Ranking highly on Google for your top keywords is a priority for any search engine optimization effort. But what percentage of your efforts, budgets, and resources should you apply to that task?

Jakob Nielson provides strong anecdotal evidence in his new UseIt column, showing that his very popular website gets by far its largest chunk of traffic from Google, BUT the other sites that drove traffic combine to provide 35% more traffic than Google does.

Similarly, the top 10 search words and phrases account for a full 10% of his traffic, but 83% of the 110,399 terms that did drive traffic were only used once during eight weeks. And these single-time queries accounted for 3X the traffic of the top 10 terms.

The importance of multi-word terms and phrases is also highlighted, by a great chart that shows the distribution of 1-2-3-4-5 word searches. Short (one and two word) searches dominate the most active searches, but 'long tail' is filled with 3, 4, and 5 word phrases that in aggregate generate an enormous amount of traffic that would be missed if the site is not text-rich and at least somewhat optimized to rank for longer terms.

Look at your on analytics history to see if your results match those of UseIt.com. The lessons from his numbers are clear:

• Don't think about optimizing your site for just a small number of terms. That isn't how people search and it isn't where all of your traffic opportunities lie.

• Use extensive and expressive language to describe the subjects you cover. Searches will find ways to use even more varied language, and you have no chance to capture them if you stick with narrow 'approved' terminology lists.

• Work hard to rank well in Google, but also work hard to gain visibility and links at other search engines and at all kinds of other sites too.

I strongly recommend reading the entire column for more interesting and instructive information.

[via inside analytics]