What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability

What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability

In an effort to differentiate themselves from competitors, many SEO/SEM firms come up with interesting unique selling propositions (USPs). Some SEO/SEM firms emphasize search engine advertising and create quite useful tools to help manage PPC campaigns. Some SEO firms specialize in training, again creating tools that help newbie and experienced SEO professionals optimize existing web pages. For the past two to three years, I have been watching SEO/SEM firms increasingly focus on the user, specifically offering website usability services.

Although I laud the evolution of SEO/SEM firms to increasingly focus on the user, I admit that I find some of their conclusions and methodologies rather troubling. Recently, I worked with a company who was happy with their SEO firm, but when they showed me the heuristic analysis I was dumbfounded. The SEO firm actually told this company to remove the primary call to action on product pages because it interfered with keyword density. There were countless other mistakes in the heuristic analysis, and it is that report that inspired me to write this article.

Online Annonsering
Internet Marketing

Inside AdWords: Place ads on television with Google TV Ads

Inside AdWords: Place ads on television with Google TV Ads

Television is a great way to reach new customers who might not be familiar with your product or service. Research shows that 37% of online search users were prompted to perform a search as a result of exposure to television advertising.* Now, you can launch a national television ad campaign right from your existing AdWords account.

Google VisualRank

Google VisualRank

Google researchers at a web conference in Beijing announced they work on some kind of PageRank specifically aimed at images. Called VisualRank, the technology was so far only applied to a smaller test set of images, as apparently applying it to all images Google indexed would be too computing-intensive (even arguably the worlds largest super-computer cant do everything imaginable yet). According to the New York Times yesterday, visual rank is an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar, and in Googles internal scoring tests it achieved far higher quality results.

Online Annonsering

Google AdWords Displaying Quality Score Variables

Google AdWords Displaying Quality Score Variables

Reports are surfacing today that some Google AdWords ads, especially on Google.de (their German TLD), are displaying what may be variables used in determining quality scores: Pscore, mCPC and thresh. The numerical values have been spotted in both sidebar and shaded results.

Internet Marketing

Google Discovers Holy Grail of Image Search But Will it Scale

Google Discovers Holy Grail of Image Search But Will it Scale

Google has a lofty ambition when it comes to image search. The worlds largest search engine hopes to do for image search what it did for regular text search"make it a whole lot more reliable. How it plans to do this is outlined in a new research paper written by two Google scientists.

Internet Marketing

Google Showing Ranking Scores On AdWords?

Google Showing Ranking Scores On AdWords?

Google Will Bank on VisualRank - PageRank for Images [SearchEngineWatch]

Google Will Bank on VisualRank - PageRank for Images [SearchEngineWatch]

On Thursday, Google Research engineers presented a paper at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing on PageRank for Google Images (pdf) to improve search results for photos, art and graphics. The system promises better image results than are currently available when searching in Google Images and may eventually improve Google Universal Search SERPs.

Internet Marketing and Online Annonsering

Google Product Search Gets More Useful

Google Product Search Gets More Useful

In the past, Google Product Search just showed you results, but did not group stores offering to sell the same product, with reviews and technical specifications. Now, for some searches, Google groups store results, shows reviews on Google and also shows product specifications.

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Yahoo Paper: Finding The Local "Center" Of Search Queries

Yahoo Paper: Finding The Local "Center" Of Search Queries

A new research paper from Yahoo and Cornell University -- with search legend Jon Kleinberg as one of the coauthors -- provides a fascinating look at how a search query such as "red sox" or "hurricane deal" can be centered around a physical location -- including one that changes over time.

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