Archive for the ‘Search News’ Category

In the old days of SEO it was important to make sure your sites code was valid to W3c standards and that your Meta data was correctly formatted, sites required loads of 2 way and one way links and a constant stream of fresh relevant information.

With the launch of Google's Caffeine  SEO has been tossed on its head, 2 way links (reciprocal)  are basically worthless and your meta data and code standard moved down on the weighting scale, instead it is now imperative to employ Google analytics into your site structure if you want to stand any chance of making page one of the search results.

Caffeine depends on information gathered by Google analytics in order to rank and position your site according to user information collected by analytics, Google have also started a personalized search system which is also integral to how your site is positioned in the results.

So what does this mean for SEO's and site owners, well for starters it means most SEO's will have to rethink their strategies and in many cases embark on a complete restructure of the sites under their care since the strategies they have had in place will no longer have the same effect as before.

The key to the new Caffeine system is Traffic and lots of, the more traffic a site receives the higher it is going to rank and position and it's part of a clever ploy by Google to increase it's advertising sales while raising the bidding war for top spots on the major keywords, site owners will need to increase their advertising budgets if they want to stay in the race for traffic and sales, SEO will be overtaken in importance by SEM and SMO and the costs incurred by site owners will rise tremendously forcing many small businesses to leave the Internet scene forever.

Meanwhile those that have relied on carrying the Google advertising on their sites and who have basically put Google where it is today will continue to receive breadcrumbs in return for their efforts, very few of the millions of site owners carrying Google adsense on their sites see decent levels of income from the Search Giant many on approaching the monthly claim threshold see a degradation of the ad quality supplied to their sites as Google chokes off the click rate and restricts their earnings forcing them to wait even longer to meet their $100 monthly minimum.

In some cases they will have their accounts terminated with out just cause and lose the income from their labors, (this has personally happened to me and while google did send me an email stating they would send me a check for the balance of my account  a lousy $36 they did not offer any sufficient reason for canceling my membership nor have i seen any sign of the check after 4 months).

To me it would seem that Google while putting on a face of performing a public service is changing it's systems in order to feed the Giants Greed and need to totally control the Internet and it's users.

Caffeine and Personalized Search are just another Tactic being employed to achieve this, Google is trying to play Big Brother to the world and decide for all of us what we see on the Internet , it is collecting information on each and every user despite the fact in some cases this is a breach of privacy (Germany has already raised this issue regarding Google analytics and is considering a Ban on it's use on .de tlds) It's maps system poses a security nightmare for countries even though sensitive areas are blacked out we are talking only a small area and when you think about it from a strategist point of view those black spots make ideal targets for a nuclear attack after all land a bomb within a kilometer of the black spot and your guaranteed to wipe the target out if the blast doesn't do the job the radiation will and they must be considered vital to a countries security to have required blanking out, so thank you Google for painting all those bullseyes .

The information they collect can also pose a threat to every Internet user notice the rise in spam and Internet scams lately and the fact a lot of it is personally addressed to you, well the people behind those annoying emails get their information via sites that collect mountains of data on it's users and their surfing habits the main repository is of course Google.

Now it may seem i am slamming Google quite a lot in this article but like the Berlin wall it's no use attacking with a toothpick if you want to make any impression that could cause them to reconsider the effect they will have on the general population of the Internet you need to use a large sledgehammer or two.

Yes some people will benefit from Caffeine and Personalized search but it won't be the small business man or in many cases the family members who turn to the Internet for information or to purchase needed items a little cheaper, those that are going to benefit most are the large corporations followed by the larger companies that can afford to plow an extra million or two into it's yearly budget, and of course Google.

For the families it's just another intrusion into their daily lives another struggle to find information they need as the Google index gets turned on it's head and well shaken put enough money into a lie and it becomes fact, control the flow of information and you control the world.

Recently we announced that Easy Search Live had Joined the ISEDN network of Search providers, as part of our membership we are able to offer the ISEDN alternative to PPC advertising.

Now while PPC has been a mainstay of advertising in the past it is fast becoming too expensive for all but the richest companies as bidding for top keyword placement rises above realistic levels, a fact forcing many small companies to look at alternative ways to advertise their business.

ISEDN ads provide a low cost alternative to PPC while retaining the exposure through it's network of 400+ Search Engines and Directories, the other advantage of ISEDN advertising is that every ad enjoys equal exposure as it is rotated through the ad slots for each keyword, this means your ad is guaranteed to show in the top ten places on a majority of the network for a majority of it's run time.

The ISEDN ads are also very cost effective in comparison to other advertising systems, instead of a bidding system there is just the one low fee per keyword (around $4 per month) this allows advertisers to maintain their budget while increasing the number of keywords/phrases the ads will appear under.

Coupled with millions of searches performed monthly ISEDN advertising all adds up to better Bang for your advertising dollar click here to check it out for yourself

Very recently Google announced it had added Twitter Tweets to it's search index, now while this maybe new for Google here at Easy Search Live we have been providing Social Search results for the last 5 months, but rather than get into a "who got it first" argument we would rather determine "who got it right".

See the major concern with adding social search to the search index is that the sheer number of posts made every day on social networks vastly outnumber the normal listings held in a search engines index and can end up clouding the waters simply because if i search for refrigerators the results could also contain every social post containing the word refrigerator and there could be millions of such posts making my task of finding a new fridge difficult if not impossible.

Our answer to this problem is to provide the social search ability but keep it separate from the normal index so posts on a social network cannot interfere with a person performing a normal search for a product or piece of information .

Our aim is to provide a better drill down of information on our search system , other News carrying sites like yahoo tend to blend their news information on their front page while we believe that separation into groups such as Business or Entertainment allows the user to select  a homepage that matches their interests, we take that a step further by providing targeted search buttons that allow the user to weed out results that are unlikely to be relevant for instance if i was looking for blogs about baby boomers a web search for baby boomers would return 1,375,536 results for baby boomers which contain not only blogs but other links with "baby boomers" in their content  but by selecting the blogs tab and performing the search i only get listings from blogs in this case 42,014 results for baby boomers blogs, all relevant to my query and drilled down according to my search criteria.

This makes in our minds for an improved search capability enabling the user to find the information they seek faster and with a much higher relevance, we even take the drill down a step further by providing "Live View" a small ajax interactive window that opens below a listing this then allows the searcher to check the listing does in fact contain the information they seek or to make comparison of the information between 2 listings without even leaving the results page.

Live View has an even greater spin off for the advertisers, because the user stays on the results page much longer than on traditional search search engines like Google he gets far greater exposure for his advertising dollar, his/her ad will be visible for up to an hour or more right there in front of the user compared to the brief few seconds ads recieve on other Search Engines, and as we all know the longer you can keep your information in front of somebody the more likely they are to buy from you, this means a much higher ROI on the advertising dollar, something every advertiser seeks and needs.

While the major engines like Google play with their toys and gadgets Easy Search Live is concentrating on providing better service and a simple search system that works.