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Looking back over what I've been writing lately I do seem to spend a lot of time talking about search engines but that's just about unavoidable because they do play such a huge part in what we webmasters do.

Even if you're only at the point where you're more reliant on link lists and TGPs for your traffic you should still be following all the developments in traffic generation via the search engines. If you are sensible enough to follow those developments you will see how they're going to impact on your traffic from those other sources. Changes in the way Google and the others rank those link lists and TGPs for important keywords will have an impact on the amount of traffic they have to send to small webmasters like you and I.

So it's important to keep up with the changes and that's why I write about them here. I try to keep the language I use here as simple as possible so that even newcomers to the industry have some hope of understanding what I'm talking about. I also leave it up to you to practice your search techniques by searching for more information on what I've been talking about.

I know some of you must wonder why I don't include links to that content but the more you have to use the search engines to find what you're looking for the better chance you have of discovering and understanding what you need to include in your websites so that people searching for content will find your sites.

So today let's continue on with another interesting development in the world of search.

More words in search terms
When Steve and I first hit the online adult industry getting ranked in the search engines was all about key words. If you were keen to get a good listing in Google and the other search engines you targeted individual words. 'Sex' was always a very popular key word ... 'porn', 'hardcore', 'tits' and many more were keywords that just about everyone wanted to achieve a good listing for.

A few of us then began to find that ranking for single words was an absolute cat fight that was taking up way too much of our time for too little result so we began to look for keyword phrases that people searched for that would bring us traffic. In those days the phrases only had to be two words long and things like 'hardcore sex', 'big tits' and 'hot porn' began to be much popular terms to target.

That last phrase 'hot porn' was one that I was always in the top four places for in Google for several years and in that time it sent me a lot of traffic and put a lot of money in my pocket. And I know others were finding the same thing ... one guy I was always competing with for that term was a good friend and we would often compare notes ... and always work at beating each other for that top spot too.

Of course others soon woke up to the fact that there was money to be made in two-word terms and the rush by webmasters for two-word key phrases has carried on for a few years now but search has moved on from those two-word search terms. Hitwise now says that 46% of all searches now being performed are for three-word search terms and the number of people who are looking for four and five word search terms are increasing too.

Now before you start stressing about how you're ever going to target three, four or five word search terms all on the one site just stop think for a moment ... and while you're thinking start writing down what some of those longer search terms might be. Perhaps even head over to Google trends and run some of those terms you're looking at through the little tool you will find there.

Once you've written down a few of those longer terms stop and look at the phrases you've written down and you should start to see a pattern there. You should be seeing that some of the three-word search terms include the words that would appear in a similar two-word search term. You should also see the same sort of thing in a four-word search term ... there will be a two-word search term in those four words and a three-word search term too.

Working some of those search terms into the text on your pages without making the text hard for surfers to understand ... and also making it obvious that you wrote it for the search engines and not for the surfers can be hard but there is an easy way to do it. Think back to what you know about people's search habits and the way the search engines return results when someone searches for one of those long terms. I've talked about before.

Unless people wrap their search term in inverted commas ... and very few people do that ... the search engines are not necessarily going to look for a long search term to appear on a site exactly as it's written. That means that it's quite possible to rank for a four-word search term even though only two of those words are adjacent to each other on your web page. As long as the other words in the search term appear somewhere on page your website may rank for what may be becoming a very important search term.

If you don't believe me ... or you want to test what I've just told you (and you should always test what others tell you about search) ... then install the Google toolbar, enable the highlighter and go searching for some of the three and four-word terms that you might want to rank for. Follow the link from the search page to the listed sites and the highlighter will stay active and should show you what I've been trying to explain here.

You might be surprised at what you see.