10 Easy Tips to Get Visibility on Google Search, Yahoo and MSN
November 29th, 2006 admin Location: Raleigh, North CarolinaProtected Content
GrayWolf’s versus Alex Centeno’s opinion on User Data
November 28th, 2006 admin Location: Raleigh, North CarolinaTo find Michael’s article please look into: http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/user-data-and-organic-rankings/
What is my opinion? I think that Google is not an amateur in terms of providing useful results but user intent is hard to predict. Can you use a combination of on-site (the publisher) and off-site (the public, competitors and affiliates) to determine the most accurate result for a search? I think so. In search engines the quality measure is to return exactly what the user is looking for, ranked from most to least relevant and considering the unpredictability of language that this person will have.
The only real way to define relevant is to add user-data to the equation. It totally makes sense in terms of diminishing the power of spam.
The one thing that I would hope is for Google to use not only stickiness, but also user experience itself. Not only time in site, but conversion information. If stickiness was the case then by creating longer landing pages people would invest an extra second in finding if the result was relevant or not.
Finally a trend that I believe to be true is that users are getting better at using search engines. At the beginning the language used to search was different than the one used this days (take a look at the concept of long-tails). This change in behavior should help engines in returning better results as the web grows.
I think that’s why Google should support SEO. Because the optimization of sites will ultimately share the good practices of the web and increase the users awareness of the SE capabilities.
The future of Search Engines
November 20th, 2006 admin Location: Raleigh, North CarolinaIn my opinion search engines as they are today they have a very inappropriate model. People on the web indeed use the search engines since there is no better way to find the content they are looking for, but the fact that they are presented with a long list (sometimes millions of web pages) of results makes it ineffective. Based on my experience as a consultant I can see that people typically search many times for things, when in reality they should need to search only once.
I believe that the future of search engines should be related to hiper-links. For example if I am using a search engine like Google(tm) to find the “cheapest HP laptop with WIFI” then I shouldn’t have to repeat my search several times and find a good combination of words to finally get to what I was looking for. The alternative approach should be categories of links. If I type: laptops” then I should be prompted with options: 1. information 2. interaction 3. transaction. Let’s say I want to buy a laptop, so I choose 3. transaction. Then 1. Manufacturers, 2. Prices, 3. Options (and so forth). By the time that I have drilled down to what I wanted I have saved time and effort.
The second most important recommendation that I have for search engines in the future is “Don’t use clicking” With the use of AJAX and the advances in CSS I think that the web in the future should be browsed by “onMouseOver” events. Clicking takes time. Some people out there would say that the event onMouseOver makes navigation very difficult since sometimes you move the mouse without wanting to visit something. We learned before to use the mouse to click in objects, the next generations should learn not to move the mouse unless you want to move somewhere else.
The future is very difficult to predict in any industry, in the internet industry the far future is 1 year from today. The only thing that is predictable is that it needs to get faster. Faster browsing, faster server responses, faster downloading and faster communications.
Alex A. Centeno . Internet marketing consultant.
