Search Market to Get Another Engine

HP, along with the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, is working on an engine to make online search more meaningful

Last year, Hewlett-Packard (HP) Labs initiated open research grants to dozens of universities worldwide. One such grant was given to the Computer Science Department of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B).

Professor Soumen Chakrabarti and his group at IIT-B used this grant to work on a new search engine which would trawl the web to provide relevant answers to queries. Their efforts are yielding results.

The IIT-B team has already created billions of annotation links between a 500-million web page corpus and millions of entities known to Wikipedia. The data is being churned on 42 high-end HP servers with over 350 gigabytes of RAM and over 150 terabytes of disks, donated by Yahoo. HP Labs and Microsoft Research have provided additional research funding.

To be successful, any search engine needs a robust mechanism that indexes web pages. At any given time, there are millions of web pages on the internet. For instance, Google has over 8 billion pages indexed and over 1.1 billion images. Add to that an efficient crawler which basically connects servers across the world wide web and across servers.

In case of the HP-IIT-B machine, the mainstay is annotation, indexing of annotations alongside ordinary text, and supporting a query language that can combine categories, annotations, quantities and regular text in creative ways, typically ending with evidence aggregation. The key to moving up in the search value chain, according to Chakrabarti, is to add semi-structured knowledge to the unstructured corpus, in the form of type, entity, category and relationship annotations, to index these annotations along with the text, and open up search application programming interfaces (APIs) and query languages to probe these indices and aggregate the resulting knowledge.

For more information http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/search-market-to-get-another-engine/368255/

SEO Can Help Build Online Presence

At this point, almost every company realizes they have to have a web presence in order to compete in the 21st century, but just being online doesn't help if people can't find you. But by using search engine optimization (SEO) and other techniques, practically every business can see improvement in their bottom line.

In a post for MediaPost's Performance Insider blog, Angela Hribar, chief sales and marketing officer at GlobalSpec, says there are a number of steps companies can take to improve their online presence - including creating original content.

Hribar says companies should put things like white papers and technical articles online which can help build the company's reputation as an industry leader and expert in its field.

She also says that businesses should consider using search engine optimization (SEO) to draw traffic to their site.

"Search engine optimization (SEO) can draw more attention to your company's webpages by helping them rise higher in search engine results for specific keyword searches," she writes. "Determine how SEO can best fit into your marketing strategy without too much strain in resources."

Companies might also want to put content on their site as it appears to draw more traffic than sites without it. According to figures gathered from Hitwise UK, content-driven sites got 73 percent more traffic than their ecommerce counterparts last month.

Article source: http://www.brafton.com/industry-news/seo-can-help-build-online-presence-$1320419.htm

SEO Expert Willie Crawford on 4 Sneaky Tricks

Maria Gudelis interviews SEO Expert Willie Crawford as he unveils four Sneaky SEO Tricks that drive traffic to your website on Wednesday, August 19th at 3 pm EST. The radio show will be recorded so if you miss it you can still listen in at:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Maria-Gudelis/2009/08/19/4-Sneaky-SEO-Expert-Tricks-That-Get-You-Traffic-with-Willie-Crawford

In in online interview, Willie Crawford said: "I’ve been in business online for over a dozen years because he is so successful at generating massive free traffic to his sites. I’ve done this primarily through generating lots of "content" - mainly articles.

Your customers go online looking for solutions to their problems. When you have lots of content scattered across cyberspace, your customers find what you’ve shared, read or listen to it, and then click through to your site. They arrive at your site pre-sold on YOU and ready to buy your products. It’s as simple as that"

SEO Expert Willie Crawford further said: "This has worked for over a dozen years, and continues to work great today. The only changes have been that now multi-media (video, and audio) are a very necessary part of the content mix"

Another attack takes down Twitter Site

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack has taken down Twitter for the second time in a week.

While the attack only stopped services for around half an hour, the outage is still a concern and will only heighten fears that the service is under-investing in its security systems.

Twitter gave no explanation for the attack in a blog posting.

“We’re working to recover from a site outage and will update as we learn more,” it said.

“Update (12:17p): We’re back up and analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack.”

The first attack is now thought to have been the work of Russian hackers looking to silence a pro-Georgian commentator. Since the outbreak of hostilities between the two countries there have been continued online attacks.

“The good news is that, unlike last week's attacks, Twitter was back up-and-running in about half-an-hour. So kudos to them for managing to avoid too much disruption for millions of their users,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology correspondent at Sophos.

Article for more information: http://www.crn.com.au/News/152742,another-attack-takes-down-twitter.aspx

Run If You Hear These 5 SEO Marketing Statements

In August 4th 2009 Tuesday’s five Marketing Misconceptions That Need to Change post, Will covered some of the misguided statements we hear from clients. If I only had a nickel for every time we hear those types of statements….

In the spirit of fairness, I am determined to defend the marketers who make these types of statements. Here’s what Will left out - often times these misguided comments originate from an agency, consultant or service provider that the company has put its trust in. So let’s look for some warning signs.

If you hear your agency, consultant or service provider make any of these five statements, consider running.

1.) Hi, I’m Mike from XXX National Directory/Search/Ad Network Company, and I am a Marketing Consultant with the company. I am here to help you build your marketing plan.

RUN! FAST! Nothing against these folks (really), but selling Yellow Pages or even a “boxed” pay-per-click solution does not make you a marketing consultant. It makes you someone that is trying to sell Yellow Pages or a “boxed” pay-per-click solution. There’s nothing wrong with selling. God knows we all do it in some form or fashion, but please don’t try to mislead people by calling yourself a marketing consultant.

Clarification: If you are in fact interesting in purchasing what essentially amounts to an advertising package, by all means engage with these folks. Just don’t expect to get any marketing strategy advice out of them.

2.) If you choose us for your SEO project, we can guarantee multiple top 10 rankings on your targeted keywords.

I thought these people had gone away, but it appears they’re back in full force. And I can’t blame clients for listening. When someone tells you they can guarantee results, it’s hard to ignore.

That being said, let’s all say this together: SEO is not a quick fix, set it and forget it solution for driving traffic . The best SEO strategies I’ve seen involve a long-term commitment to the creation of relevant content, building that content in multiple formats, and finding multiple distribution channels for that content.

I am guessing there are companies that make an SEO guarantee and do follow through on it. I am also guessing that those guarantees are made on keywords like “patent attorneys that also handle divorce cases in reston virginia”.

3.) You really can’t afford to wait on addressing social media. We should build out your presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter right away.

Stop. Please. We all realize that social media is important, even though it’s getting a bit crowded. Like anything else though, you shouldn’t build anything if it doesn’t fit into a more strategic plan.

Some of these groups will bait you with the promise of thousands of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or LinkedIn connections overnight. Great. Go ahead and recruit thousands of followers, all of whom could care less about your message. They’re following you because they’re trolling for followers as well. And the followers/friends/connections you do want? You’ll turn them off quick with the hundreds of meaningless updates you’ll have to post to accumulate all the meaningless followers.

Build a social media strategy. Make sure it ties back to your overall marketing strategy. Then join, listen, learn, and eventually execute. It’s that simple.

And one more thing, and I know this will be painful for some “social media gurus” to hear. Social media is NOT a necessity, nor is it necessarily effective, for every business and business category.

4.) We know you think of us as a print design shop, but just last week we added capabilities in web design and development, search engine optimization, pay-per-click management, email marketing, social media…oh, and we can also handle your dry cleaning if necessary.

Wow, just last week huh? So you must have hired an entire new team right? Nope. Acquired a company that specializes in those areas? Nope. Formed a joint venture with a web marketing agency? Not so much.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with trusting a marketing service provider that has done you right over the years and who is now claiming to offer new services. Just make sure you probe a bit or execute a small trial project before diving in head first.

5.) You shouldn’t cut back on your marketing/advertising spend in a recession. As a matter of fact, I was reading in Business Week (or insert another referenced publication) that the companies that spend MORE during a recession end up as the top brands years later.

So your client just laid off half his/her staff, notified remaining staff that salaries and bonus levels have been frozen for the time being, cancelled plans to open the new office in the commuter-friendly downtown location…and you’re going to bring the “increase your marketing spend” message?

Don’t get me wrong. Increasing marketing spending may be right for certain companies; we’ve even seen a few of those up close and personal in the last few months. But the first move - as an agency, consultant or service provider - should be to figure out how to spend your client’s marketing dollars more efficiently.

Article source: http://web2.sys-con.com

Five Easy but Powerful Ways to Use Google Analytics

First of all - what is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free analysis tool which gives you information on where your website visitors are coming from, which pages they visit, how long they stay and a lot more. There are plenty of paid stat counters available which present data in different ways, but Google Analytics is one of the best, and it is free.
One can over-analyze or under-analyze any website. Some people spend too much time checking stats, analyzing, and planning, and don't spend enough time writing good content and getting new readers to their blogs.

On the other side of the pendulum, you could go on week after week, blindly publishing content and flailing along with offsite promotion, without seeing what results your campaigns are getting, which type of content is the most popular for your visitors, and which traffic-generation techniques are getting the best results.

I find that the best times to check stats are when I don't have a lot of time to do a more intense project, or when I am a bit too tired to do anything more "heavy." Sometimes just before I go to bed at night is a good time to check into what has been happening between my visitors and my websites' pages. I can browse and poke around in my Analytics account and learn quite a lot - even with minimal energy.

Here are five simple and powerful ways to use Google Analytics:

1. Find out which of your website's pages are getting the most traffic, and optimize those pages.

If you are running ads on the pages, make sure they are properly placed and updated. If you are linking to affiliate products, make sure your links are up-to-date and that you aren't missing any links, or new products which should be there. If you are using that page for some other purpose, such as to generate subscriptions or whatever the case may be, make sure that the page is laid out as well as possible. This can be helpful if you have a large website which has a long "to do" list and many things to optimize or tweak. By just starting with the most heavily-trafficked pages, you will get the maximum results from your efforts and also know where to start.

2. Find out which referrers are generating the most traffic, and continue any actions you have been taking to generate traffic from those referrers.

For example, if you see that Twitter is generating a large amount of targeted traffíc, you can expand your activity on Twitter. If you see that your article submissions are getting new visitors from article directories, you can make a note not to drop those out - or possibly step them up. Conversely, if you see that you have been spending time/money on a traffic-generation method which is not getting very far, you can stop wasting your time on it (presuming you have given it time to take effect).

3. Find out which keywords you are ranking the best for and see which ones you can "push to the top."

If you had a website on dogs, for example, and found that you were ranking at #30-#40 on Google for many keywords, but ranking #11 for, lets say, "dog chew toys," you might want to work on increasing your rankings on dog chew toys and focus more of your SEO efforts on this term (of course there are other factors you would consider as well, such as the searches and competition for this term). Climbing from position #31 to #20 will generally not get you a huge improvement in traffic. But climbing from position #11 to position #3 almost certainly will. Focus first on keywords or key phrases that have the best chance of ranking high in the near future, and then move on to the others.

4. Find out which pages keep your visitors' attention for the longest.

If the average visitor on Page A stays for 5 seconds, while the average visitor to Page B stays for 150 seconds, the likelihood is that your visitors find Page B's content more interesting than Page A's.

5. Look at the graph of your bounce rate.

This tells you how many people left your site without visiting a second page. Depending on the website and the page, this may be a good or bad thing. But if you have a blog or a content site, it is usually a good sign when people stick around to view more of your posts and content before they leave. If your bounce rate increased or decreased after you made a certain change, you can opt to revert that change (if bounce rate increased) or keep it (if bounce rate decreased). For example, if I changed the theme of my Word press blog and then noticed a date-co-incident jump in my bounce rate, I might consider changing it back :) This statistic can be used in many ways - it will depend on the nature of your blog.

For more info login to http://www.google.com/analytics/