Typical Yahoo: Sky is Falling, and They’re Painting the House
Months of rumors, speculation, multiple acquisition rumors and offers, internal turmoil, and promises of improved performance, and this is what you guys come up with to get people excited about Y! again?
Seriously?
Not only is it an all-time understatement on the “too little, too late” axiom — it’s hideous.
If I were a YHOO shareholder, I’d want Yang’s head on a kaiser roll with extra mustard.
(via TechCrunch)
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)
Perfect Saturday Distraction: The Poetic Prophet (aka The SEO Rapper) Lays It Down…
As far as we know, this is a landmark occasion — seo making its way into rap, or for that matter, any musical piece.
Sneak Preview #1: SEOiQ Testing Center
This week Jeremy and I are going to start pulling back the curtain just a bit, showing a few select screenshots from SEOintelligence.com.
The first up is our SEOiQ Testing Center — one of the centerpieces of SEOi. From the Testing Center, you can input up to three competitor site URL’s to measure your own site’s SEOiQ (a score generated by an algorithm that encompasses PageRank, backlinks, Compete.com scores, Technorati rank, and a series of other proprietary measures of site search engine ranking strength).
After the jump, your first screenshot of one part of the SEOiQ Testing Center results page.
SEOi on CrunchBase
This Way to the Launchpad
What is SEOintelligence.com?
SEOintelligence.com is the easiest and most comprehensive hosted SEO toolset available. We enable the average web publisher, ecommerce merchant, blogger, web entrepreneur and almost anyone the ability to dramatically increase their rankings and web presence. SEOintelligence.com was born out of the need for a good hosted SEO Toolset that delivered easy to understand charting and SEO Diagnostics. Our proprietary SEOiQ scoring algorithm will allow you to track the progress and ability for the Search Engines to find you!
Who is behind SEOintelligence.com?
The idea came from Jeremy Hermanns and Kyle Bunch, two Web Entrepreneurs who have been working together for over 5 years. Kyle and Jeremy needed a SEO toolset that they could use to manage their ever growing set of new projects, and existing ecommerce and web publishing properties. After using a bunch of competing software the two embarked on “one-upping” the industry and developing a superior solution on their own.
Why can these guys do it?
Well it’s simple - experience.
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