Personalization of search results is very important to the future success of any search engine, and its an effort well underway with many of the big 3 search engines as we speak. - Lorna Li
Last week I talked with Google’s Marissa Mayer about the user side of personalization. This week I had the chance to sit down with Matt Cutts at the Googleplex and asked him what the impact of personalization will be on the SEO community. One thing that was interesting in the Marissa Mayer interview was finding out just how much impact personalization would have for most of us in our Google search experience. The fact is, right now, personalization won’t make that much of a difference in many of our searches. - Lorna Li
Google came out publicly about using your individual search history to personalize its natural search results for your search queries over a year ago. But recent headlines about privacy of search data and Google’s new “transparency” about use of this data in the upper right hand corner of search results “Personalized based on your web history. More Details” have brought the idea of Personalized results to everyone. - Lorna Li
No longer will the top ten Google search results always be ten links to the typical web page. If Google deems a video to be of strong importance and relevance to your search term, you may find a link to that video showing up as perhaps the third search result when doing a web search. This represents both increased marketing competition and opportunity for B2B companies. - Lorna Li
It’s just over a half-year since Google launched Universal Search, its method of blending results from its own various topically-focused or "vertical" search engines. Since that time, the system has evolved. In particular, Google Universal Search now fills more than just 10 spots on the page, while shopping and blog search results are among new resources being included. Below, a look at these and related changes. - Lorna Li
The Firefox Web Developer Toolbar is one of the most useful tools you can have for web design. This is a short introduction that will show you some ways that you can use it when making web sites. To use the toolbar you have to be using the free Mozilla Firefox Browser. After you have the Firefox browser, you can download the Firefox extension called the Web Developer Toolbar. - Lorna Li
Newsworthy press releases help your business. What if you could get traffic and better rankings, too? The four easy steps outlined in this article help you get results. - Lorna Li
In the video, I walk through a relatively live (hence some wait times and even some unexpected data) demo of using the tool to find out more about the folks ranking well for the search phrase "camping gear" at Google. The video is about 12 minutes in length, but if you're curious about how we like to use the tool internally for basic analysis and competitive insight (as well as judging how particular sites might be achieving their rankings), this should be very worthwhile. - Lorna Li
The Google Analytics team announced the release of seven features today. The next stage in the metamorphosis of the popular web analytics tool. - Lorna Li
If you are willing to pay, there's no shortage of keyword tools that help you estimate your keyword demand—the number of searches made for a particular search keyword each month. But skinflints blanch at the thought of paying for anything, so we need to find free ways to estimate keyword demand. - Lorna Li
Digg, Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Newsvine, you name it - this is a place for you. A way to build community outside the site meet people from other networks, etc. - Lorna Li
Darren Hoyt, that brilliant WordPress developer and designer, explains how you can publish RSS feed headlines on your WordPress blog with a built-in WordPress function instead of using a plugin. - Lorna Li
The question about the "right amount of questions" to ask of people signing up to your opt-in form is a tough one to answer, we get it all the time. Then we have to give the lame answer "that depends." But it's true, it does depend. It depends on what you really need for your business. There are varying degrees of data collection methods, here I've attempted to outline a few. - Lorna Li
The SEO power of in-content (or “Wikipedia-style”) links may be up for debate but from theory, practice, and experience webmasters know that a link in a context is much more powerful than an isolated (sitewide) link in a sidebar. It is logical to think that internal linking should also be done with the help of in-text link rather than navigation menu. - Lorna Li
Google regularly clears out scraper sites and directories built for the sole purpose of generating adsense dollars. While doing so, Google also smacked down a few legitimate websites from their index. The penalties for the few who abuse the rules often hurt those who were behaving well, and the results don't seem to be pretty. - Lorna Li
With Google blocking rank checking software & the growth of personalized search, rankings will no longer be useful in measuring the impact of SEO. - Lorna Li
B2B copywriting is tough stuff. Instead of, "Wipes clean with a damp cloth," you may find yourself trying to simultaneously explain and extol the virtues of some complex mechanical system while being creative and persuasive at the same time. Copywriting for B2B SEO is even tougher. Here are ten tips to help you succeed. - Lorna Li
Want to know what it means to rank 4th in MSN? How about to rank 2nd in Yahoo? Or what about ranking 1st in Google and 3rd in MSN? Well then grab the number of overture searches the term had last month and use our new “Expected Clicks by Rank in Google, Yahoo, MSN and Other Tool.” By combining the AOL User Search Data, Hitwise Search Engine Market Share and Overture Search Tool, you can now estimate with some certainty how many clicks to expect for ranking anywhere in any search engine for any term. - Lorna Li
You can use third-party traffic estimators to compare your site’s performance with competitors’ performance. Of course, those tools’ data isn’t always good. In fact, it’s rare when you find a tool that a lot of people like or trust, and even more rare when I don’t trash a tool a lot of people like or trust. The current SEO metrics darlings of the industry are Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast. There are, of course, other tools that SEOs occasionally discuss. Traffic Estimator and StatBrain are two such tools, for example. Between these five tools, you can pretty much size up yourself as other people see you, and you can equally evaluate your competitors. You’ll get better data from these tools than you will from Google Trends (which received a lot of buzz recently). - Lorna Li
Peter Askew over at Domainer’s Gazette posted a nice working example of modern day search volume estimation entitled “How To Estimate Universal Search Volume *Without* Using Yahoo or Wordtracker“. It’s a nice example of how one can use real-world available evidence to estimate traffic volume, in order to act and move along quickly. It ain’t perfectly accurate. It ain’t exact. It ain’t precise. It’s an estimate. But with an estimate in hand, I can act now and start learning, while my competition is still in analysis mode, and that is often my goal. - Lorna Li
Flash SEO is either a no-no, experts tend to dismiss SEO for Flash altogether in this case, a matter of creating a text version in HTML/CSS or a rather complex endeavour. So you have basically 4 options: - Lorna Li
Majestic SEO is the backlink analysis service developed by Majestic-12 allowing for the exhaustive backlink report that can (potentially) be a fully legitimate competitor of and a great alternative for Yahoo! SiteExplorer. - Lorna Li
If the predictions that soon Google Chrome will be bigger than FireFox turn true, SEOs should seriously think about making websites as Chrome-friendly as they can. - Lorna Li
Measuring the effectiveness of a social media campaign can seem like a daunting task. But, after 2 years of extensive research, testing and execution of social media campaigns, we have developed some guidelines that can help you determine whether your organization is getting the maximum ROI from your social media campaigns. - Lorna Li
