Now that Bing has made a healthy bid for an enduring part of the search landscape SEO buzz has emphasized search behavior, because understanding it is what the Bing team hopes will make it a serious competitor for Google. Bing PR emphasizes that multiple searches and frequent use of the back button are still too common – people aren’t finding what they’re looking for.

Is Google just getting lazy? No; the fact is that adapting search to semantics and natural language is just really, really difficult. That’s why your typical Google day usually includes a couple of hilariously off topic Adwords ads when your searches get tricky. People don’t think the way search engines do. That’s why in 2007, Google reported that 25% of its searches had never been entered before.

That’s a special challenge for SEO. It’s easy to justify putting your efforts behind high-traffic keywords and as long as you spread out the work, long tail seems to have proven itself, but we’re talking about “no tail” searches. How do we improve our chances in that 25%? We’ve been playing around with this one for a while because many of our strategic search engine optimization clients belong to specialized industries. They don’t necessary have relevant primary keywords. We want to capture interest from relevant searches, unique or not. Here are three tips to get you started.

Research Pro Terms: Always drive some efforts toward the standard professional term used in your client’s industry – not just the most popular (though you shouldn’t ignore that, either). Unique searches are more likely to be in depth, either in the form of natural language queries or as very specific searches by power users. Power researchers are more likely to be pre-educated bout the term, so you increase your chances of capturing them by using professional terminology.

Use Synonym-Friendly Long Tail Keywords: Google and Bing don’t have the semantic smarts to please people all the time but they’re pretty good and thesaurus-like tasks. (This is actually pretty annoying in Google when it decides that its phrasing should be what I’m looking for instead of mine, but it’s a benefit here.) How easy is it to rephrase your search term with the same basic structure but different words? Experiment and go with long tail keywords that search engines will accept as semantically equivalent to each other, such as buy/purchase/get, (when the root keyword is something typically sold online, “get” works) instructions/how to/guide and so on. This makes your long tail picks more flexible, with more potential to capture unique searches.

Be Sentence-Oriented: Remember how I said many unique searches must be drawn by power searchers? They’re not the only group; the other consists of queries written as sentences from search novices such as “How do I reboot my iPod?” Optimizing for particular sentence queries is usually impractical, but you can use shortened versions of these searches as long tail keywords, such as “Reboot my iPod.” If it sounds close enough to another sentence query it may get a bit of love unless the searcher’s looking for an exact quote – and in that case, he or she wasn’t look for your services in the first place.

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