Tag Archives: SearchMobile Carriers and Search Engines: A Dangerous RelationshipSuzzicks over at SEOmoz recently had some interesting insights into the crazy search results shown through mobile carriers. We’ve broken down the highlights for you here, below: Universal Results are by far the most mobile friendly as they allow users to be totally interactive. For example, you can click on a phone number to call, a map to get directions or even listen to a simultaneously buy a song. Though Universal results are interesting, they’re often fraught with trouble considering you never know what kind of result you’re going to get, depending on the phone you’re using. Along with Google’s algorithm changes, results vary week to week. For example, using an iPhone to look up “Britney Spears” a year ago produced vastly different results this year as the mobile carrier displayed results based on availability of adjoining apps. The recent Verizon/Google net neutrality news has deepened the issue of mobile … Read the rest Win Your Brand’s SERP Results PageDanny Dover posted an interesting whiteboard over at SEOmoz where he gave suggestions for helping businesses dominate the SERP results for their brand. We’ve summarized it for you here on our seo hosting blog as it’s potentially very useful for seo web hosting companies. Continue reading Microsoft Search Results now being shown by YahooBack in 2010, WebProNews started reporting on the Yahoo and Microsoft merger and how that affected search results. At that time, up to 25% of results shown on Yahoo were coming from Microsoft and up to 3.5% of paid ads were coming from Microsoft’s ad network. Yahoo’s VP of search stated, “The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft, however, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing.” For SEO, Microsoft’s team provides the following helpful hints:
Identifying Opportunities using Google’s Webmaster Tools Search Queries ReportTom_C, head of keyword research over at SEOmoz recently posted about capturing the opportunities on your site that are low effort but high reward which we’ve summarized for you here. There’s a great tool out there, the new search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools that makes this happen easier than ever. The first step… …is to gather the fruit. That means that you’ve got to do some research on your keyword terms in WMT and make sure to filter your results for the country you’re aiming for. The more filtered you are, the more accurate and helpful your results will be. After you’ve filtered, download the whole thing to Excel. The second step… …is to identify your fruit. This means you’ve got to do some replacements in Excel to get rid of dummy data, and once you do that, you should have a smaller list of keyterms that will … Read the rest How do you know what is search spam?by Mike Moran Last week, I asked the musical question, “Is Your SEO Strategy to Barely Avoid Spamming?” One of the commenters told me that he waited and waited in that article to find out what the line was between spamming and ethical behavior, but I didn’t tell him. So, that’s what we tackle this week. Spam has an easy definition: it’s anything the search engines don’t allow. You can read the search engines’ terms of service (for example, Google calls them quality guidelines) All the usual suspects are there, ranging from tricking the search engine by showing the search engines a different page from what the searchers see, all the way to creating fake links or buying links to fool the engines into thinking your page is better than it is. You’ll hear all sorts of different names for these tricks: hidden text, link farms, paid links, cloaking—there are … Read the rest Likes Mean Relevance in Facebook SearchNick O’Neill at All Facebook reports that Facebook has confirmed that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them.” He also calls this Facebook’s “war on Google.” While utilizing likes and the open graph as a ranking factor in search should help Facebook improve its internal search, it doesn’t represent much of a threat to Google search. Google indexes the web. Facebook indexes activity from Facebook users. There’s a pretty big difference, regardless of how big Facebook is. There is certainly something to be said for Facebook search, however. There’s no question that a lot lof people are using Facebook and spending a lot of time there, so having some kind of search strategy for Facebook is not a bad idea. Naturally, the Open Graph will play a huge role in this, and that means taking advantage of Facebook’s social plugins. As I’ve … Read the rest Which Matters More: Quality or Freshness of Content?The question at hand for Chris Crum at Web Pro News is what matters more: freshness of content or its quality? He revisits a few spoken rules from Google and weighs in a bit on his own and we’ve summarized his main points for you guys here… Matt Cutts over at Google Search once put out a piece a long time ago about the best practices for content, specifically how much freshness impacts the value of a piece of web copy. The question in the video is from a user and basically asks what matters more for blogs – freshness or quality? The old SEO notion that the more frequently a blog is updated, the better is at odds with the idea that a blog can rank well from a singular piece of quality content posted long ago. Matt’s response is that yes, quality content is ultimately the absolute most … Read the rest Liquid Query: Multi-domain Exploratory Search on the Web User search activities on the Web are getting more and more specialized: users expect more precise domain-specific results from search engines and typically perform complex tasks that involve exploratory, multi-step search processes. In this paper we propose the Liquid Query paradigm, that allows users finding responses to multi-domain queries through an exploratory information seeking approach, upon structured information collected from Web documents, deep Web data sources, and personal data repositories, wrapped by means of a uniform notion of search service. Liquid queries aim at filling the gap between generalized search systems, which are unable to find information spanning multiple topics, and domain-specific search systems, which cannot go beyond their domain limits. Liquid query provides a set of interaction primitives that let users make questions and explore results spanning over multiple sources, thus getting closer and closer to the sought information. We demonstrate our approach with a prototype built upon the … Read the rest Why optimizing your pages for search doesn’t workby Mike Moran What do you do when you set out to attract search traffic? If you start by optimizing your pages, you might not succeed, because you must answer the question, “Optimize for what?” You must optimize your pages only for a specific set of search keywords. If you accept at face value that you already know the search keywords you must optimize for, you might be in for a rude awakening. You might be wrong. 
Image via Wikipedia Often, we think that we know what people are looking for, but we’re wrong. We think that people are looking for our product names or other names we call our products, but they might be searching for something else. People often use different words than we expect. I remember when I worked for IBM that we insisted on calling our computers “notebooks” even though “laptops” was the word that searchers … Read the rest Google incorporating site speed in search rankings(I’m in the middle of traveling, but I know that a lot of people will be interested in the news that Google is incorporating site speed as one of the over 200 signals that we use in determining search rankings. I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts.) The main thing I want to get across is: don’t panic. We mentioned site speed as early as last year, and you can watch this video from February where I pointed out that we still put much more weight on factors like relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, etc. — all the factors that you probably think about all the time. Compared to those signals, site speed will carry much less weight. In fact, if you read the official blog post, you’ll notice that the current implementation mentions that fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed … Read the rest |
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