Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Hitwise just released a graph that will make eBay sellers unhappy.

Apparently, data has been being collected over the course of almost three years – and it doesn’t look good for the online auction site. Results of the study show that searches for the word “auctions” are declining, as consumers are coming to favor “classifieds” instead. “Auctions” maintained its spot on top of Bill Tancer’s graph until March of 2007 or so, but then a battle began.

Tancer noted:

“Summer 2008 marked the first sustain lead in ‘classifieds’ v. ‘auctions’ searches. During the last months of 2008, however, ‘auctions’ regained the lead, signaling the utility of auctions for holiday gift buying. 2009 however, has been the year of the ‘classifieds’ as the economic downturn has fueled our desire to save money by buying second-hand goods.”

What does this mean in real world terms? Basically that sites like Craigslist and local classifieds search are going to be edging out even more of eBay’s share of the market.

eBay’s stock has lost roughly 43 percent of its value since June of 2006 – about the time Tancer’s graph of search terms begins:

 (Credit: Hitwise)

Lars and Jens Rasmussen (who also worked together on Google maps) have developed a highly operational online interactive tool called Google Wave. Lars comments on the new feature:

“A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Google Wave could conceivably integrate all of the social platforms into a single conversation, eliminating the need for Google to compete with them. A preview of Google Wave gives you an idea of just how interactive it really is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ.

Make schedules, share ideas, integrate with other networks and even plan parties and track invitations acceptances and rejections on Google Wave.

Microsoft, Telligent and speakTECH are working in cooperation to form the three legs of a triangle known as the Social Enterprise Alliance. The Alliance is designed to offer an enterprise social networking solution for companies both in manufacturing and consumer goods sectors.

Rather than co-branding sites Google’s Friend Connect or Facebook Connect, the Alliance is supposed to be a stand alone, one of a kind solution, defining and developing communities based around a company. According to general manager Greg Urquhart of U.S. ISV and National System Integrators, U.S. Partners Group at Microsoft,

“The Social Enterprise Alliance with Telligent and speakTECH demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to recognizing partners that collaborate to offer a higher level of solutions and services offerings that are more relevant to customer needs. By integrating Telligent’s Community Server platform with speakTECH’s integration and services expertise — all of which leverage the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server platform — companies have a better solution to connect with their customers, partners, suppliers and investors.”

Telligent, a leader in enterprise software for online communities and collaboration, has two main offerings – Community Server and Community Server Evolution. Their platform empowers collaboration brands such as Dell, Electronic Arts, Intel, Microsoft, and Reader’s Digest. Their staff is impressive, including Chief Social Scientist Marc Smith, formerly Senior Sociologist Researcher on Microsoft’s R&D team, who now leads Telligent’s R&D analytics and business intelligence efforts – more specifically, Telligent Harvest. Rob Howard, founder and CTO of Telligent, said:

“Manufacturing and consumer goods companies have a unique opportunity to put the power of social computing to work across all aspects of their business, improving engagement and collaboration of employees, partners, distributors and customers. Holistic social computing solutions enable the agile and innovative enterprise.”

Interactive design and technology firm speakTECH brings consultancy, design and development services to the table, building on technology such as Microsoft Office and components of the Windows Platform. Their goal is to improve customer experiences and empower client personnel, improving operational efficiency and uniting technology. Aaron Sloman, CEO of speakTECH commented:

“Companies are finding the return on investment for social media campaigns to be aggressively outpacing traditional marketing strategies. It’s driving a transformation where traditional marketing departments need to re-tool as interactive marketing agencies.”

All of us would have heard about the launching of the new search engine Bing from Microsoft. This search engine is very likely to change how we optimize our websites. Microsoft announced the launching of its new search engine on 28th of May.

This new search engine will be more of a decision engine and not just a search engine. Bing has many new and exciting features that will make us get the search results that we need faster and easier. Bing is launched in order to pose a challenge to Google and we need to wait to see whether Bing will be a strong enough competition to Google. Whether it is going to be a competition to Google and yahoo or not, it is certainly going to pose serious challenges to the SEO experts and webmasters.

All along, we have been optimizing our websites based on the concept of keyword density. This was much easier to follow this concept and optimize websites based on this principle. We have also seen a tremendous success in this area. However if we want to perform well in Bing we may have to start looking at the issue from a little different angle. Keyword density will no more be an effective optimization principle because Bing is going to be a decision engine more than a search engine.

Bing promises to give better search results in the area of travel information, local business, health care and shopping. Here the results will not be based on the keyword density but it will be based on the relevance of the search to the users using the subcategory grouping. So we will not get unnecessary listings and results that we don’t really need to see. If we are searching for Michael Jackson, it is not necessary that all of us are looking for his albums. There are number of people who is interested in his biography. Therefore by listing all the sites with the keyword ‘Michael Jackson’ will make a good majority of them useless for the internet searchers. When the results are categorized based on subcategory grouping we can easily filter out around 40% of the unnecessary results and get more focused results. This should help us get the information we need faster. So websites will be listed irrespective of the fact whether they have the required keyword density or not.

This implies that we don’t have to depend on keyword density of the web pages anymore. How do we make our sites relevant to Bing? You can make your websites perform well in Bing by concentrating and optimizing your website for specific subcategories that are pertinent to your product or service.

Global users can expect to use Bing from 3rd of June.

Googlepedia is truly meant for those who like and do visit Wikipedia often from the results displayed by Google in the user searches. Googlepedia is available as an add-on in Firefox and is completely free. This add-on would split the Google page into two halves. Each half would each constitute to the Google search results on one side and on the other side would be the Wikipedia articles. Google results would be viewable on the left side and the Wikipedia results on the right side of the browser.

It is true that typing the search term in Wikipedia directly would mean the same and would take the same amount of time to search and find the beat article but the user would not have the opportunity to have all the results in the same page and would not be able to scroll down the results. Another important aspect (an advantageous feature) of Googlepedia is that it allows the user to shrink and expand the articles that are displayed from Wikipedia on the right. The user would even be able to hide the Wikipedia display altogether.

The internal Wikipedia links in Googlepedia would be available as clickable Google searches by default. But, depending on the users requirement, the setting can be toggled any time. the Wikipedia language in which the articles would be displayed can also be changed by the user depending on their need.

One more important feature or goodness of this add-on is that encyclopedia’s open source articles would also appear after Google’s results. Though FireFox has a number of add-ons that are not really popular, this latest add-on is certainly a huge hit among the internet users. Wikipedia has been considered one of the most reliable sources of information among many respected authors and scholars. Number of people even quote Wikipedia in their work. So by providing an exclusive section in Google results through this add-on is indeed a nice tweak. Number of internet users have already seen this add-on but it has not been advertised fully so it remained almost hidden if not dead until it came to light a couple of days ago. People are wondering that whether there are many such useful add-ons with FireFox that has not be publicized properly by this major browser company. This is where Google stands out; if it were to be a product of Google, then it would have received due attention and publicity from the company because part of Google’s success relies on its ability to popularize itself and its own products. If only other companies have to follow the footsteps of Google they will indeed do well in terms of their own growth and success online.