traffic analysis how many visitors are getting to your site from each keyphrase (valuable information, but unfortunately not enough to do much with), it was very hard to decipher which phrases were bringing you most quality traffic. Recently, however, some sophisticated but affordable tools have been developed that allow you to judge performance of each individual keyphrase based upon visitor behavior. This new software makes it possible to periodically analyze which keyphrases are bringing your site most valuable visitors- those who buy your products, fill out your contact form, download your demo, etc. This type of data, rather than sheer number of visitors from each search phrase alone, is invaluable when you are refining your search engine marketing campaigns, since you can discard and replace non-performing keyphrases and put increased effort toward phrases that are delivering visitors that become customers. This kind of ongoing analysis is final piece of keyphrase puzzle, and allows you to continually target most important phrases for your industry, even if they change over time.

Conclusion: Keyphrase compilation, evaluation, and performance are all vitally important to any search engine marketing campaign. While high rankings in search engines are an admirable goal, high rankings for poor keyphrases will consistently deliver poor results. Integration of this keyphrase process into your overall search engine marketing strategy can dramatically improve your website performance (and thus your bottom line).

Scott Buresh is Co-founder and Principal of Medium Blue Internet Marketing . For monthly tips on how to get the most out of your internet presence, sign up for our Internet Marketing Newsletter .