Making sense of the vast amounts of information available on the World Wide Web is no mean feat and the likes of Google, Yahoo and now Bing do their best but let’s be honest – SERPs are so 2008.

The aim of the semantic web is for the machines to lucidly understand the relationships between bits of data so that when the user is searching for something online the results returned are absolutely spot on. Some surfers think we’re nearly there, however my own browsing experiences lead me to believe that we’re still far from it.

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From a journalistic point of view, search marketers can come under a lot of lexicographical fire when it comes to writing copy. However, I strongly believe producing keyword rich content does not have to come at the sacrifice of quality prose.

Writing is a craft, as is optimising content to perform well in the search engines and it’s fully possible to have the two working in perfect harmony. Just before I started an SEO internship through Wired Sussex all those fateful years ago, I was doing some research and came across an article on search marketing written by Charlie Brooker. Now I don’t want to join a cult but if Charlie started one just show me where to sign. In his article the self-confessed ‘miserablist’ warned against prose manipulated for Google and the dangers these new trends posed for quality reportage. And although his points had a faint whiff of truth, anyone in the industry knows that it’s quite possible to write content that not only is picked up by the search engines, but it also enjoyable and informative to read.

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The key to this is thorough research, coupled with good old fashioned trial and error.

Target one or two keywords per page. Potential customers will be searching a range of different keywords, and no site targets only one throughout, unless its product or service is extremely limited. So, you need to gage what are the most precedent keywords on each page of your site, and then rewrite the copy and start to optimise the meta data around those specific targets.

There are many keyword research tools available online, I prefer to stick to the trusted main players – Google’s AdWords, Wordtracker and the fairly new Google Search Based Keyword Tool, beta version. Although it’s primarily for pay per click campaigns, AdWords is awesome because it provides you with a range of metrics that tell you the average search volume of the keywords, their competitiveness and their cost (were you bidding on them for PPC). With this data you can judge if it’s worth targeting certain keywords for organic search, or going for the long tail and spying a gap in the search market.

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Google’s search engine developers have been secretly developing a new project – dubbed “Google Caffeine”. Caffeine apparently has a next generation architecture for Google’s web search which aims to push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. Sounds like a huge step for Google but is it all hype? (more…)

Yahoo have ventured into the most significant change in their evolution so far. Yahoo has launched a new revamped personalised homepage for their search engine. They plan to use the US as a testing platform and then launch fully in the autumn across the web. (more…)

Microsoft Corp. registered a 0.4% increase in their search market share in June at the slight expense of Yahoo! not Google, said comScore.

The bigger picture of the worldwide search market now looks like this (figures updated on July 9th):

• Google 90.85%
• Yahoo: 4.26%
• Bing: 3.04%

32% of Bing visitors come from the US, taking BING’s search market share in the US to 8.45% (StatCounter, June 2009), an additional 0.4%, whilst Google remains stable at 65%. However in the UK Bing only represents 2.56% of the search market.

What’s in it for users?

Microsoft presented Bing not as a search engine, but as a decision search engine, offering more contextual, relevant results to help decision making. (more…)

I want to search a certain query in search engines. So which one do I use?  Habit drives me towards Google knowing they are the biggest player in the market, but is that REALLY the best search engine to use for my specific query? Will Google give me the most relevant results? Apparently so, according to a new study by Citigroup. Their recent analysis of search relevancy found that Google was better than any of its main competitors in returning relevant results. (more…)

PageRank sculpting is an SEO method of controlling your websites allocation of PageRank throughout your web pages. PageRank sculpting is based on simple logic. Previously all you needed to do was add the rel=”nofollow”  tag to a link pointing at a web page that had little use to you in terms of search engine optimisation (such as a shopping basket or a contact us form), then you didn’t dilute any of your PageRank to that page.
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Recently I’ve been looking around at the different search engines on the internet hoping and believing that there was more to search than the big three of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Having looked at the very serious Wolfram Alpha a little while ago and more recently the oddly named Duck Duck Go, I have now been alerted to Hunch.
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Duck Duck Go may have gone under the radar since its launch in September 2008 but it is in fact an internet search engine that has had some positive feedback from its users. I thought I would take a look at this new search engine, if only to give my eyes a break from the usual suspects’ home pages and logos.

Duck Duck Go bases itself around being a search engine that will provide you with the results you need whilst wiping out the clutter that can often get in the way of a regular search query. Using its own web crawler, the DuckDuckBot, and information taken partly from Wikipedia, it is hoping to make search more relevant. (more…)