SEOMoz.com has a funny post about unusual long tail terms that have resulted in hits to their site.

My favorites are:

How to read minds - as if Google could tell the answers to that.

Better than google – as if Google would tell the answers to that.

How does google see my site - Yes, as a outlet for Adsense ads of course.

Now, some gems from my own site:

Blog nightmare – really my site isn’t that bad is it? I can explain. I posted about this cartoon by Dilbert.

First time buyers picky picky – almost like a James Bond movie from the 60’s

Close encounters of third kind sound bites – well, I know blogging is alien to some people but come on, it doesn’t bite. It is strictly vegetarian. : )

This recent post by Mike Levin at HitTail really nails why you need to be using this long tail SEO tool.

One of the amazing trends I’ve discovered in watching the HitTail discussion on the Internet is how Google Analytics and HitTail so often get invoked in the same breath, such as comments from The-Secret and shopgirl.

While Google analytics is statistics, which gives you the typical top-10 lists, HitTail is on the other hand, based on anecdotal and empirical evidence –working much like a private eye piecing together clues. Recently, I was slammed by a HitTail user accusing us of not really being a longtail tool, because we stop 350 keywords in, and the long tail hardly even starts at that point. I humbly reminded him that the “My HitTail” tab was only one of five –and actually the least-important one at that.

That’s right!

We only made that long tail graph to demonstrate to people how things JUST START TO GET INTERESTING in the tail, and how much attention is improperly spent on the head, where you’re already performing well! So, I added some text to the bottom of the chart to make sure people get the subtle message of how the data displayed in the chart is actually UNIMPORTANT!

The fact that we’re not Web analytics software, applying statistics to the data is what makes people so addicted to HitTail. We’re not insulating you from the data or interpreting it for you. We’re merely zeroing in on serendipitous events that happen to be handing over competitive intelligence. It’s not some derivative of this event that’s important. It’s the event itself–that someone found your site on such-and-such a term, but they worked really hard to find you–usually deep in the results.

This tells you two things:

1. You CAN be found on that term. Hence, the value of identifying the first time anyone ever found your site on a particular term. It demonstrates POTENTIAL–like surveying for new oil fields.
2. There’s a bunch of crap ahead of you in the search results that likely did not satisfy the searcher, or else they would have stopped sooner.

So, merely by virtue of using HitTail, you’re simultaneously surveying for new fields of website traffic “oil”, and you’re verifying that no one already has a strong claim to that property. There’s no waiting for the polar icecaps to melt to claim your Internet gold. You don’t have to battle Russia, Canada, the U.S. and Denmark for North Pole natural resource rights. All you have to do is choose an already-search-optimized publishing platform, such as Blogger, SquareSpace, TypePad or WordPress, and take HitTail’s writing suggestions.

It’s that easy.

Acording to James Lamberti of comScore, AOL gets the highest percentage of paid clicks at 24%, followed by Google at 13%, Yahoo at 11%, and MSN at 8%.

From this basic data, a high ranking for any given query in Google is worth roughly four times that of a visible AdWord link for the same query. Stated another way –

You have to show four PPC links to create click-through opportunities equal to one organic ranking.

Imagine you were trying to decide where to spend your online marketing budget – do you spend 100% of it on a PPC campaign (arguably predictable, more measurable, and guaranteed) or do you balance it with alternative SEO expenditures to create organic results.

Imagine though you could create tens of thousands of unique key phrases that rank organically high. Could you achieve the same in a PPC campaing? Probably not, and if you could, what would be the true cost of such a plan?

Blogs tend to create tremendous visibility in the long-tail by helping authors focus on specific subjects for each post. Indeed, they are one of the best solutions to creating organic visbility. And for every way that your blog posts can be found (and are found), they are roughly four times more valuable than PPC equivalents.

Read more at Blogging for Organic Visibily vs PPC Campaigns