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********************* Catch and cache past installments of SearchWrite SearchNews in the http://www.searchwrite.com/Pages/searchnews.htm ********************** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ At this week's SMX Social Media Conference in NYC, a key focus was on micro communities or smaller niche sites that have a passionate community of members. Micro communities are essentially vertical portals with social networking and media features. Take "Llamaland.com" as an example of a llama-loving micro community. Or WebMD, a community that lets you run your own blog, participate in message boards, tag things (which rank well in the search engines). Or LibraryThing, a site that's great for authors, publishers, and marketers who have produced their own books There's Yelp, a local city review site. If you're a small business, you can take control of your own listing on the site. You can also write reviews of restaurants and establishments. Since Yelp is so visible in the search engines, it provides great visibility. DonorChoose is a community for educators and students that allows you to blog, review things, leave comments, etc. Minti is another micro community that's for parents. It offers advice, networking opportunities, and a bunch of other good stuff. RealEstateVoices is a real estate social news site. SportsShooter is an example of a photography micro community. Threadless is a t-shirt site where you can submit your own design for t-shirts. Cork'd is a micro community for wine geeks. Imbee is a Facebook for kids. Speaking of real estate,Trulia is a real estate community that's like a Facebook/Yahoo! Answers with blog features. It's relatively large within the real estate realm. Keep in mind, you don't necessarily need to find customers within these communities, but rather like-minded people and colleagues who can spread your brand. PeerTrainer is a fitness community. You can mentor or peer people and essentially be their online trainer, and vice versa. It's also great for trainers and people who run gyms and fitness clubs. How does one discover micro communities? Through the search engines, of course! Search for terms related to your industry. While you might not see a community ranked number 1 all the time, if you consistently see the same site popping up for various searches you can deduce that the site is strong/authoritative within the community. You can also find micro communities via social media discovery blogs. Social media and web 2.0 lists are also a good resource for finding micro communities, as well as recommendations and networking. How do you determine if a community is right for your business? Look at membership numbers. Also, analyze the community's topical focus, relevance, and "leverage-able" features.
Speaking of online communities, eBay has officially entered into the social networking / social commerce realm with the official announcement of the launch of eBay Neighborhoods. These "neighborhoods" will be communities/ networks built around specific products/ items; reportedly, there are plans to build around 600 such networks. See the official announcement here. The number of items listed on eBay has fallen the past quarter and also on a year-on-year basis. While eBay does not admit it, there are reports that this may be due to suppliers being unhappy with the contextual advertising [as a result of a partnership with Google] that is offered on the site, which suppliers feel lead buyers away from the site. Considering the social networks are being monetized primarily by advertising, and viewing it together with the contextual advertising partnership, we could be seeing the evolution of eBay, increasingly monetizing via advertising and reducing its dependence on transactional revenues. <http://neighborhoods.ebay.com>
Last week's Search Engine Marketing Local Mobile show in Denver, Colorado laid out the rules of the road. Here's how to mobilize your search campaign for those on-the-go. 1. There is a universal business listings repository initiative underway.
Google has announced new features for Google Analytics that include site search reporting and event tracking. The site feature will be available worldwide soon, and will enable you to track internal searches on your site and apply those site searches to other metrics on your site. The site search reporting feature also works with Google Custom Search, GSA, Google Mini and many other non-Google site search products. The event tracking feature is launching in a limited beta. Event tracking allows webmasters to measure visitor engagement with a site's interactive elements. You can track user interactions with AJAX, JavaScript, Flash movies, page gadgets, downloads and other multimedia Web 2.0 experiences. Google also announced a limited worldwide beta of a new version of Urchin software. Google bought Urchin to create Google Analytics, and many Urchin users were upset with the lack of updated to Urchin. The past version is Urchin 5.0 and runs natively on a server, as opposed to Google Analytics, which is a hosted application. There is a free 90-day trial for the software update, which can be requested through authorized resellers. After the 90-day trial period, Google will be selling the new version for a discounted price to users of Urchin. Finally, Google Analytics has added six new languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 25. The new languages are Czech, Hungarian, Portuguese (Portugal), Thai, Filipino, and Indonesian.
The Swedish journalist Martin Jà?nsson of Svenska Dagbladet is arguing for use of the new term ퟙSearch Editorퟘ or ퟙEditor of Searchퟘ. Martin relates the story about meeting the Editor of Chief of the British Times, Anne Spackman, who told him that they have hired a so-called Search Editor. The TimesíŸÙ Search Editor is to explain to the editorial staff how the search structure of the Web functions, work on indexed pages and improve the rankings of their newspaper articles in Google, Yahoo! and other search engines. Will the term ퟙSearch Editorퟘ replace ퟙWeb Editorퟘ in future job ads? The ideal Search Editor would be an editor with knowledge of the following three topics: 1. Searchability through Web search engines, i.e. the external searchability
The Google Blog has announced that GOOG-411, Google's voice enabled search service, is now out of beta. To use GOOG-411 just dial 1-800-466-4411 (aka 800-GOOG-411) and listen to the voice prompts. As part of the official launch promotion for GOOG-411, Google said they will unveil which Googler is the voice behind GOOG-411.
In our continuing quest to help you create your own SEO workshop, here is a list of 20 more Search power tools. From Freshbooks Invoicing to AWeber, a multiple auto responder and mailing list management service, to Basecamp, the project management interface which, hey, you could be using regularly as a SearchWrite client since that is our client interface project management system. <http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2007/oct/15.html> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ MapQuest has launched a new beta site, which represents a new and rearchitected site with a host of new features and capabilities. The new MapQuest blog offers some additional insights and explanations. MapQuest says that the changes respond to user feedback. Features have been added or simplified and the interface has been "Web 2.0ified." New MapQuest Tour: <http://beta.mapquest.com/?cid=NewUI_From_Tour>
The quality of your snippet íŸÓ the short text preview the search engine displays for each web result íŸÓ can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google and others send your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL. <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="informative description here"> Google prefers to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it's worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't affect your ranking within search results. What are some good meta description strategies? Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Create descriptions that accurately describe each specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and consider using page-level descriptions everywhere else. You should obviously prioritize parts of your site if you don't have time to create a description for every single page; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages. Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information -- price, age, manufacturer -- scattered throughout a page, making it unlikely that a snippet will capture all of this information. Meta descriptions can bring all this data together. Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions are more difficult. In the latter case, though, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and is encouraged -- just make sure that your descriptions are not "spammy." Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse. Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are... descriptive. It's easy to become lax on the quality of the meta descriptions, since they're not directly visible in the UI for your site's visitors. But meta descriptions might be displayed in Google search results -- if the description is high enough quality. A little extra work on your meta descriptions can go a long way towards showing a relevant snippet in search results. That's likely to improve the quality and quantity of your user traffic. ******************************************
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