Sure, search marketing can help you reach out to potential customers beyond your current opt-in list. It can also serve as an introduction for your brand, and helps build credibility and trust with your target audience.

Most online marketers have already heard the recent news about Google indexing "tweets" in its search results. If you're a Twitter novice like me, you may be wondering what it means for your business, your marketing efforts and the way you handle social media. 

It’s generally agreed that long-tail keywords produce higher quality traffic at a lower cost. While it’s a great theory, by its very nature long-tail keyword traffic is scattered across a vast landscape of countless possibilities. So the question is how do you generate the extensive list of long-tail keywords and phrases needed to build a significant amount of quality traffic?

"Is my bounce rate too high?" "Is it good that only 15% of my traffic arrives via non-branded keyword searches?" "What metrics do I need to be paying the most attention to?" Benchmarking gives definitive answers to questions like those above. And while performing regular benchmarking of your organic search metrics offers a great way to determine the success of your efforts, knowing where to get started with the benchmarking process leaves some marketers confused.