Archives for August 2008

Aaron Worsham / Aug 4, 2008

Yahoo delivering on user created potential in search

Back in April we covered the web 2.0 expo announcement of Yahoo’s Search Monkey, a search result modification API. Now Yahoo is making the bold step of bringing a small group of Search Monkey applications into the default search results space. My prediction: Yahoo is evolving into a specialty search company.

When announced, Search Monkey was Yahoo’s early days search tool that summed up the company’s commitment to an open application development platform. Programmers working in the Search Monkey space were able to create specialized results within the Yahoo search application. If, for example, you run a restaurant and you wanted your chef’s three best entries listed with your name in the results, it could be done in Search Monkey. The catch was, people using Yahoo needed to install your Search Monkey app into their Yahoo profile in order to see the special results. That was, at least, before now.

Yelp and LinkedIn are the first two companies outside of Yahoo to have their Search Monkey applications added to the default search engine for Yahoo. The specialized look that Yelp and LinkedIn developed for their searches will now be in every Yahoo search result by default, meaning every Yahoo search page with Yelp or LinkedIn results will be serving up rich, contextualized information. I have to believe that other companies are seeing this as their best chance to help push their unique content out to one of the big three search engines.

This move begins what I feel is an important journey for Yahoo to distinguish itself from Google and Microsoft. User generated search results like Search Monkey may give Yahoo a speciality search advantage. If you know that Yelp (a resturant recommendation site) has more informative results in Yahoo, you’re going to start using Yahoo for your resturant searches. While it remains to be seen how many Search Monkey apps Yahoo brings into the fold, this is likely only the beginning. Yahoo’s press release suggested that both the Yelp and LinkedIn app were seeing 15% click-thru rates when tested in an A-B group, which is a very high percentage in search. It seems logical to me that as long as your app has a high rate, and your content is well structured for semantic markup (a requirement for Search Monkey to work properly. See Microformats), you too may find your user-created search layout added into Yahoo’s main trunk some day. Now you just have to contextualize your site’s content and write your custom Search Monkey application. Need any help?

Sarah Worsham / Aug 4, 2008

SEO for Business – More Than Just Keywords

I was speaking with a client today who said his previous SEO company asked him for 20 keywords and got his website on the front page of Google for all of them. But he still hadn’t seen his traffic go up, nor seen any leads from the experience. I think this provides a very important lesson about SEO – first you need to understand your business goals and your goals for your website.

Just because you’re on the front page of the search engines for some keywords you think are important doesn’t mean you’ll get more traffic or leads. You don’t know if those keywords are the same as what your potential customers are using. SEO is really an ongoing experiment in finding out how your customers want to find you.

After speaking with the client for awhile longer, he came to the conclusion that he really wanted more leads from his website. In his experience he’s found that he closes 80% of business from people who contact him. Leads are important way to increase his sales and are a good goal for his website. Now we have something to work with – and SEO isn’t the only answer, it should be part of an overall Internet strategy.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, internet strategy, internet marketing, internet consulting

Sarah Worsham / Aug 1, 2008

Which Social Networking Sites Are Best for Promoting Your Business Website Content?

One way to increase the awareness of your products and services (and your brand) is to have your website and/or blog content show up on social networking sites such as Digg, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, etc. Users of these social networks will hopefully discover your useful content and visit your site – possibly becoming returning visitors and passing on your name to co-workers, family and friends. Social networking sites usually have different types of audiences, so it is worth investigating them to see which ones work best for your target visitors.

Here is an summary of some of the top social networking sites:

Digg – Started initially in the tech industry as a way to link and rank news and articles and has quickly spread to gaming, and off-the-wall. Digg is trying to widen their audience, but in my experience, many business-related articles are quickly lost in their huge amount of submissions.
FaceBook – Started as college students only, but now open to all. Best for connecting with long-lost friends and for networking with acquaintances. There are business networks and groups, but FaceBook does not make it easy to separate close friends with business networking acquaintances. One possibility is to create two personas – one for work and one for personal use. Posts from your blog can be displayed in your profile and you can create pages to promote your business.
MySpace – Probably one of the more mainstream of the social networks, MySpace is heavily used by younger generations and by entertainment and music groups wanting to connect with their fans.
LinkedIn – Targets business users who want to keep track of their networking contacts. Business can join and create groups to promote themselves.
Del.icio.us – Is a link sharing social network where you can share links with notes and tags. Can be useful across multiple industries and a nice way to add more content to your own blog/site (check out their widgets).
Technorati – Started as a way to view news on tech blogs (hence the name) and see their ranking (as a function of how many other tracked blogs link to them) – is now used across many industries for an overview of what’s going on in the blogosphere.
StumbleUpon – Has a fairly general audience who use the site to ‘stumble upon’ new content that others have submitted.
Newsvine – Started as a sort of portal with voting for content from news organization, it now accepts content from anywhere, but still heavily favors news websites. May be worth a look for your business blog since you can also start your own column on the site.
Sphinn – Targets Search & Internet Marketing Professionals.

As mentioned previously, it is also worth taking a look at industry websites to see if there are smaller niche social networks and communities in your own industry.

Need Help using Social Networks to Promote Your Business Website? Get started with a free website analysis or contact us for a quote.

Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, internet consulting

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