Jennifer Laycock, of Search Engine Guide, begins a fascinating six-part blog series on the “Pinocchio Effect” in search. By that she means “…deep down, search engines want nothing more than to be real boys (or girls). That’s right, it’s that simple. As search engine engineers gain more and more ability to tailor the algorithms, their ultimate goal is to help the search engines make choices the way that people do.” 
Jennifer’s seeks to explain where this sort of “humanistic” thinking leads in terms of search strategy. Since aspects of human development are ever-changing and approximate, search becomes a fertile field for…
Paul Gillen’s take (in The New Influencers, A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media) on why blogs are so advantageous for small businesses: “It’s all; about search–Google and its competitors are the best thing that ever happened to small business. Companies that can’t afford to advertise can achieve international visibility in vertical disciplines through search performance….Blogs do exceptionally well on Google because of the search engine’s fondness for frequent updates and relevant page titles. A focused blog, podcast or videocast that stakes out an unclaimed niche in the market can come to dominate search resulots in a short time.…
26 December 2008
Open letter to GOOGLE
Chairman and CEO: Eric E. Schmidt
Co-Founder and President, Products: Larry Page
President, Technology and Director: Sergey Brin
SVP Product Management: Jonathan Rosenberg
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Gentlemen:
I find myself posing questions about Google PageRank to various web experts and link brokers and decided it was only fair to ask you directly about it here. After all, Google PageRank does kind of cut to the heart of everything we’re doing, or trying to do, on places like SEO Shootout–a site which, btw, my Google toolbars in both Firefox and IE currently indicate as having a PageRank of 3.
I myself labor…
Worio is a new engine that’s partly a social bookmarking site as well. It searches, in part, according to what other people have preferred in the same category. Sort of a search consensus builder. This is called “using recommendation techologies to improve the search experience.” 
Website Auditor Enterprise, from Link Assistant, is another software package for maximizing a website’s appeal for search engines. We get a little uncomfortable when a firm claims “guaranteed #1 search engine placement,” as Link Assistant does for Website Auditor. But the software sounds well-conceived and is modestly priced. So give it a look if you’re in the SEO market. 
A software package that’s similar (only paid) to Firefox’s SEOQuake, described yesterday on Shootout, is SEO SpyGlass. SpyGlass allows you to analyze web pages, including those of your competitors, for factors that produce high search engine rankings. 
Here, from Resource Nation, are ten more tips for website design for legitimate SEO benefits. 
Jennifer Laycock on Search Engine Guide refers us to advice by Greg Myers on SEMGeek.com that a website redesign be tested via paid search. Myers suggests setting a pay-per-click budget aside to test the effectiveness of keywords and other aspects of a site. His piece doesn’t take long to read, and may interest you.
Here’s an apparent paradox: Don’t blog for search engine benefits, unless you do blog for search engine benefits – the ones that result from reader attention. 
This good advice is provided courtesy of Mano Jasra on the Search Engine Guide blog, and explained by Lee Odden, CEO of Top Rank Online Marketing, whom Mano interviewed at the SES Chicago 2008 conference last week.
What Odden said was if you blog for search engine notice without having much to say as a blogger – without being passionate about your subject – you’ll run out of steam and you’ll never build a brand by blogging.…
Pleased with your new website? Spent a lot of time designing it and getting it built? Time to move on to other things? Yes, and no. Designing and maintaining a website for access by search engines is a never-ending process. If you want to improve your rankings on the search engines – keep attracting their relentless Web-crawling spiders – website maintenance is never done. 
It’s a continuous process of accessing results with given keywords, making adjustments and checking again: a systematic cycle of search engine, spider-crawling tuning. It’s fun, but never-ending. Don’t put up a site and leave it as…
