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With the ever-expanding enormity of the Internet, desirable search engine results are more important than ever before. Search engines are generally an efficient way to narrow down the millions of pages of information available, to a few relevant results.

Advanced Search Features

The relevancy of results can depend on several factors. For one, the search terms used make a difference. Boolean search rules are probably the best-known and most widely used. These consist of separating specific terms with AND, OR, or NOT, to include or exclude results. To get an overview of the Advanced Search Features available in a number of search engines, check out this chart: http://www.mlb.ilstu.edu/ressubj/subject/intrnt/srcheng.htm

One rule to remember is that the more specific your search terms are, the better your results will be. For example, instead of searching for “dogs”, try searching for “terriers”.

Another rule is that less is more. Be concise with the search terms you pick - putting too many search words into the engine can result in confusing or too few results. In fact, most search engines limit the number of words that can be used in a search request to ten words.

Finally, you can also add filters to whatever you are searching. For example, if you are searching full text files, you can enter title:oxygen to find only files with the word “oxygen” in the title. The same can be done for URLs. If you know “oxygen” is part of the URL you’re looking for, you would enter inurl:oxygen. I use this tool all of the time to find information provided on a government website by adding inurl:gov to my search criteria.

Organic and Paid Search Results

If you’ve ever used more than one search engine, you’ll quickly realize that not every search engine returns the same results or links. There will be similarities and differences across most search engines, especially the “Big Three”: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

The Big Three search engines tend to include sponsored results (basically, results that somehow fit the search term as defined by the advertiser, and which appear above the real search results). Usually the sponsored results will note that they are “sponsored” results somewhere, so as not to be confused with the “real” results. Except, the search engine companies actually hope - that you’ll click on the paid results instead of the real results, so the search companies can get paid for you visiting their clients’ websites.

The results from the different search engines can actually overlap. If you want to have a wide variety of relevant links, you may spend time typing the same words into different engines, only to come up with mostly the same search results.

There is a tool that makes the similarities between the search engines abundantly clear; although this search tool is not good for much other than to show you how similar search results can be between Yahoo and Google: http://www.langreiter.com/exec/yahoo-vs-google.html

A variation on this theme can be seen here: http://ranking.thumbshots.com/

Meta Search Engines Combine Results From Many Search Engines

Instead of relying on the Big Three search engines alone, don’t be afraid to try some different search engines. Meta search engines are a good way to be more efficient with your searches, and they will help you to get a much more diverse set of relevant search results. Meta search engines, such as http://www.Clusty.com and http://www.Widow.com are both good at returning a wide variety of results.

For demonstration purposes, let’s take a look at some different search terms in each of five different search engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN, Clusty and Widow. The three search terms used for this unscientific experiment are: unemployment, weather, and Myanmar.

Test Search: Unemployment

For “unemployment”, Google, Yahoo and Clusty first returned sponsored links. MSN and Widow both returned online encyclopedia results - MSN using Encarta’s encyclopedia; Widow returning Wikipedia.org results. Wikipedia also showed up in the other three search engines, as well, but further down in the results lists.

A similarity between all of the search engine results was they each turned up specific states’ unemployment links in the first page - primarily California, New York, and Ohio. Google and Yahoo also brought up current news items related to unemployment.

Widow.com (the meta search engine) provides additional tools in the left sidebar for related-keywords and clustered search options. For the search term “unemployment”, the clustered results offered: insurance, compensation, unemployed, rate, workforce development, benefits eligible workers, information employers, data, individuals, and welcome Ohio. All of these additional search terms are just a click away.

Test Search: Weather

The next term is “weather.” In this search, only Google and Clusty returned a sponsored result at the top. The top result for the other three engines was weather.com. The secondary results in each of the engines included, in varying order, Yahoo weather, and NOAA’s National Weather Service website.

Differences for the term of “weather” included MSN showing MSN weather in their results, as well as a UK weather website on Widow.com. Again, I was impressed by the optional clustered search engine results on Widow.com. These included options for city searches, Doppler, and the latest weather news.

Test Search: Myanmar

The final search word for the five search engines was Myanmar, to test the relevance of findings for a region that’s received a lot of media attention in the last few months since the Myanmar Cyclone. The results on Google started with several colorful maps of the area, a feature that really stood out for me.

As for similarities, each of the five search engines contained one or more Wikipedia results. The search engines also included current news links and some tourism links. Once again, many of the clustered search results on Widow.com caught my eye: travel, Burma (Myanmar’s previous name), culture, cyclone, statistics, politics, government, and tours.

Search Lessons Learned

What are we to learn from this little search engine experiment? There are several things that you can take away from this. For starters, the Big Three search engines tend to have pretty similar results. Occasionally there are differences, but not anything spectacularly different.

Another conclusion that can be drawn is that you are more likely to get sponsored results when you use more general terms (unemployment, weather), as many advertisers can link their products to a wide variety of general terms.

The most pleasant feature is the availability of diverse range of clustered and related terms, available with a single click of the mouse, on Widow.com.

The potential for Meta search engines to cut down on multiple searches is there, if users are willing to break out of their typical searching habits, to uncover jewels of information within the existing data.

The Widow.com Meta search engine goes above and beyond what I have experienced with other Meta search engines. The Clusty.com Meta search engine also offers clustered search terms, but for some search terms, some of its offerings are simply nonsensical.

How I Discovered Meta Search Engines

In the course of my own work, I spend a lot of time searching on the web for information on a variety of topics. As a ghostwriter, I frequently write on topics that I know little about ahead of time, so I do loads of research to help me cover the topics I write about in a much more logical and educated manner.

I used to use Google almost exclusively. But, one day I was researching an article topic that I had written about previously. Imagine my aggravation when the only material that Google would show me on the topic was material I had written myself!

While I had written about that topic previously, I was not an expert on the subject. I did not want to simply rehash what I had written before; I wanted to write on the topic in a new and different way.

I tried Yahoo and MSN and met the same disappointment with the search results. Then I went to http://www.DogPile.com. I thought their results were awful, but I liked the concept of the Meta Search Engine.

I tried many Meta Search Engines, and then I came across the Widow Search Engine. I liked it so much that I made it one of the default search engines in the article search tools on my website. The thing I like about Widow best is the Clustered Search Listings. With Clustered Search, Widow brainstorms the keyword variations for me, so that I don’t have to figure out the related search terms on my own. As they say in the MasterCard commercials - this is priceless!

In the end, this article is not about which search engine will send the most traffic to a website you own. Instead, this article is about which search engine will give you the best information to help you find the answers you want and need.

Good luck and happy searching.

Bill Platt is the owner of http://www.thephantomwriters.com article ghost writing and article distribution services. He has been helping small business owners promote their online businesses, using reprint articles, since 2001. In 2007, Bill wrote an ebook titled, “Article Marketing For Traffic, Sales And Profit”. You can get Bill Platt’s ebook here.

Tags: SE Positioning, search engines

Since links are the fabric of the web and they allow us to move from page to page and site to site, they also play a crucial role in deciphering the context of your site when analyzed from outside sources (particularly from search engines).

Call it osmosis, link transference or what you like, the fact remains that “what other sites say about you” meaning “how they link to you” (or how you build links) matters.What percentage of inbound anchor text (the text in the link itself) variety does Google and other search engines deem as a significant percentage vs. your on page factors to assess the context of your site? Do they look at your content or your site reputation more when assessing where to rank your content?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: link reputation, SE Positioning, search engines, seo

Those who have been in the industry since the late 90’s have seen huge changes in SEO. The industry has really matured. But in the grand scheme of things, if you were to plot SEO on a product life cycle chart you would see that the industry is still in its’ infancy.

Except that we’re poised for some serious growth.

SEO - Introduction Stage - Starting about 1998
Companies who were around in the introduction stage often had to build product awareness and develop a market for SEO.

In the early ‘2000’s, many of our clients had just build their first websites. This was a significant investment for them and they thought that now that they have a website, the online sales would just flow in. Many didn’t realize that they had just invested serious coin into an over-priced business card. Because nobody could find them.

At this point, there was little consistency in the product. And as the algorithm got more complex, the SEO offering varied more. Some companies were offering to “submit to hundreds of search engines” (some still are) whilst others were offering usability, analytics and site architectural input in addition to on-page and off-page SEO.

SEO - Early Growth Stage - we’re still just at the beginning of it.
In the early growth stage, smart SEO companies are beginning to think about building their brand and to increase market share.

Demand is increasing as more customers understand the benefits of “getting found”. There is some competition at this stage but because the market is broadening so much, competition is limited and there is still a huge amount of camaraderie within the industry.

10 years into it, it’s easy to assume that our industry is more mature than it actually is.

We’ve only just begun.

Customer Implication
Demand has already started to increase but it is going to skyrocket. And it’s going to come from all types of business from very small customers to Enterprise type of businesses.

Up until recently, the neighborhood dry cleaner didn’t care if someone across the country found their website because they deal within a 5 km radius got very little benefit from optimizing their website. Now as search gets much better at localization, those local business will become much more serious about the opportunities online

It is also likely that we’ll see a lot of growth from Enterprise clients. These clients previously resisted SEO due to the complexity of working within legacy back-end systems. As technology increases and back-end systems become less expensive for more capability, we’re going to see companies replace their antiquated CMS’s with SEO friendly options.

Another change that this stage of the product life cycle will bring is in our relationship with the client. As SEO becomes a bigger part of the mainstream marketing mix, our customers will become more and more knowledgeable about SEO (we’re already starting to see this).

We’ll move from having a sales / consultative role to being a thought partner. Our clients will have a good understanding of what needs to be done but they’ll outsource it to us because we’re more efficient at implementing.

Competition Implication
With high growth in revenues, low barriers to entry, and no certification required, the SEO industry is prime for attracting any and all new entrants.

There have always been new competitors. But the face of our competition is going to change greatly. Up until now competition has focused primarily on small start ups and web design firms who decide to add a search component. Some stick around but many are wiped out with the next major shift in the algorithm.

This phase of the SEO life cycle is going to attract better capitalized, stronger competition from many sectors. These new entrants are attracted to SEO by the potential for profits not by the fit with their offering.

We are already starting to see traditional media firms seek to protect their eroding revenues by grabbing a slice of the online pie. But WalMart has shown us that future competition could be anyone. And it will be.

No all new entrants are attracted by dollar signs. There are also companies that are feeling increased pressure to offer a more well rounded package. As the integration of offline and online marketing services increases, customers are putting more pressure on agencies to handle the full scope of their marketing spend including the online component.

Although we’re already starting to see increased competition, many existing SEO companies aren’t feeling the pinch yet because demand is also increasing.

One implication of increased demand coupled with new entrants to the market is the impact on supply. We’re starting to experience a shortage of experienced SEO talent

SEO talent is a scarce resources. And this scared resource is not yet being renewed at a fast enough pace. Whilst some colleges are starting to offer digital media / internet marketing diploma, these grads know very little about what it takes to optimize a website.

Moreover, what they do know is limited to theory. It’s one thing to know that links are important to ranking. Its an entirely different thing to know how to effectively build links.

So what?

Who cares where we are in the product life cycle?

Although we’ve already experienced a lot of growth, this growth is nothing compared to what we’re about to experience.

In this next stage of the SEO life cycle, we’re going to see shifts in our clients, competition and product offering. Knowing that this is coming, will allow you to prepare.

If we know that face of our competition is going to change from other small to mid sized SEO’s to large Agencies and Enterprise size companies in totally unrelated industries then we can prepare for this by determining how we’re going to differentiate ourselves from the new entrants.

And if we know that there is going to be increased pressure on skilled resources then we should be developing in house training programs now.

The future is now. And it’s only just begun.

Tags: search engines, Website Promotion

In Cajun cooking, almost every dish starts with what’s known as “The Trinity” onions, celery and bell peppers. These 3 ingredients are the foundation of almost every savory dish. Whether you’re eating gumbo, jambalaya, or even a Cajun soup, they all start with these components. These form a delicious base to each of these dishes.Like Cajun food, getting a small business listed on the search engines also is based on a trinity of components. These components give your search engine efforts a base to be built off of, and ensure that you’ll be successful. Those are: the ease of getting listed, the effectiveness of your listing, and then finally, the level of placement.

1. Ease: If you’re like most small businesses, you’ve got a lot going on. You’re running your business, doing your marketing, creating your products and/or delivering your services, and trying to squeeze in some life balance on the side.

Hours and hours of search engine optimization work are the last thing you need to add to your to-do list. You need a simple, easy system to get the most search engine attention for the least amount of work.

2. Effectiveness: Effectiveness is two-fold. First, you want your efforts to be effective with the search engines. You want them to look at your site’s code and to rank you well.

Second, you want your listing to be effective for your searchers. If a searcher is looking for products or services like yours, then you want them to see your listing’s description, read it, and to be compelled to click on it.

3. Position: Your website probably doesn’t have to be ranked #1 for your best keywords to get all the attention you need being in the top 10 is just fine for most small businesses. You also probably don’t need to be ranked well for a very general term, like “consulting”. You have to find the combination of search terms and position on the search results that works best for your business and gives you a balance of ease of maintenance (staying in the rankings) and bringing you good clients.

How do you take advantage of the trinity when you work on optimizing your site? Here are some suggestions on how to address each of these issues in your plan:

Ease:

1. Start with solid advice. There are a lot of search engine systems out there, and a lot of “how-to” advice. Make sure that the system you’re using has been tried and tested, so that you’re not just going to be spinning your wheels as you work on your optimization.

2. Break your efforts down into short activities. Optimizing your site for the search engines takes several steps and trying to sit down and just do them all, end-to-end, will take a while. To preserve your sanity, and to do things in a way that will make your efforts have the most impact, plan to do each step one at a time, and then upload your revised files and wait a bit before making additional changes. That way, you’ll avoid going crazy, and you’ll also be able to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts along the way.

Effectiveness:

1. Really look at what you want your site to do for you. Is it really important that you get huge numbers of visitors to make lots of sales? It may be if you’ve got a product to sell. But, if you’re a one- or two-person service business, then it’s more likely that you only need a few well-qualified visits to make all the sales that you can handle.

2. Experiment with your description in your listing. Use different description tags on different pages of your website to see which compels more searchers to click. By looking at your site statistics, you should be able to see which page your visitors are coming in through.

Position:

1. See where you really need to be ranked. If your optimization efforts have gotten you to the second or third page, then you’ve already got a good start. You may just need to do a bit of work to raise your ranking to the first age.

2. Ask your best clients and visitors how they found you. What words were they searching on? Which search engine did they use? You want to get more of these “best” clients through your website, so asking clients who you already work well with about how they came to work with you will help you to make your listing more effective.

These few tips will help you optimize your website with a solid base of the optimization trinity�making sure the process will be easy, effective and will get you the position you need.

Erin Ferree is a brand identity designer who creates big visibility for small businesses. As the owner of elf design, Erin is passionate about helping her clients stand out in front of their competition and attract more clients. One of the best ways to do that is with Search Engine Optimization, which you can learn about in her eLearning product, Raise Your Ranking, which is available at http://www.howtoraiseyourranking.com .

Tags: search engines, Webmasters

Peter Morville is widely recognized as a founding father of information architecture. He co-authored the best-selling book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and has consulted with such organizations as Harvard, IBM, the International Monetary Fund, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute and Yahoo! Peter is president of Semantic Studios, co-founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute and a faculty member at the University of Michigan. Peter’s latest book, Ambient Findability, was published in 2005.

In his presentation for Webstock 2008, Peter called himself a crazy librarian who fell in love with the web. Peter designs sites so that people can find what they’re looking for. It’s not just about findability, Peter says. The structural design of shared information environments is important. The vast majority of Internet architects don’t even know the term Internet architects. Content authors, bloggers etc. have a responsibility for shared information. One lesson Peter says he constantly needs to give clients is that it’s not enough to provide a single taxonomy. You can bring multiple ideas and formats to a single document to a wide audience with different needs. The Stanford University site is a good example of a usable site. When you design for the web, you should provide usable navigation and a site search facility at the very minimum.

The Consumer Reports site is another good example. It doesn’t stop with global navigation but gives a couple of information sub-sets to tell the user what the site database consists of. One size does not fit all in taxonomy. The Mayo Clinic use a more user-friendly design by listing all diseases by their most common name rather than the formal medical terminology. The site was re-designed with users in mind and has positively flourished as a result. It demonstrates that you need to design site taxonomies for specific audiences and users.

The elements of the user experience are multilayered. Peter is sick of the word “usability” as it means different things to different people. Depending on who you talk to, usability could mean:

• useful
• usable
• valuable
• findable
• credible
• accessible
• desirable

All these elements are important. Peter recommends asking these three questions when designing a site layout:

1. can users find your web site?
2. can users navigate your web site?
3. can users find your products and services despite your web site?

He also claims that not enough attention is paid to accessibility these days. Your web site needs to advance your business goals and inspire trust. Peter mentioned Google search as an example. People tend to trust results that are listed high in Google. Findability and credibility are therefore increasingly connected.

Peter has provided site usability services for the National Cancer Institute. When he began working with the site, 90 percent of traffic was from the general public who had been diagnosed with cancer and were seeking specific information. Peter helped re-design the site to make sure these people found the information they were seeking about specific cancer types. At the time Peter worked on the site, an amazing 70 percent of searches on the major search engines were for specific types of cancer so the Cancer Institute used this information to improve the findability of their specific cancer pages.

We can talk about findability at the level of the object and the system, says Peter. What are the ways the object/data can be found? How do we make it easier to be found? How does the environment support the navigation and retrieval of the object/data? What he calls ambient findability is the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. The destination is never quite reached because perfect findability is impossible.

We’re now drowning in information and suffering from information anxiety in the information age. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” says Herbert Simon (Nobel Laureate Economist) or the Dilbert version of this is: “Information is gushing toward your brain like a firehouse aimed at a teacup”. We are creating alternate ways to receive information via our digital networks, Google Earth being a good example. Another example is the “kid tracker” which is a GPS wristwatch your kids wear so you can know the location of your kids 24/7. Soon, people will be able to track other people every second of every day. This raises privacy concerns.

Peter showed a couple of examples of findability technology available now. Within a wireless network area, you can now use the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance to add electronic tags to items so you can locate them at any time. Hospitals use the technology to tag wheelchairs so they can be found instantly and save staff time and money searching for them. It’s claimed this saves one hospital $28K per month. Another example was the keen couple who had tagging devices embedded in their hands so they could open each other’s apartment doors and access each other’s computers. How romantic!

So in a world where the information haystacks are getting larger, how do we create information needles? How do we solve the findability question? We need to think about business intelligence, visualizing patterns etc. Back in the 1980’s Peter wrote an article claiming that the Internet will turn everyone into a librarian and now it’s happened. We can’t stop talking about meta data, social media labels, bookmarks and Flickr tags! In 5-10 years, Peter thinks that many sites will become like Amazon in terms of findability.

Search is one of the most important ways we learn. “Search has become the new interface of commerce” says John Battelle. Search startups such as Endeca and Trexy are pioneering new ways to search. Everyzing is a search engine that allows you to search audio files by individual words within the transcript. Buzzillions is an example of a site using both structured meta data and tag search. Hybrid search solutions are launching all the time. Google is struggling with how to provide data the way people categorize it. Google Book Search is an example of a site with usability issues. Flickr solved this issue by using clusters to sort photo tags, with huge success.

Peter says that we need to focus on usability in the future. Everyone working on your site needs to have the same goals in mind. He completes his presentation with the story of the three stone cutters. There is a guy wandering in the wilderness and he comes upon a quarry and asks the workers there what they’re doing. The first stone cutter is working at a slow pace and says “I’m making a living”. The second guy is working really hard and fast. He says “I’m doing my very best”. The third guy is working at a pace somewhere in the middle but with a smile on his face. He says “I’m building a cathedral”.

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Tags: search engines, seo positions