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Posts Tagged ‘search’
Monday, December 12th, 2011
We have been hearing a lot lately about Facebook. What it means to individuals as well as businesses. Most of us understand basically what Facebook is. It is a way to stay connected with family and friends and to keep current on events in their lives. That is correct. What a lot of us don’t understand is how it will actually help businesses just by staying connected with friends.
In nearly every aspect in our lives we depend on the references or opinions of others that we do trust in order to make informed and responsible decisions. This can be something as simple as where to eat to what companies we will trust our personal information on the internet.
That information is what drives the search engines to small businesses. It’s like the old saying “what goes around, comes around.”
For instance, you are chatting with a family member on Facebook. You may be telling them that you need a new roof replaced. They may have used a company from your area that they were very impressed with themselves. They give you the name, but they don’t have any other information. After you get off Facebook, because you trust that family member, you are going to do a search for that particular company, right? Right. That is just one way Facebooking and Search Engines can work together.
Social Media marketing is only going to grow. Make sure your business stays on track by using social media sites to build your business. Start a fan page. It’s just like word of mouth, but it will be word of friends and family. The family and friends of fans of your page will look at your page. Because they trust their family and friends, they will like your page as well. Your audience will only grow. And getting bigger means more sales for your business.
Tags: advertising, Branding, business, facebook, publicity, search, search engine optimization, small business, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | 3 Comments »
Saturday, November 19th, 2011
Online marketers like to talk about the long tail, but what is it and why is it so important?
Of course, many online marketers don’t do anything about the long tail. The might talk about it. But you’ll notice, if you watch for long, that they don’t do anything about it.
Think of search engine results as a lizard. If it helps, picture a chameleon. They have a pretty head. Colorful. And everyone likes to look at it. Everyone wants a head like a chameleon. But what about that tail? It’s long. It isn’t the head. It doesn’t have the brain. But it’s important. It has power.
The long tail in search is the search phrase that not many of your competition is focusing on. Yet, it has power. Not as much as the head. But then, it isn’t as colorful or pretty as the head either.
It’s just not the most attractive part of the lizard.
The most attractive search terms are those terms that everyone is going after. But they’re difficult to dominate. There’s a lot of competition. And you have to work your butt off to get to the top rank. With the long tail, on the other hand, since there isn’t as much competition you don’t have to work as hard. You may not see the same level of results as you would with a “head,” but the results you do get yield a profit.
Go for the long tail first. Secure a few of the long tail search phrases before you go for the head. Work your way up the lizard, not down.
Tags: long tail, search, search phrases, search results
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 3 Comments »
Sunday, October 30th, 2011
For several years now the search engines have been obsessed with ranking web pages based on popularity. They use link popularity and other measures to determine whether a web page is relevant and useful to a search query. Bill Slawski, who writes about search patents on his blog SEO By The Sea, recently wrote about a Microsoft patent that is based on measuring authority. How is this different?
I think it’s a good question because popularity and authority are not the same. For instance, Lady Gaga is one of the most popular performers in the U.S. and much of the world. But that doesn’t make her an authority on anything. She may know quite a bit about music, but simply being popular doesn’t make her an authority.
So what would make her an authority? According to Bill, any combination of several factors including
- Educational degrees held by the source
- Where those degrees were obtained
- Citations of the source in scholarly or technical works
- Number of publications associated with a source
- Number of social network connections and/or followers
- Whether or not the source is employed by and/or graduated from a well respected and/or highly cited institution
- Social networking information such as a number of posts relating to the source and/or a particular topic addressed by the source
- Number of patents held by the source
- Number of links to content associated with the source
- Number of articles citing work associated with the source
- Ratings and Reviews associated with the source
Measuring popularity is a lot easier than measuring authority. All you have to do is see how many people like something. But authority is a bit murkier. One website can be authority on a particular subject yet own a deficit on another subject closely related. Such is the nature of authority.
It’s nice being popular, but I think you’ll get more long-term mileage out of being an authority. Not only is that important for the future of search, but it’s vital for the future of online marketing.
Tags: authority, online marketing, popularity, search, SEO
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »
Sunday, August 14th, 2011
I don’t think many Internet marketers would question whether or not social signals are used in search. It’s pretty clear that they are. The only question is, to what extent?
Facebook and Bing have a very close relationship. In fact, if you are logged into Facebook, then take a look at Bing’s home page. You should see along the top navigation menu a little Facebook icon next to your name. If you click your name or the down arrow, then you’ll see a link. Click that link and it takes you to a page explaining Bing’s social search feature.
In short, Bing allows you to see what your Facebook friends like, not necessarily what they are searching for. And your Facebook friends can see what you like.
Google does something similar with Google+. If you conduct a search on Google, you’ll see a +1 icon next to the search results. If you +1 an item and you are logged into your Google+ account, then that item will appear on your +1s list. The same for the people you connect with through +1. Then you can see each other’s +1s – if that person has set their preferences to allow you that privilege.
But Google goes one step further. On the search results page, it will tell you which of your Google+ friends have shared an item on Google+ or on any social network they’re a member of. So you can really watch what your friends are sharing.
This is just the tip of the iceberg on social signals. There are plenty more, and I think the search engines will get a lot more sophisticated using those signals for search purposes. It will be interesting to watch.
Tags: bing, facebook, google, search, social signals
Posted in search engines | 2 Comments »
Sunday, July 24th, 2011
You may have noticed that in recent years social media is getting to be more popular than search. Why is that? I think I know a few of the reasons.
No. 1, search is a technical skill. Socializing is a natural human activity. Internet marketers who consider themselves naturally social will prefer those modes of marketing that allow them to exercise their natural human faculties. Social media does that. Search does not.
Search is hard work. Social media not so much. Sure, you might have to put in some time. But for the most part, you just show up and do what is natural.
With search, you have to do research and learn how to beat the competition. With social, all you have to do is build relationships.
Search is not something that everyone is interested in. Some people don’t want to type in a word or a phrase and get back a set of results that someone else thinks is important. Some people would rather find information based on what their friends say is important. Social media allows them to do that. Search does not.
Human beings are social creatures. Searching for information is not a natural human endeavor. Building relationships is.
Tags: search, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | 10 Comments »
Monday, June 20th, 2011
I know Frank Reed says a recent ICANN ruling that will allow large corporations to purchase their own domain name extensions for their brands will only be available for the big guys – small businesses won’t be able to afford it. However, I can see opportunity here for small businesses.
Where there are domain name extensions, there will be domain names. So, for instance, imagine Samsonite applying for one of these branded TLDs and paying the fee. Who will be allowed to have a .samsonite domain name? I’d imagine anyone that Samsonite allows to.
A large corporate brand could conceivably purchase its own domain name and sell domains to anyone willing to pay their fee. So if you sell luggage in your small town department store, what’s to stop you and Samsonite from entering into an agreement for you to have your own domain at yourstore.samsonite? (Under this scenario, by the way, you could also have domains at yourstore.royce and yourstore.travelpro.)
Or imagine this, the city of Dallas, Texas gets its own top level domain extension – .dallas. What if they allowed businesses headquartered there to have their own domain name? A city could conceivably give away those domain names on a first-come, first-serve basis. Or they could sell them and put the revenue into developing city infrastructure. The sky’s the limit, right?
I can imagine this scenario, however, there is one big challenge – a major hurdle, if you will. How can these domains be search engine optimized, or can they? How will search engines adapt their own search algorithms to make those domains more searchable, or will they bother?
Of course, .dallas could have its own search feature so Google’s search recognition may not be necessary. However, I’m curious what the nature of search would look like with thousands, possibly millions, of legitimate, ICANN-recognized TLDs. What do you think?
Tags: brand names, Branding, domain names, search, TLDs
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
Are you concerned about search privacy? If so, then you might be interested in two smaller search engines. Google and Bing, the leading competitors in search, store your search data for up to 18 months. But Blekko and DuckDuckGo are banking on you wanting more privacy than that.
Blekko – Blekko stores your search data for 48 hours, and that’s it. But the problem with Blekko is that your searches are confined only to sites that you or your friends tell it to search. The search engine makes use of “slashtags,” which are akin to Twitter’s hashtags. The intent is to cut out spam and undesired results from your searches. This type of search engine can be useful to your business if you can train your customers to use it and add important search terms related to your website as slashtags for their searches. Good luck in that.
DuckDuckGo – DuckDuckGo is more traditional in that they do crawl the Web and return search results based on keyword-related queries. And they do not collect your private information at all. Nada. You can also turn the privacy features off, if you prefer.
DuckDuckGo even refers you to two other search engines (on its privacy page) that do not collect your private information: Ixquick and Scroogle. The latter seems to base its results on Google search results, but it appears to be the only one of the four sites mentioned in this post to do so.
Are these smaller search engines good? Can they be good for your business? You’ll have to test them. I ran a test at both Blekko and DuckDuckGo. I was impressed that SBM was No. 1 at DuckDuckGo for the search phrase “small business marketing minnesota.” Of course, I’m No. 1 in both Google and Bing for the same phrase.
If you train your customers to conduct private searches at these search engines when searching for your business or services that you offer, then you might get some traffic from these sources.
Tags: privacy, search, search engines
Posted in search engines | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011
While trying to help a client with some content, I performed a search for “online dating videos.” I performed this search first on Bing and then on Google. The results? Bing had a website promoting an online dating video contest at No. 1; Google had the same site at No. 4. Page 1.
So what’s the problem, you might ask. The contest expired on December 31, 2009.
On one hand, you could argue the result was relevant to my search query. After all, the domain name is onlinedatingvideos.com. You can’t get any more relevant than that, right? Except that the information on the website is outdated, which means it isn’t relevant at all.
Relevancy has typically been defined solely in terms of the nature of content. That is, if you are promoting content related to basketball, then any content related to basketball is considered relevant. But here in the real world, that isn’t the case. Every searcher knows that. How many times have you searched for information only to find that the search engine returned results that weren’t even close to what you were looking for? Or worse, the information was outdated.
As marketers, we have to be conscious of this ourselves. What can we do to ensure that our content ranks well to reach the right searchers?
The dating video website was a site sponsored by popular dating site Date.com. It’s clear that they win with this search result. But searchers do not. Nor do the search engines. After all, if I can’t trust the results, then why would I use that search engine?
I think the search engines need a filter for discarding outdated information. This has been a problem at Google for a long time. It’s not new. I’m tired of seeing outdated information in search results. And I think this is one of the reasons that social media is such a good bet for marketers (and consumers) right now. What do you think?
Tags: bing, google, search, search results, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »
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