In economics, supply and demand describe market relations between prospective sellers and buyers of a good. (wikipedia.org)
In search engine optimization, we can use the supply and demand model to describe the relationship between the people searching for specific keywords (the demand) and the people creating content to meet that demand (the supply).
The following is a simplified explanation on how to visualize the supply and demand of keywords.
The more information you can gather when determining your most valuable keywords for SEO and SEM, the better. With IceRocket’s Blog Trend Tool, you have the ability to find out what is most popular in the blogosphere and view the trends for any keywords (comparing up to three at a time).
Google has a similar tool called Google Trends (see: Keeping Ahead of your Competition With Google Trends). However, Google’s tool focuses mainly on the search volume and news stories for keywords.
IceRocket.com now has a trend tool which allows you to see the popularity of your keywords over a period of time within the blogosphere.
At the end of this article, I give examples of how to use the two together.
1-800-Goog-411 has recently graduated from Google Labs to become a full-fledged Google product. It’s a free service that allows anyone to call in and find local business information.
However, what becomes more important than the service itself, is how to make sure your business is listed.
If you have been wondering how other businesses appear on Google Maps or in the search results when you are searching for a specific location, then the Google Local Business Center is your answer.
Local listing is the next frontier for the search engines. They have the game down pat for web-wide searching, but when it comes to finding something in your area, they do not perform as well.
However, Google is trying to stay the leader of the pack by introducing new technologies and products that relate to local searching.
What this means is you have additional ways to be found, outside of natural and paid search advertising.
I can’t honestly remember the last time I used a phone book, before I looked something up online first. …And I can guess that I’m not the only one.
Here’s an example: Yesterday I needed to buy a mattress (true story), and I did a search for “mattress store san diego.” There were three local search results that came up with a Google Map at the top of the search listings. Guess which one I picked? That’s right. The one that was closest to me with enough information and pictures on their site to make me feel comfortable knowing that I would be happy shopping there.
Because that mattress store was listed on Google Local Listings, they made an additional $530 that would not have come in otherwise.
The point is that times are changing, and local search is coming to the web. Either you get there first or your competitors do. It’s free and easy to set up, so no matter which way you look at it, it’s a good idea.
When you think of search engines like toddlers, the concepts for search engine optimization (SEO) get much more simple.
With young children, you need to make things extra easy in order for them to understand. Take children’s books for example. They usually consist of a few words per page and cut right to he point.
The same thing applies to search engines. You need to make it crystal clear what each page is about, and when they understand what each page is about, they know how to rank you. The more clear, the better chance of top rankings.
Claims were made against Target stating that their web site was inaccessible to the blind, and a federal judge in California has certified a class action lawsuit.
By not making their site accessible, Target is said to have violated federal and state laws prohibiting discrimination against the disabled. The National Federation of the Blind is included as one of the plaintiffs.
Using alt and title attributes (in hyperlinks) should be part of your best practices no matter what. Not only do they help make your web site more accessible to people with disabilities, they also makes your site more accessible to the search engines.
If laws are passed, web site owners and companies may be forced to make these changes.
First off, read up on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Then, make sure you are using Alt and Title attributes in your site at the very least. You will be making your site more accessible to both your visitors and the search engines.
Here are 10 Quick Tips
to make your site more accessible from the WAI:
Microsoft AdCenter Labs is a site that explores and announces some of their latest technologies in the works.
Although many of the working demos showcased in Microsoft AdCenter Labs include functionality that can be found in both Google and Yahoo, there are a few that hold some merit.
Xinu is one of the coolest tools we’ve come across lately!
Enter in your domain, and it will provide instant reports on:
If you want to save the information for later, in cases of benchmarking, you can export the data as a PDF.
Google has updated their adWords interface to allow advertisers to pick which sites they want to advertise on and where they want their ad placed on the selected sites within Google Content Network.
We’ve changed the AdWords Site Tool to help you find these new options. When a site has relevant publisher-defined placements, they will be listed beneath the site’s URL in the Site Tool search results. (See fandango.com in the example below.) To see all the placements for a given site, click the new ‘View all placements’ link, also found beneath the site’s URL.
What’s better than writing a post about Microsoft’s newest updates to their search engine? Getting #1 in Google for the examples Microsoft uses.
We posted our commentary on Microsoft’s updates to their search engine earlier today. Within their blog post, they suggest doing a search for ‘Microsoft taco truck’. Well, before the end of the day, we were listed number 1 in Google for ‘Microsoft taco truck’.
You can read our original post here... or do a search for ‘Microsoft taco truck’ in Google.
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the latest updates to their Live Search Engine.
According to the blog post, you can now use Microsoft’s Live Search to find the secret location of the Microsoft taco truck. I’ve spent years searching for that damn truck! Where have you been all my life Core Relevance!!!
Microsoft says, “We’re always going to be fighting people who threaten the integrity of our results by using illegitimate or malicious techniques. With this release of Live Search you should find the amount of spam is down quite considerably.”
What’s interesting is the first two results returned by their “taco truck” example above link directly to a site full of spam links.
“You might ask how we know spam is down? Experts on our team take a ‘randomly selected and statistically significant’ set of searches and measure the percentage of spam in the results.” — I guess “Microsoft taco truck” wasn’t statistically significant…
“Snippets”? Oh! You mean the “description”, got it.
Microsoft Live now searches 20 billion web pages. Four times the size of their previous index. “Enough said”, says Microsoft.
So, what does Google have to say about it?
According to Google, “Search engines’ published metrics for index size measurement vary greatly and are no longer easily comparable. Often, for instance, web crawlers retrieve duplicate entries for one page or links to documents that they haven’t crawled, and whose content thus isn’t in the index. At Google we believe the essential quality of an index isn’t the total number of documents, but its comprehensiveness - which unique documents are in the index. So we don’t count duplicate or uncrawled pages. According to our internal testing, our newly expanded search index is more than three times larger than that of any other search engine.”
Hmm… Interesting.
Microsoft explains, “It’s our job to be doing the smart thing to figure out what people really mean.” Which means, that Live Search will now assume it knows what you want to say. In their example, they assume that when you type in “nw”, you really mean to type in “northwest”.
Does this apply to the Paid Results? Um… no.
Again, using their “nw” example, we tried a few things on our own. It turns out the assumptions are only made for the organic search results. It doesn’t seem to be used within their paid advertising. If you type in ‘northwest care’, you get sponsored sites for ‘northwest’ and ‘care’. if you type in ‘nw care’, you get the same organic results, but the sponsored sites are now mainly about ‘care’, it doesn’t seem to know that ‘nw’ is the same as ‘northwest’.
Google is constantly updating the formula used to calculate your Google Quality Score. The lists below outline some of the core components.
Used to Calculate your Minimum Bid:
Used to Calculate Ad Position:
Used to Calculate Eligibility to Appear on Sites within the Content Network:
Used to Determine Ad Appearance on a Site-Targeted Site:
This article is related to AdWords Ranking only.
A high Google Quality Score will give you better ad rankings, placement on relevant sites in the content network, and lower minimum cost-per-clicks.
Last month, Google published a number of items that will reduce your Landing Page’s Google Quality Score if used.
Web sites and landing pages that use the following will be penalized with low landing page scores:
I wouldn’t suggest trying to fool Google either. If a user complains about your landing page for using the techniques listed above, Google may ban you from further advertising.
The Google Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. By calculating a “variety of factors”, it measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query.
In general, the when you have a higher quality score, you will pay less for each click on adwords, and achieve a better adWords ad position.
Google put this in place to ensure that only the most relevant ads appear for each search performed.
