Search Engine Optimization

Yahoo! grabbed the attention of the marketing industry earlier this week when the company announced the debut of Yahoo! Search Direct. Yahoo! Search Direct is similar to Google Instant, where “suggestions” pop up as the user is typing in their search query. Yahoo! announced that “[w]ith Search Direct, Yahoo! content is combined with information from the Web to provide rich answers, not just links, and to give people the option to immediately engage or continue to a traditional search results page.”

In order to not look like a copycat program, Search Direct has a few key features that set it apart from Google Instant.

First off, before a user even begins to type in their search keywords, Search Direct provides them with the top ten trending searches. These results are updated every ten minutes to keep the trends fresh and relevant.

Similar to Google Instant, Search Direct predicts your search query as you type, and offers you suggestions that would finish your search for you. However, unlike Google Instant, when you scroll over the available options, the most relevant links for that search query pop up alongside the search box. Users don’t have to leave the search bar to find the information they are looking for.

Depending on your search (weather, phone numbers, addresses, etc), Search Direct will pull the answer directly into the search box, so users don’t have to click over to a results page.

Search Direct is still in its infancy, so it doesn’t work for every search. Typing in Brick Marketing, for instance, doesn’t yield any results in the search box apart from a few local business profiles. Most users are still going to have to click over to the full results page to find the information they are looking for, but the potential for Search Direct to provide all the information you need without a results page is definitely there.

When Google launched Google Instant, many SEO professionals worried what kind of effect it would have on SEO. Do you think Search Direct has the ability to change the way we search? Is it enough to take on Google? Yesterday, Mashable had an article that shared research done by eMarketer, stating that “Yahoo’s percentage of the search ad revenue pie will fall to 8.1% this year compared with 10.4% in 2010.” Is Search Direct enough to keep Yahoo! relevant?

Let me know what you think about Yahoo! Search Direct by leaving a comment below.

Algorithms are in the news this week and as far as that goes, this year.

In a surprising change, Yahoo and Bing are partnering up to take on Google.
Bing, to those who remember, used to be called “Live Search” and as part of the new deal is now going to power Yahoo searches.

Yahoo and Microsoft have been conspiring to take more of the market that Google has seemingly dominated  in recent memory.

This new partner ship between the two search engines, is projected to capture 31 percent of the market share, while Google maintains an approximate 85 percent share.

Despite this change in services, Yahoo insists that search functionality will not change.

For example, webmasters will still be able to use the “Build your Own Search Service”, Yahoo! Query Language, and Site Explorer.

In a less popular change, developers will now have to pay for utilizing the tools which used to be for free.

This deal only covers the search results portion of Yahoo services; other services will not be affected by the change except one; The only real casualty will be Yahoo SearchMonkey.

The Search Monkey service will shut down on October 1st and any associated third party custom result applications, infobar applications, and data services will also be affected.

What does this mean to the end user? You have a little over a month to say goodbye to the monkey.
The final breakdown of the Yahoo-Microsoft agreement will go as follows: back-end crawling, listing, and ranking technologies that generate search results will be handled by Microsoft. Presentation of the results, save a  “Powered by Bing” message at the bottom of the results page, will be handled by Yahoo.

Visually, it should improve searching.

Not to sit back and watch this happen, Google recently acquired Like.com, a visual search engine website for a rumored $100 million.

The idea it appears is to enhance Google’s initiatives towards visual searching.

Like.com’s searching technology, when added to the Google line up, has the real possibility of transforming online shopping to resemble more social media than e commerce.

Theorized changes include; ability to upload personalized photos with the intent to allow a search engine to virtually try on clothing and pre-fit and pre-try on color and style combinations for the best possible outcome.

This is not new technology per-SE, as Like.com made its debut in 2004 as Riya.

Its attraction is the algorithms that were developed to search for things like bags, clothes, shoes, and jewelry.

Essentially it can understand what “red shoes” and “black skirts” look like, and the algorithm cross-matches items to uncover the right combination for the desired look.

As the Yahoo modification is slated to take as long as until 2012 to complete, Google is looking to implement its changes in a more timely manner, so we may see an easier online shopping Christmas season.

One thing these changes have in common, is that visual elements in our searching have become more desirable than text based functionality, and this will prove more and more challenging to enforce going forward.

To me, this highlights the need for professional enforcement and monitoring and just reinforces what many of us already know;  the only constant on the Internet is change.

Now for few days remaining in the eriuqs spires healthy recreation contest, google has been shuffling results probably thinking what page is relevant to the search query “eriuqs spires healthy recreation”. I have also seen my entry (that is posted 3 weeks before the end of the contest) placed under penalty for 2 days, from page 2 to way page 11 I believe. Well, with the amount of time I have entered the contest, I am not expecting a miracle to win, all you have to do is drop a link and watch how google will pick the link up for your entry.

Few good things for this contest:

1. Have your content relevant to the phrase you are optimizing with. In addition, your content must be related to the site you are linking too.

2. Quality of content and its length(???). Having one or two liner entry is a big NO to win in the contest. Unless you have lots of high authority links pointing to your entry (needs to prove otherwise, two line sentence post + lots of high authority links).

3. Links. This is the basically the hardest part of SEO process. Getting links on blogs, news sites, social bookmarking, directories and other link opportunities, is by far eats the time of the process. One thing for sure, break some newsworthy post and the rest will come in handy plus a big traffic bonus.

4. Have a cup of coffee, stare at your PC and rest.

Well goodluck to all entries, hold on guys, and watch those datacenter dance, in this way, you can also check if your entry to this eriuqs spires healthy recreation thing still have a chance to propagate on the official contest DC. If you check different DC, you will probably see a new top entries and don’t be surprised for it.

Eriuqs Spires Healthy Recreation, another search engine optimization contest with a target key phrase eriuqs spires healthy recreation organized by Heart Rate Watch Company and montana real estate company. This promotional campaign focus more on recreational activities being handled by the company. that is one good thing. Why? We need some extra curricular activities on our busy life.

We don’t want to look tidy when we go out from our home or office because of those days jobs nor we do focus on our computer screen 24/7. That is unhealthy! Recreational activities like biking, Skiing, golf, cross-country skiing, fly fishing, mountain biking and hiking are just one of those we can do to at least unwind and free up our mind on those stressful work.

We know as a busy person, every minute of it is a fortune, but a relax mind and a healthy body creates more fortune than a tired one. Now going back to this seo thing, blog is one of the main point of entry. That is easy to be promoted using those rss, fresh content indexing on different search engine and can easily be updated in case we have something to say about the contest.

Oh, by the way, I have also joined this to test the waters out though this will end on May 29, that is, 11 days from now. And this post is my entry but still no word if this qualifies.