Believe it or not, it only takes me 20 minutes to write a 400-500 word article. This article (which I wrote in 20 minutes) explains some of the tricks I use to accomplish this.
Blogging gives me a daily deadline, and I don’t really want to spend more than 20 minutes each day on blogging. Many […]
More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: SEM Web Design Technoratri MySpace Reddit

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

When we talk about “trust” in terms of websites, we often refer to elements such as adding details such as you address and contact details, a privacy policy, and a guarantee. But trust is also a process.Trust is something earned with every interaction.

For example, once a music artist has built up a fan base, their new album is bound to sell more units than a new artist. The fans place a higher level of trust in someone with whom they have positive, prior experience. It’s not just about the intrinsic quality of the music, it’s also about the conditions that lead to a valued relationship. The same goes for websites.

Thinking of trust as a process can help build momentum, build your name, and build your reputation. In order to get users to engage with your site, they need to first place a level of trust in your site. Thankfully, the bar is reasonably low. You don’t have to convince them to hand over their life savings, you only need to convince them that engaging with your site will provide them with value and not waste their time. And in order to keep them over the long term, you must maintain that trust.

Let’s look at a few broad principles about trust as a process.

Ease Of Interaction

Make it easy for people to interact with the site. Learn the self-evident lessons of usability. Go beyond usability. Offer easy ways for people to interact. Why is interaction important? The most important trends in the web space in recent times have been about community and shared space. Think Facebook, blogging, Wikipedia, feed readers, and cloud computing. They’re all about interaction, as opposed to the mid 90’s web, which was mostly about top-down publishing.

Interaction will become an increasingly important factor over the coming few years, especially as the global recession bites deeper. Here’s an exert from Jason Calacanis’ latest email letter:

“The good news in all of this is that folks are going to be spending a lot of time online, playing video games and consuming things that are not expensive. They’re going to be looking for “experiences over expenses. …Why will there be a boom in traffic, engagement and participation?

Well, people will have time on their hands and the desire to socialize. Group behavior makes people feel better. One of the best cures for the blues is sharing a meal with friends.

Blogging became a phenomenon not because of some technological advance, but because between 2002 and 2005 there were a lot of unemployed–and underemployed–individuals with a lot to say and a lot of freetime. Bloggers like Peter Rojas, Michael Arrington, Nick Denton, Rafat Ali, Xeni Jardin and Om Malik broke out in the down market–not the upmarket.”

Awards

People like to feel important. Offer them an award or an elevated status level. You see this technique used in forums. Members are given classifications, from Newbie through to Moderator. Bestowing moderator status not only assigns an administrative role in itself a form of hierarchy - but it also elevates their status within the community. Similarly, the granting of stars, boosting posts to sticky status, or boosting posts to the front page has a similar effect.

So long as an award process is transparent and consistent, people will come to trust in it, which, in turn, leads to greater levels of engagement.

Voting

People like to feel their opinion matters. Give people an opportunity to vote. Voting helps make people feel included, and that they are influencing outcomes. An obvious example of such a system is Digg. Digg is a community built around voting and a forum for expressing personal opinion. It could be argued that the downside of Digg is that some people’s votes appear to matter more than those of others. The lack of transparency is, to my mind, Diggs biggest flaw. If people feel that voting is skewed, they are less inclined to trust the system.

Meet Expectations

Deliver what your users expect.

Google had a problem. They wanted to index subscription-only material, but clearly publishers did not want to give this material away. This led to a situation where Google users would click on a result, but not get the article they expected, based on their previous experience of using Google i.e. clicking on a result leads directly to the indexed content. This situation leads to a decrease in trust. So Google came with First Click Free. First Click Free allows users to skip over the subscription page on their first visit.

The lesson is to try and maintain consistency. If users get something other than they’ve come to expect, they’ll leave.

A Sense Of Belonging

People like to feel they belong. Cultivate a sense of belonging, and look to include people, wherever possible. Be accessible. Talk in terms of the group, rather than the individual. Examine the language you use. Does your language speak of a sense of community, involvement, and shared values? Of course, this won’t apply to every type of site, but if you’ve got a strategy based around user interaction, then look for ways to make people feel as if they belong. It might be something as simple as responding to people’s comments in timely fashion, or providing a personalized welcome message, or using inclusive language.

Social Proof Of Value

People like to go where other people are. Think about ways in which you can demonstrate that other people use, and place a high value upon, your site.

Methods include visitor counters, positive mentions you’ve received in the popular press, recent comments on your site, feed reader subscription stats (like those offered by FeedBurner), third party traffic stats (from sites like Alexa and Compete.com) and quotes from known influencers. Make sure that people who are new to your site see these social proofs as soon as possible. Don’t bury them deep - put them up front, loud and proud. Don’t be afraid to blow your own horn.

Social proof is an increasingly important aspect of internet marketing. Some things gain currency for no other reason than everyone else likes it. No one wants to eat at an empty restaurant, even if the food is just as good as the heaving restaurant next door. People like to be where other people hang out.

To get there, you need to establish momentum. But how on earth do you build that momentum from scratch? The answer isn’t pretty - it’s hard - but there three concepts you are helpful.

Have a read of this article, Filthy Linking Rich & Getting Richer by Mike Grehan, if you haven’t read it already:

“The great twentieth century sociologist Robert Merton dubbed it the “Mathew effect” as a reference to a passage in the Bible, in which Mathew observes, “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” The Mathew effect, when applied to networks, basically equates to well connected nodes being more likely to attract new links, while poorly connected nodes are disproportionately likely to remain poor…..It has been proposed that “the rich get richer” effect drives the evolution of real networks. If one node has twice as many links as another node, then it is precisely twice as likely to receive a new link.”

This is also known as cumulative advantage.

Also take a look at this article in the New York Times, entitled “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?”. To summarize, the article talks about how social influence plays a large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality.

“The long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictability is inherent to the nature of the market…..If one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors. ”

So, popularity is an impossible process to replicate and systematize. Popularity is due to a combination of factors, which could include take-up by a few influencers, being in the right place at the right time, gaining the momentum affect as others get on board, and a large dose of luck.

However, there are, I think, three main lessons here.

One is the role of influencers. Influencers is a fairly broad term, which can include people who hold sway over large communities, to those who are merely inclined to pass on a good find to another person. You need to make it easy for those people to engage with your site. To trust you. It’s old fashioned word-of-mouth, and it’s still the most powerful marketing method there is.

In practical terms, try linking out to the inflencers and saying good things about them. Or bait them. Give them things. Make it easy for them to talk about you.

Secondly, identify the hubs with a sphere of influence. All communities have a few, central authorities around which the entire community orbits. Try to get seen on those sites, whether it’s by buying advertising, posting articles, or participating in discussion.

Thirdly, leverage off a trust process.

SEO is an example of leveraging off a trust process. The user trusts Google to find the best results. The searcher searches on a phrase, and chooses a result from the left hand side of the page. The user will often choose one of the top three listings.

The key to achieving these things is tenacity. And to build and maintain trust.

More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: Search Engine Optimization Social Marketing Digg Technoratri Facebook

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Posted by Jane Copland

This is an older topic, but one which is still worth discussing: what is the best way to investigate linkbait, viral or other content-based link building efforts in "boring" industries? How best to find out what worked in the past? How best to find out what didn’t work?

We have a range of tools at our disposal when it comes to content-based link building research. You’ve heard of all of them, but it’s not likely that you’ve used them in a complimentary fashion before, using one to back up the holes left by the others.

StumbleUpon

• I tried clicking Stumble all night and not doing the dishes but it didn’t teach me much about niche content creation or its linking potential.
• Instead, you can browse words in any tag by right-clicking on the word. You can do this anywhere on the net.  It’s actually one of StumbleUpon’s unsung fantastic features. Get as specific as you like, and remember that you don’t even have to find a page with your desired keywords included in text. Run the word through a search engine and take the word off the search results page.

• The results of these stumbles aren’t always fantastic, but if you stumble far enough, they offer an insight into how tough the competition is within StumbleUpon for any particular keyword. There is really no such thing as the "everyman’s social media site": anyone who has enjoyed a lot of StumbleUpon traffic knows that 99% of them ride in on Firefox and the rest aren’t using Internet Explorer, but the silent giant of the toolbar is as close as anything to a mass-market, general social site.
• Be sure to check the submissions page of the URL you’ve stumbled to. This is available either via the "speech bubble" icon next in the toolbar to the right of "Send to" and to the left of "Channels," or by typing in www.stumbleupon.com/url/(url-of-page). If page after page appears blank, aside from the information left by the submitter, the niche is likely completely untapped within StumbleUpon.

Del.icio.us

• People seem to confuse Del.icio.us (or, delicious.com nowadays) as being a more civilised Digg, but its role as a bookmarking site makes it much more useful for researching quality content, as opposed to easily-digested, front-page news. As I highlighted two weeks ago, linkable content exists on a spectrum and each different type of content has its uses. For the purpose of true content-centric link building, referencing bookmarked pages is far more useful than seeing what someone chose to Digg or even Stumble.
• Studying Del.icio.us (damn it, do I have to call it Delicious? Was I the only person on the Internet who liked the dots?) for non-tech content shows you what techy people find appealing. This is so important for "boring" industries. A large percentage of the world’s workforce aren’t social media participants, so content with which you plan to attract links has to be created with the online world in mind. Delicio.us (see, I compromised) is a goldmine of such content.

Linkscape and Yahoo! Site Explorer

• Again, as I showed in graphic fashion in a blog post a couple of weeks ago, link building with content is not about how popular it became, but how popular a search engine sees it as being. Let’s ignore for a second the fact that the more advanced search engines probably can acknowldge a range of social factors. Pretend that we’re living in the Orthodox Church of SEO and that link popularity and passed PageRank are the only relevant metrics. Link numbers matter. Research the pieces you’ve found in Yahoo!’s larger index, and then use Linkscape to analyse what those links mean.
• Line up the metrics for each page. Spreadsheets are tops for this. I adore spreadsheets. You’re attempting to find out which pieces of content achieved a balance between gross link popularity, popularity passed, trust passed and eventual strength. This includes removing the nofollowed social media mentions, including comment links. Has anybody ever linked to one of your sites in a popular Digg comment? Holy crap, that can be as bad as the Digg effect itself, but Google ignores the link as though it were a javascripted pop-up on a spammy lyrics site.
• Because Linkscape reveals 301s, 302s and meta refreshes, you can follow a piece of content’s PageRank trail (or lack of one; you’ll see people do silly things). If you tried to reach an old piece of linkbait and saw that you were 301 redirected elsewhere, you should first decide which level of bait and switch you consider this redirection to be on. Then take the resolving URL to Linkscape and see a) how many other pages were redirected to this page, and b) whether many people link to the page, thinking their links point to the removed content. No one really knows whether the bait and switch deceives a large number of people. Have a look at this before you try it. It’s likely that the more technology-centered crowd will notice a cheeky redirect.
• Take a look at the anchor text. Look to see if people have actually adopted a site’s badges if  the content provided one. Linkscape will report on whether the link is an image and will provide alt text, so patterns in badge adoption are blatantly easy to see. This is also a good way of determining which badges people like and which they avoid, although the simple rule is: pretty = high adoption rate; ugly = fail.

Google

• It’s SEO, right? So what happened in the search engines? Do people ever actually take sites that obviously create on-topic linkbait and see how it’s worked for them in terms of ranking for their competitive keywords?
• If you’ve analysed Yahoo!’s and Linkscape’s data and acknowledged which pieces of content appear to have been the most successful, you should see that reflected in search results. Using the rank checker can help simplify the process.
• Of course, you will have to take into account previous domain strength as well, and no tool can do this for you with a couple of clicks. However, detailed analysis of linkbait usually results in you seeing one or two smaller domains ranking surprisingly well after a devastatingly well-composed, well-executed linkbait campaign.

TO CONCLUDE, I’D LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CAPSLOCK DAY. I CONSIDERED WRITING THIS WHOLE POST IN CAPSLOCK AND THEN REALISED THAT WE’D END UP WITH ABOUT 290 SUBSCRIBERS, AND THOSE WERE THE PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T CHECK THEIR FEEDREADER TODAY. PASS THE MEME ALONG

Do you like this post? Yes No

More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: Search Engine Optimization Technoratri Reddit Technorati Autoprimemedia

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Do you have a brand? If not, your site is part of a “cesspool.” In AdAge Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt explains the AdWords quality score and organic ranking algorithms in laymans terms:

The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

“Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.“

“Brand affinity is clearly hard wired,” he said. “It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”

The key to understanding the above is to appreciate that not only do the large brands have more money and more exposure, but they are less likely to be policed if they do the same thing that a smaller webmaster does. It is why a billion dollar company’s affiliate program passes PageRank and my affiliate links do not.

Simply put, big brands should spam. Smart people like you, who read the algorithms as a profession, already knew this, but a large segment of publishers think search is mostly trickery and voodoo.

Build a brand and buy links. If your brand is big enough you most likely will not get policed out of the search results. It has been that way for years. If only the AdWords support team or Matt Cutts spoke with Mr. Schmidt’s level of clarity!

More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: SEM Search Engine Optimization Technoratri StumbleUpon Reddit

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Posted by Paz

I was looking at a few profiles today and thinking it a shame I didn’t have a bit more detail about the individual as opposed to their SEO services or product he/she was selling/marketing.

It then got me wondering about how everybody else here got involved with SEO ‘n stuff. Do most of us come from technical backgrounds or are most people more ’self taught’ like myself? Considering that an estimated 90% of websites belong to small businesses or individuals, I suspect that the majority are more in my bracket?

I have been involved with the internet for about ten years now (wow, how time flies). It was literally about ten years ago that I got my first ever proper PC…although I did have a zx81 at one time, but I could never get it to work and then the spectrum came out that was beyond our means and nobody would help me any more with my low spec machine, so my ‘interactive media skills’ got directed down the Atari 2600, sega, sony playstation route.

Once I had the new PC I discovered it actually had the internet on it and I was starting to find my natural habitat somehow (one that naturally fitted into my nocturnal body clock). A great discovery that would swallow up 10 hours a day of my time whilst still working 9-5, yet didn’t actually show me anything for all that time invested?!

Forums came to big prominence at some stage during this and I was learning a good deal from websites like the highrankings forum that I still read today. I started using SEOmoz 2 or 3 years ago when it was first released. I can’t even remember what user name I had then, if I even had one at all (I have only very recently been more consistent with those types of things and can actually remember how to log into a million places!). Wow, SEOmoz has come a long way in a short amount of time, huh?

I had very little knowledge of SEO, of course, but had dabbled a little and built one or two fun websites that did reasonably well, in so much as I could find them for a particular search. They were just hobbies really, and sometimes added a little extra income.

After being bored with my real office type jobs (in event planning ) and general doom and gloom of the UK I emigrated, like many sun chasers, to Spain, and whilst doing some crumby jobs I dabbled in websites a little more.

Through circumstances I became involved in a similar work theme I had been doing in the UK and decided to join together the forces of my (lack of) website skills, my (non-existent) design skills, and my work ethic (for a job where I could sit on my ass all day being the brains of the outfit).

Well, about 6 years on I have probably invested the equivalent, average working man hours of twenty years into all things SEO, analytics, usability, social networks, publicity, press releases, articles, links, zzzzzzzz you get the picture.

I have never implemented black hat tactics on my business website, have never cheated, and never intentionally spammed (although technically, leaving links on on various topic forum posts out of habit may be open to debate).

I have no relevant qualifications as such, but due as much to the success of the website as anything else I now own an event planning company out here in sunny Spain (far from the maddening crowd). It’s still a small business in most senses, but is a genuine success story by my standards. I don’t actually organise many events myself though; from the start I have been and continue to be the webmaster and bring in the sales leads. That takes up, as fellow ’students’ will know, every available hour (never been so unfit in all my life!) and I have people doing the events and conferences that actually do a ten times better job of it than I would.

Over time I have gained so much knowledge from people on these type of forums and blog sites, people like Rand, Rishil, Avinash Kaushik and Jill Whalen, whose opinions, amongst many others, I generally respect even if not always agree with. I like to think this knowledge has been passed down to others from myself as I have learned and implemented things, learned to test and re-test, and have the genuine knowledge that I can assist friends and families get a few more sales from their own websites.

Of course, often you are too swamped to do things to the best of your abilities but it creates other business opportunities. This in turn opens up new avenues of interest, new niches, new found hobbies all built around this one entity. Websites have in a way become what all business is or should be about.

Now I’m another SEO expert selling his wares? Ha ha. (Actually, I do to a very small degree — for a particular niche I will lend my skills and advice to small businesses out here in Spain, often targeting their local English speaking community.)

I’m not sure there is any moral to these ramblings. If there is I would like it to be quite simple things like ‘enjoy your work’ and ‘treat others as you wish others to treat you‘ in the general sense. In the internet/SEO sense? Well, seek out the advice of respected people in the business, don’t cut corners, and make your website the best it can possibly be within your budget/resources.

I recently realised I actually do ‘live it’, I guess, with hindsight that is the secret to success, be it financially or in a more personally rewarding way. I’m glad I discovered mine even if a little later than ideal in life. I’m now admitting to myself that I will ‘probably’ never win the Tour de France or score the winning goal at Wembley for Nottingham Forest.

Heyho. Can’t have everything, eh?

Do you like this post? Yes No

More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: Social Marketing Furl Autoprimemedia Pay Per Click Yahoo

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

[Editor’s note: This post is our continued dissemination of content from last week’s  SearchEngineStrategies San Jose search marketing conference, where aimClear had 3 correspondents providing our readers notes and articles. The following is from our friend and blogger-associate, Jennifer Osborne:]
During Day 2 of SES San Jose, Avinash Kaushik, Google Analytics Evangelist, was in fine form […]
More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: SEO Search Engine Marketing Social Marketing Technoratri Facebook

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Today’s search engine marketing news and opinion: Making the Most of Search Engine Copywriting; Hosting Issues and SEO; Google Discusses Search Evaluation Process; and more.
More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: SEO Tools Stumble Pay Per Click web2.0 text links

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Last week there was a bit of a brouhaha over Google news incorrectly giving the wrong date for a news story. In that particular incident Google news picked up a 6 year old story about United Airlines filing bankruptcy which upset the stock market for that particular stock. I’ve seen things like that happen before […]
More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: SEO Tools Web Design MySpace Furl Yahoo

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

I’ve been trying out Google’s Chrome browser. I like it. I really do.

I like Chrome mainly because it is fast. Faster than Firefox, anyway. However, I’ll be alternating between the two browsers, because Firefox has a plethora of useful plug-ins that Chrome lacks.

Like many Firefox converts, I haven’t looked at Internet Explorer for some time now.

Microsoft have recently released IE8, so I thought I’d evaluate it in terms of search, and contrast it with the functionality and positioning of Chrome. Many in the internet community have speculated that Chrome is going to eat Microsoft’s lunch, and not just in the browser space, but with the ushering in of cloud computing. Is this plausible?

Let’s take a look.

You can download IE8 Beta from here. As usual, you’ll have to sign your soul, and those of your yet unborn children, etc, etc over to Microsoft, and then reboot.

Goodbye Google Toolbar

You run through the inevitable setup screens. The first search-related issue I noticed was that Google’s toolbar wasn’t compatible with IE8 beta, and asks me if I want to disable it. Is a bug, feature, or a market position?

Next up, IE8 asks you if you want to use “Express Settings”, which means that the search provider will default to your existing default, and just about everything else defaults to Microsoft products or services. Internet Explorer also wants to become your default browser. At this point, you can opt for Custom Settings, and modify each setting individually.

Pretty flexible, really. If you want to opt out of Microsoft services, you can do so easily.

The Search Wars

My main reason for looking at IE8 is in terms of search. What functionalities do you get, and how is this browser positioned against Google?

Search Suggestion

One feature, called Search Suggestions, offers, naturally enough, search suggestions. Like the equivalent Google feature, IE8 will try to guess what keyword you are search for a prompt you with suggestions as you type. This feature works with many different search providers (Google, Yahoo!, Live) and large ecommerce and content sites (Amazon.com, eBay, Wikipedia), which makes the search box a nice keyword research tool, but nothing new to most of us, I’m sure.

Note that this type-ahead feature, like on all browsers offering type-ahead suggestions, will send your search queries to your search provider, even if you don’t hit send. Matt Cutts, perhaps sensitive to the privacy concerns aimed at Google, makes the point in this comment he posted on GoogleBlogoscoped that ” if “Suggested Sites” is on, “your web browsing history is sent to Microsoft, …. the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with some standard information from your computer such as IP address, browser type, regional and language settings…..”.

How Will This Affect SEO?

An aspect SEOs need to consider is how the widespread implementation of search suggest is going to affect SEO. In this post, Aaron talks about how search suggest is likely to force a consolidation around the most popular terms. This has implications for those going after the long tail, but also provides new SEO opportunities, especially if you have a brand that incorporates popular search terms.

Explorer also allows search suggestion from any provider, which can be a useful SEO tool, in itself.

Visual Search

IE8 also offer Visual Search, which provides pictures to help you select a result. This didn’t seem to work for me, but I did notice that a search on “Seattle Weather”, the search term suggested by Microsoft, did bring up a page featuring advertisements for Australian outdoor sportswear suppliers. Reminds me how far other providers have to go in this text ad space in order to catch up with Google. It wasn’t until I dug around a bit further that I discovered that you need to install search providers. Even then, it wasn’t playing well, giving me a string of error messages.

Still, problems are to be expected in a beta release.

Other improvements include search history matching, a useful “Find On Page” button added to the instant search box, and the ability to drag the search box in order to change the width. A few nice touches.

Forced Search Provider?

On the Microsoft global-domination conspiracy front, far from locking you in, Microsoft have made it rather easy to configure IE8 to incorporate your choice of search provider. It wants to default to Live Search, but you can easily select Google, or other services. The pull-down search box provides options to add more. So, good marks in terms of flexibility.

There are various other features, including InPrivate browsing, which supposedly blocks ads and prevents people tracking you across the web. As it isn’t search related, I won’t review it, other than to say it is good that the user has to jump through a few hoops to enable it. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, web ads enable the production of a lot of “free” web content. If ads were turned off by default, many sites would simply cease to exist, or start charging for content. Full marks to Microsoft for leaving this option to the power users.

IE8 Vs Chrome

Now, contrast these features with Google’s Chrome.

Did you find Chrome noticeably faster than your existing browser, be it Firefox or IE?

I did.

Speed was the deciding factor for me. On the internet, speed is (nearly) everything. IE8 didn’t strike me as being any faster than Firefox, and certainly a lot slower than Chrome.

In this respect, IE8 feels like an update to an existing product, as opposed to a game changer. Chrome feels like a game-changer, even though, when pushed, I can’t put my finger on exactly why this is. I think it may come down to the usability gains of extra speed, especially if your day to day use orients a search function. IE8 is adding functions, desktop application-stylee, while Google is busy taking features out in order to simplify and minimize.

If cloud computing is to take off, then the browser is going to need to need the speed of an application, and it is going to need to be simple and transparent in order for people to bother migrating.

Application-Centric Vs Web Centric

Chrome explains itself better. The Google information pages tell a cohesive story, whilst Microsoft’s story appears scattered and a little confused. I’d liken Chrome to an Ipod. It lacks features some users might demand, but it works right out of the box for most people. Microsoft IE8 is, well….Microsoft. It feels more application centric.

Perhaps that says something about the web strategy of the respective companies. Google wants to pull users out of their existing habits, and into the Google web, whilst Microsoft needs to integrate existing application users with the web.

A subtle difference, but there nonetheless.

Have Your Say

What are your thoughts? Have you tried both new browsers?

More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: SEO Search Engine Marketing StumbleUpon Facebook Furl

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Final proof if it were needed that Google is now too powerful - they’ve redrawn the map of Europe and ceded the Benelux countries to Germany…

26 Vote(s)

More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: Search Engine Marketing Facebook Furl web2.0 media tools

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Working on CrowdFire (sorry, I know, but it’s a big deal to me), as well as Web 2 and tons of other FM stuff, and trying to not ruin my family’s time on Island. So I’m going to be dark on the blog for the most part……



More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: Web Design Social Marketing Furl Google Yahoo

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

One of the reasons Nelson defeated the French at the Battle of Trafalgar was the British ships had copper bottomed hulls. The reason? Copper is toxic and no living thing can grow on it, so all the barnacles and limpets and seaweed couldn’t grow on the hull and slow it down. Thus the British ships […]
More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: SEO SEO Tools Web Design StumbleUpon MySpace

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

What makes me link these days is not something that is obviously useful, but rather something that gets me to think. Members of Linkbait Coaching, hopefully know that if they want a to linkbait me, this is what they have to serve up.
So what got me thinking this morning was this post, titled, Don’t Be […]
More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: SEO SEO Tools Social Marketing Digg Technoratri

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

I just gained my 400th fan on Stumbleupon My growth rate on Stumble has been exponential the last couple of months. I think I had less that 100 fans 3 months ago. I changed the way I use Stumble and people seem to like it.
I don’t even call it a tactic, as the way I […]
More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: SEO Search Engine Marketing StumbleUpon Facebook Furl

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Posted by Jane Copland

SEOmoz is pretty lucky when it comes to blog comments in that we receive a lot of them. By most blog’s standards, our regular count of between twenty and sixty comments is quite enviable, trounced by the likes of Techcrunch but highly competitive in this industry. We also keep a relatively good record of the comments our members make and how well received those comments are via Mozpoints and the record of recent comments we keep on everyone’s profile.

Two things we often fail to address is what our - or any website’s - comments say about the state of our community and what the best comment protocol is for encouraging a productive commenting environment.

Whether they mean to or not, bloggers often write to the people they believe are reading their work. We know that we have "lurkers", as much as I dislike that term, who read blog posts but never comment, but since we know the names, faces, styles and opinions of those from whom we receive feedback, we sometimes focus on them. Thus, the makeup of a blog’s commenters makes at least a small difference to its content.

Many websites can make guesses at how their community has changed, but here, we can record it with precise scientific accuracy. Or through a made-up system of points that appeals to geeks. When SEOmoz first calculated Mozpoints in February 2007, the scores were arrived at through participation alone: obviously, no one had ever voted on anyone else’s contributions at that stage. This is what our contribution hierarchy looked like on February 10, 2007.

In contrast, here is our ranked users page now. It looks a little bit different. How, as a blogger, should you analyse these changes? Why did users such as simmal_tree (whose user name is now kulpreet_singh) taper off their commenting? Did he - and other previously active users, of which there are many - lose interest in our site? Did they become too busy to participate in online communities? Did they move away from the search industry?

Our community hasn’t changed drastically enough for us to really need to take a look at who we’ve lost or who is less active, but I believe that a system like ours is worthwhile for sites that maintain a large readership. Measuring both contribution and recognition (through votes) allows a website’s owners to monitor both changes in a site’s demographic, but in contributors’ values.

I ask you this: if you’ve been reading and participating in SEOmoz discussions since, say, early 2007 or before, what do you think has changed here? Do you remember V2 with its brown and orange tones? Do you remember a time before floating comment boxes and user generated content? How is your interaction with SEOmoz different now than it was then?

A secondary concern I have with comments is how best to implement a commenting system. This seems to be less important in the quest to keep readers, but significant nonetheless. I think ours is very good, only we do hear the occasional complaint about our login requirement.

I like a system which has users log in and maintain a profile for the following reasons:

1. It promotes slightly more responsibility. A person’s comments are archived more accurately and a profile acts as a small portfolio. Users’ profiles often rank well in search engines and should give people more reason to be considerate about what they write than if all they’re required to do is leave a name and email address. Of course, this often doesn’t stop people from making ridiculous comments, but it helps filter out trolls who can’t be bothered creating accounts in order to be negative. Sadly, it keeps out positive commenters too.
2. It slows down spam. Whilst hardly stopping it, login requirements add one more obstacle for the Furberry and Fauxlex merchants.
3.  It creates a sense of belonging that makes people return at a higher rate.

I also recognise that it has its flaws: Non-members are less likely to comment, even if they have something valuable to say, because our attention spans online are short and the couple of minutes it takes to create most accounts is too long. Darren Rowse at Problogger presents the view of someone who does not like logging in:

There is one situation where I rarely leave a comment - even if the post deserves it - blogs that require me to login before making a comment. Maybe I’m lazy (actually there’s no maybe about it) or maybe there’s something inside me that worries about giving out my personal details - but when I see a comments section that requires registration I almost always (95% or more of the time) leave the blog without leaving the comment that I want to make.

The three types of comment systems I see most regularly are those which make someone enter their information every time, those that remember returning visitors, and those which maintain accounts:

Quick ‘n dirty commenting: users don’t even have to leave a website if they don’t want to. This is the easiest and most common system, but is also easily morphed into a certain degree of membership:

I don’t have an account at the above site, but it remembers my information from the last time I visited. A small sense of belonging is achieved without making users create accounts or log in. This achieves a balance between membership and ease and should appeal to people like Darren who aren’t keen on logging in, as well as people like me, who like to feel… remembered.

If you are logged in here on a regular basis, you’ll recognise the final form of commenting. Acknowledging that SEOmoz built its blog from the ground up and didn’t use a CMS like Wordpress, it still seems to me that allowing profiles and at least having a membership option, if not requirement, promotes repeat visitors and heightened participation.

Acknowledging that I’ve covered two different facets of commenting here, I believe that both comment protocol and long term comment activity act as both measurements of a website’s success, as well as helping to determine what level of engagement users have with a site’s content and with each other.

In addition to wanting to hear from those of you who’ve been around for a long period about how this site and community has changed, I’d also like to know the opinions of those of you who rarely comment about why you read blog content but don’t add your own thoughts. If you have been reading our site for a long time and rarely comment, all the better!

Do you like this post? Yes No

More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: SEO Social Marketing StumbleUpon Facebook MSN

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Google have AdWords advertisers who have been with them for 6 years, a Google Cookbook, apron and more schwag. I got pictures.

33 Vote(s)

More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE)
Tags: SEO SEO Tools Web Design StumbleUpon MySpace

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.