Keyword Search: What Does the Future Hold?
TechCrunch drew our attention to an insightful post by Nova Spivack of Radar Networks on the future of keyword search in a world where we might (finally) see semantic search arrive and deliver on its seemingly endless promise. Spivack’s main contention is one we can certainly identify with — as the explosion of information availability floods our search channels with more and more results, both relevant and irrelevant, intelligent data seeking methods become more and more essential (as represented in the chart below).
For those of you who prefer words to visual aids, Spivack explains:
Keyword search engines return haystacks, but what we really are looking for are the needles . The problem with keyword search such as Google’s approach is that only highly cited pages make it into the top results. You get a huge pile of results, but the page you want—the “needle” you are looking for—may not be highly cited by other pages and so it does not appear on the first page. This is because keyword search engines don’t understand your question, they just find pages that match the words in your question.
Spivack has been discussing these issues for some time, most recently at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam earlier this month. This is the presentation he gave:
Our take? Semantic search sounds amazing in theory. But it’s something we’ve heard promised for at least half a decade (probably a lot longer), and the progress towards it has been snail-like at best. And if you’re hoping to cut through the ever-growing morass of results on the various search engines and connect with your potential consumers/audience, the last thing you can do is sit around and wait for the semantic magic to solve your problems.
Always be looking forward, but not so far that you lose sight of the opportunities in the present.
SphinnCon Coming to the Tarheel State
This news is a little over a week old, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t share — the details of the next SphinnCon have been announced:
SphinnCon is coming to North Carolina on May 2, 2008. The event will take place at Kress Terrace in lovely Greensboro. From the event website:
The conference will invite attendees to submit presentations on subjects they’d like to talk about and also submit requests for presentations on matters of interest to them. This will loosely resemble a roundtable event, with regular Q&A through-out the day. Topics expected to be covered will include SEO, PPC, Social Media and Affiliate Marketing. Presentations can be intermediate or advanced level, white hat or black hat.
At only $150, the conference is quite a deal compared to many of the industry events out there, and provides a great opportunity to learn from the pros and network with other search industry professionals.
The only catch? There’s a limited amount of space (150 spots) — so if you want to attend, you should probably head over to the registration page and reserve your space today.
Sneak Preview #2: Robots.txt Generator
As promised, we’ve got another sneak preview of SEOintelligence for you. Today, we’re pleased to give you a peek at a nifty little tool called the Robots.txt Generator (click the thumb at the left for a full-sized preview).
The Robots.txt Generator helps you to create an optimized robots.txt file for your site, to ensure that search bots and crawlers are only looking at the stuff you want them to see. No more having your /admin folder get indexed (and pull your whole site’s search ranking down with it). You just visit the Generator, enter some basic info, and voila — you’ve got yourself a properly-formatted robots.txt file.
Sign up for your free trial today and give the Robots.txt Generator, and all the many tools in the SEOi warchest a whirl!
Facebook Publishes HOWTO For Marketing Via Facebook Pages
Those crafty cats over at Facebook published an Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing yesterday (embedded below) and it’s definitely worth a look:
While it doesn’t pertain directly to SEO, there’s a lot of great marketing advice in there that ANY marketer, search or otherwise, should add to his/her arsenal.
And yes, in case you were wondering, this did light a fire for us to finally setup an SEOi page on Facebook.
(via TechCrunch)
SEOi on the Radio - over 40+ Markets!!!
Hello…we wanted to announce that SEOintelligence will be on the Radio in over 40+ Cities/Markets across the US. This is very exciting news for us and the culmination of many months of hard work and production deadlines to make it all happen. The ad below will Air over the next 3 weeks (1000+ spots) and we look forward to the initial feedback and comments.
*Thank God for Marconi!!!
Click Here to Listen to the new SEOintelligence 30 second radio spot!
SEOi Affiliate Program Launched
We have officially completed the SEOi Affiliate Software integration. Affiliates will receive the following generous commissions:
Two Ways to Get Paid:
1 - 25% of Sale @ $10 USD Per Sign Up
2 - 12.5% of Monthly Recurring Revenue @ $5 - LIFETIME of the Account
As you can see from this blog we are trying to be very open about everything we do, please give us your feedback and let us know what you think.
Click here to become a SEOi Affiliate today!
SEOmoz | Widgetbait Gone Wild
Matthew Inman (Oatmeal) from SEOmoz.org just posted a great article about Google Widget Link Spam and some other negative Google index penalties that he has experienced over the past year at JustSayHi.
Some of you might remember I left SEOmoz last year to join up with JustSayHi with the intention of creating the world’s biggest, baddest free online dating site. Using these quizzes, I had a creative way to rank our site for competitive keywords in an industry that is primarily dominated by paid links, directory spam, and other greyish-black SEO tactics. We ranked #1 for online dating, free online dating, and numerous other very competitive terms. We were averaging over 2,000 new members a day and passed the 500,000 member mark.
Oops.
Shortly thereafter, we made a godzilla-turd-sized mistake. JustSayHi’s parent company, Next Internet, acquired a bunch of payday loan and education lead-gen websites (around Q4 2007) which are among the hundreds of domains in their portfolio.
This is a great piece on the way you can attempt to be ‘white hat’ and still make simple albeit small mistakes that can land you right back in the Google penalty box. Matthew details the road he navigated (including working one on one with Matt Cutts) and how he is trying to regain his rankings and site reputation.
Check out the rest of Matthews ‘Widget Bait Gone Wild’ article here at SEOmoz.org
Stats Ahoy! (or, SEOintelligence and GetClicky Team Up)
In the spirit of corporate transparency, we’ve got a big new feature coming in SEOi that we’re excited to talk about for the first time here today:
SEO Intelligence, Inc. recently worked out a deal to integrate GetClicky.com analytics into SEOintelligence’s best-of-breed toolset (White Label). This partnership will enable all SEOintelligence.com users to benefit from GetClicky’s groundbreaking website analytics package, giving them the ability to track improving results from the SEOi user interface. GetClicky’s team has assembled an incredible API integration, which will allow our clients/users to use the data for better and more accurate SEO optimization, insight and decision making. The new feature will be called “SEOintelligence Web Stats”
This first iteration will be integrated and 100% fully functional by the end of April. In coming releases we hope to integrate more GetClicky site data with SEOi’s client specific keyword metrics on the Dashboard (ooooh! aaaahh!).
We will be sharing more information and screen shots as the integration continues, but we wanted to announce the great news anyway 
Best,
Jeremy and Kyle
EliteRetreat is ON!
Hello SearchSavant fans, writing this LIVE from the EliteRetreat in San Francisco…don’t start drooling just yet, as I am bound by a NDA to not disclose any specifics of the conference/projects. All I can say is it’s happening NOW, and I already have 2 pages of notes on action items for when I leave tomorrow!
Seriously, this is such a amazing conference - I have had a total blast and we are only 1/2 way through the first day sessions. If you ever get the chance, I highly suggest you get yourself to a future Elite Retreat.
Like I said, I’m under an NDA and can’t say much…but here’s a taste of the great speakers we’ve been privy to today:
Matt Mullenweg - Keynote Speaker (WordPress fame)
Jeremy Shoemaker - ShoeMoney.com
Andy Liu - Buddytv.com
Neil Patel - Pronet Advertising
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Sneak Preview #1
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Sneak Preview #2
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