by admin on February 24, 2009
Following a tweet that I ran across and digging a few links, I found one of the new style search engines. SearchMe presents a flash based gui that upon searching, allows you to scroll through lists of textual results while viewing quasi-graphical representations of the target pages. My first thoughts as an SEO were of course where am I ranked! Kind of vain, but very typical of SEOs.
After a couple initial searches for my SEO clients, I actually did some hands on results browsing. My thoughts of SearchMe are:
- The pages are busy. As I look at the pages, I don’t know that this is a bad thing, just different. As we have grown accustomed to the stereotypical search results page of Google, Yahoo, etc, I think we get used to the paradigm of text lists.
- My mouse scroller would not work on the lists. Dumb you say? Of course, but as a user I’ve grown accustomed to being able to scroll on the page by rolling the little rolled on top of the mouse. Convenience, UI, generally accepted user interface. I expect that they will tweak for something like this down the road (if there is a down the road).
- Clicking on a listing in the text list immediately loads the quasi-graphical page view of the search result. A big plus on the cool meter.
- Mouse over the listing and you get a text ad that pops on the bottom of the result. I guess they need a way to monitize their data, so I’ll not pass judgement yet as long as the ads are relevant. If the ads turn spammy, then I’m not so sure I want them associated with my content.
- Click on the magnifying glass, and you can zoom in on portions of the target page. Big plus on the cool meter.
- I clicked on a results page for a site that we do SEO on. I just want to see if the referer information will be helpful. To my dismay, All I get for the referrer is “http://www.searchme.com”. Now, that is not very helpful for an SEO. We need referer to keep up with which keywords are being searched.
I realize that SearchMe is still in beta. I was more interested in getting an initial read on it. From a UI perspective, I am not sure that all the bells and whistles are something I like. I am very much a utilitarian searcher - give me data in a very easily navigated format. I can see though where others might prefer it. Ultimately, as all search engines, they will be judged based on the quality of data they provide. For the few keyword searches I ran, the results were different than Google’s, but not to such an extreme that I would be concerned. As you dig in to more competitive terms though the results may vary significantly.
by admin on February 19, 2009
Pretty much everyone who keeps a pulse on the SEO community has heard of, read, commented on, or created a blog post in response to John C. Dvorak’s recent post on the PC Magazine site about SEO Fiascoes. For those who have not heard, he basically bashes a mainstay of many years in the SEO industry — long URLs. As the story goes he got some SEO advice from someone who supposedly knows what they are talking about gave him a comment about using long url’s, which he interpreted to mean that his traffic would rise if implemented. Or so his story plays out in his post.
Two things come to mind for me… one, he knows nothing about long URLs, how they came in to vogue, or what they were intended to accomplish. Secondly, to the SEO inclined he comes off as an idiot in a bully pulpit preaching about something he has limited knowledge of.
With regards to long URLs, they were not originally implemented as keyword laden URLs. What has morphed in to long URLs originally was an idea to accomodate the search engine spiders apparent inability to spider dynamic URLs.
Dynamic URL
http://www.threestonemedia.com/index.php?page=form&id=1 (this is a contrived example)
Long URL Equivalent
http://www.threestonemedia.com/contact-us (contrived again)
Back in “the day”, a website owner may have had mediocre luck in getting the dynamic URL form indexed as it was often the case that search engines did not spider/index dynamic URLs extensively. By converting a URL to a “long URL” the search engine spiders would find the page, spider it, and if it had any quality what so ever it would be indexed. Our first implementation of this type of URL conversion resulted in a site increasing from under 100 indexed pages to over 3000 indexed pages in a matter of 2 weeks.
In the current search engine world, the issues around spidering dynamic URLs has supposedly been addressed. Although if it was truly addressed, would the big 3 have come out with the new canonical URL tag recently? It really does not matter though. Just as old wives tales go, when non-SEO webmasters took tales of how to increase indexed pages and rankings, the general mantra has become - “throw a long URL on it and your rankings will increase”. This is surely bogus as search results are often not completely driven by any on SEO trick you can implement.
Back to Dvorak, my first thought was that he is an idiot (and I am not completely backing off that assumption) for presenting his opinion as an expert opinion on a subject which is outside of his skillset. However, the more I ponder his comments and the immediate backlash the more I think his SEO expert may really have been teaching him the art of link-baiting. His post has generated tons of links for PC Magazine (including mine — which are nofollowed - HA!). He has rejuvenated a sliding image, especially among those who view SEO as voo-doo. He might even have made himself relevant again.
I don’t think Dvorak would have thought this up of his own accord. I do however think that his SEO “maven” may have tossed out the idea as something to play with.
by admin on October 2, 2008
While we have not seen an impact on incoming leads and ultimately conversions lately, I am interested to see what others are finding. In my opinion, lack of confidence about the economy especially given the collapse of several major financial players and the on again, off again bailout plan may actually lead to increases in SEO spending. My logic is that generally online marketing whether via PPC or old fashioned SEO is largely underserved right now. I’m not saying there aren’t enough shingles up with the term SEO on them. Rather I positing that businesses may actually get more bang for their buck than with traditional marketing approaches.
How do you expect the current financial meltdown to affect 4th Quarter 2008 SEO spending?
- Businesses will not alter SEO spending (75.0%, 3 Votes)
- Businesses will increase SEO spending (25.0%, 1 Votes)
- Businesses will decrease SEO spending (0.0%, 0 Votes)
- There is no correlation (0.0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 4
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