Identify traffic-stealing competitors
Find untapped keyword opportunities
Create content that ranks higher
The Web is getting more social, and the internet allows conversations between consumers and those who sell goods and services online on a scale that can be global in reach. The nature of that conversation has changed from the days of mass media to now, and success in business on the Web may rely more […]
Starting out with my first website in 1996, I hadn’t realized that one of the most important pages that I had put on the site was a contact page. With a copy of “Learn HTML in 2 Weeks” at my side and a design that reflected my limited skills, I wasn’t aware of my limitations, […]
Sipping on a cup of coffee on a Wednesday morning in the lounge of the local bowling alley last summer, surrounded by shop keepers and insurance salesmen and other small business owners, I hand out my business card. Most of these merchants have actual places I can visit, while all I have are pages they […]
Robots reading cereal boxes in the supermarket? Googlebot at the art museum? Street signs and building addresses snatched from Street View images for local search, image search, and product search? Three new patent applications published at the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office this week explore the intricacies of reading text in images taken from Google’s […]
There are opportunities that small businesses have that large businesses might not even considering touching, or that they may not have the ability to respond to quickly enough. The aerospace industry uses the term “launch window” to describe the right combination of time and location for a rocket to be launched so that it will […]
Until very recently, you might have seen a label next to a search result in Google that indicated it was a “supplemental” result. A couple of patents from Google, one of which was granted this week and one from earlier this year, discuss how a search query might return results from an extended database that […]
Back in March, Christine Churchill wrote a Small is Beautiful column about the ability of small businesses to be flexible and creative, to think locally and explore niche markets that larger companies wouldn’t enter because they were too large or too slow to change in Survival of the Nimble. When your company is run by […]
One of the biggest stirs of 2005 in the search marketing field was caused by the release of a patent application from Google titled Information retrieval based on historical data. It introduced time as a dimension of ranking pages, with changes in content and linking and advertising and topics as factors to be considered, as […]
In the online world, we’ve seen the emergence of social networking sites that allow for the discovery and sharing of websites, of bookmarks, of common interests, and the meeting of friends and friends of friends. In the business world offline, small businesses have the opportunity to be socially active in a number of ways, from […]
Google returns results based upon content appearing upon individual pages, or at specific URLs. But that content could come from different authors, who have different levels of control over it. For example, a blog page may have posts written by more than one author, comments penned by others, and advertisements showing ads that even the […]
A wide range of newly published patent applications and granted patents, covering such ground as subscribed content in search results from Google; tag searching, detecting similar audio files, and simpler support vector machines from Yahoo; geographic based searching from MetaCarta; and data center architecture and smarter results to queries from Microsoft, amongst others…
Have you ever tagged an image in Flickr, a link in Del.icio.us, a video in YouTube? Have you used tags in these systems to find similar pictures or pages or videos? Is tagging is taking indexing away from professional indexers, and putting it into the hands of amateurs. Have you used a tag to indicate […]
Can indexing phrases from pages be an effective approach in identifying and filtering keyword stuffed pages, and honeypot pages aimed at attracting visitors solely to have them click upon ads? A new patent application published yesterday and assigned to Google, Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system, presents a reasonable argument in […]
Mobile search has its own rules, and if you want your pages indexed for people searching with handhelds, it may help to take a look at some of the patent applications that have come out lately from Microsoft and Google on the topic. Microsoft provided some details about what they are looking for in a […]
Some processes covered in patents granted last week by the US Patent and Trademark Office: Microsoft reranking results based upon redundancy of information, Ask reranking pages based upon affinities between searchers, Hewlett-Packard creating queries for searchers to investigate from scanned documents, and; Exalead forming dynamic query refinements from words found in documents located within search […]
The final day of the conference saw blog posts about the conference’s last three sets of sessions; some video interviews conducted by Lee Odden with Neil Patel and Cameron Olthius, Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg, Stephan Spencer, Gord Hotchkiss; and a retrospective of Day three, from the comforts of home, by Kim Krause Berg. The […]
The social side of search came out in some of the blog posts about Chicago SES today. Search Pulse 11, broadcast live last night during cocktail hour was filled with major search issues and special on air guests. Loren at Search Engine journal writes of Jim Hedger’s press conference last night, which uncovered a connection […]
Three new search related patents were granted yesterday at the US Patent and Trademark Office to Yahoo, Google, and IBM. The Yahoo Patent looks at how to measure the buzz around categories, topics, and terms from their use at the Yahoo Portal. Google’s filing focuses upon matching anchor text to find related documents in different […]
To those who were fortunate enough to attend the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago this week, I hope that you are having a great time. If you hadn’t seen it, Todd Malicoat, aka Stuntdubl, offers 14 Chicago Conference Conversation Creators. He also includes “10 Things You Shouldn’t say at SES Chicago.” I was contacted […]
The Chicago Tribune took a close and thoughtful look at the search engine market in China, in Baidu vs. Google this weekend (free user registration required). This morning, Baidu announced in a press release that they would be entering the Japanese search market in 2007. Some insights from the Tribune article: 1. Baidu is the […]