Monthly Archives: April 2009

Long tail keywords definition

When dealing with an SEO company, one of the phrases you will probably hear a lot when discussing your campaign is ‘long tail keywords’. Long tail keywords are basically a combination of multiple keywords to more accurately describe what you are searching for.

So what are the advantages of using long tail keywords?

Well, consider the keyword ‘SEO’. This keyword on it’s own is extremely competitive, so being able to rank highly for this keyword alone will involve considerable time and investment before you begin to see any results. However, if you were to to use another keyword to i.e. include the geographical location, for this would be less competitive giving you the opportunity to rank highly for it. So, instead of optimising for the term SEO, you may optimise for the term ‘manchester seo‘. Additionally, SEO as a keyword isn’t particularly targeted, as the searcher could be looking for an SEO company, a specialist, tips, advice or even just a definition.

If we used a long tail keyword, i.e. manchester seo company, then again this will be less competitive than a single keyword and is also more highly targeted (the searcher is most likely looking for an SEO company based in Manchester).

The longer your long tail keyword is (the more keywords it made up of), the less competitive it will be to rank for. However, make sure you do your research first. It might be easy to rank for a very long tail keyword, but if no one uses it as a term to search for, you won’t get any traffic from it. This is all part of your keyword analysis that should be performed at the very start of your campaign.

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Search engine market share April 2009

search-engine-market-share

While performing a weekly check to see how Elevator ranked for certain keywords, including manchester seo and manchester seo company, I noticed an increase in organic searches from Yahoo. On further investigation, I noticed that Elevator SEO was now on the first page in Yahoo for some of the optimised keywords, but that the traffic from Google was still relatively low compared to the traffic we were getting from Google which wasn’t ranking as highly.

After a bit of research I found out the latest search engine market share for April 2009. Unsurprisingly, Google is by the far the market leader with 81.39% of the total market share. Yahoo was in second place with 9.93%, which is a huge difference. This explains why less traffic originates from Yahoo despite better performance in keyword rankings.

The data also shows approximately a 4-5% increase in Market Share for Google (approx a 6.5% overall increase) since April 2008, and a 2-3% decrease for Yahoo (approximately 16% overall decrease). This perhaps illustrates the sustained growth of Google, and the importance of ranking well within as Google over other search engines.

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Tracking backlinks and directory submissions with Google Docs

link-tracking-spreadsheet

If you’re reponsible for creating backlinks to a website, such as submitting the site to directories, requesting a link or reciprocal link from a similar website etc it is good practice to make sure you keep records of all your activity. This is especially important if you’re not the only person responsible for doing this! A good method is to use a spreadsheet within Google Docs, which allows the same spreadsheet to be used simultaneously by multiple users in real time. Editing a document using Google Docs is much more efficient than most document management systems as it allows everyone to work from the same document at the same time, and even see what your colleague is typing!

The spreadsheet above has 4 columns:

  1. The URL of the website or directory that you are trying to get to link to your site
  2. The date you submitted your URL or contacted the site webmaster 
  3. The status of the request, which we have as either ‘Pending’, ‘Approved’ or ‘Failed’
  4. Any useful information or notes associated with the request, that may serve as a reminder or can provide instructions to other users

There are many other columns which you can add that you may think are useful and can help you assess the quality of the links. For example, useful columns might include:

  1. Page Rank (PR) of the page the link to your site is on
  2. The number of other links on the page
  3. The date the link was added to the site
  4. Type of link (i.e. directory, direct, reciprocal etc)

The more information you include, the stronger your records will be. However, the flipside is that the more information you need to fill in, the longer the process will take! It is also possible to ’sort’ the information, so once you have compiled a large list you can sort the data by i.e. status, date submitted, page rank etc.

Similar to Microsoft Excel, you can also change the format of cells with ‘rules’, using ‘conditional formatting’.  This allows you to review the status of your requests with just a quick glance using different colour schemes for each status type. For example, entering the string ‘Pending’ into the status column automatically makes the text bold and changes the background colour to a light orange.

Although this process may seem like a lot of work, ultimately it will save you time and effort and also any potential embarrassment by contacting the same webmasters repeatedly!

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Wolfram set for May 2009 release

wolfram
Stephen Wolfram (pictured) believes that his new search engine could be as important as Google

Wolfram is a new eagerly awaited search engine, that has been promising to be ‘as important as Google’ and is set for a May 2009 release. It is one of the research developments of the company ‘Wolfram Research’, named after it’s founder Stephen Wolfram (a British born scientist). The alpha version of the search engine (or knowledge engine) is available from the following link:

Wolfram Alpha 

So what’s so different about Wolfram compared to all the other search engines out there? Well there is certainly a lot of search engines out there, but Wolfram is very different from what currently exists. Wolfram claims that this system can understand questions given to it by a human user, and then actually compute an answer. This is very different to how search engines currently work, which is by referencing search terms against web pages saved in their index, and then displaying them for you ranked in their chosen order of importance. Wolfram said,

Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things. And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that. I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.

Wolfram claims that by using extensive and extremely complicated algorithms and techniques, they have devised a method to “curate all data” from the millions of available web pages so that it is immediately computable. Then, in order to interact with the system they have started devising a system that can handle and understand natural language.

Of course, getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be incredibly difficult. And for example we’re still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web.

Wolfram believes that with combined efforts of human experts they have made a breakthrough into actually making it work. The first stage of the process “Wolfram alpha” is released in May 2009, although Wolfram says that it is a project that will never end. It will be very interesting to see how it is used in the early stages, and could signal a new way of using the web.

I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the web. That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!
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Google in late stages of Twitter sale

The latest news circulating around the internet is all about Google potentially buying Twitter. Apparently Google is in the final stages of an acquisition which could potentially lead to a successful sale. How much this business deal would go for is also causing a stir. Twitter is currently estimated to be valued at $250 million dollars, although they turned down a considerably larger deal from Facebook at the end of last year for $500 million dollars.

Google aren’t the only people trying to buy Twitter, there is also competition / interest from other internet giants including Amazon. The real value that has been seen in Twitter is it’s potential to become a search engine with a real-time database; something that Google will be very interested in (and also don’t currently have).

Twitter have also been working on developing their own functioning revenue model, and being aware of the potential for a real-time search engine is probably what is making their own valuations that much higher than what is being currently offered.

Aside from the real-time search, others believe that Google would introduce a charging scheme for Twitter or use it to combine adverts and other sales strategies. It would be very interesting to know exactly what Google’s plans are for Twitter, and most importantly, what would become of Twitter if the sale was to go through.

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