Should Search Engines Have Manual Reviewers?

July 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Nutch robots

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There was a time not so long ago when a company such as Google would need to have tons of people doing manual, often rote tasks. Of course, the entire nature of search engines is that they rely heavily on the ever-growing power of computers. With a computer, rote work becomes a lot less frequent and far fewer people are needed. However, such an approach may have the flaw of a lack of the human touch about it.

Google has had a long lasting problem with websites and their often mediocre or worse content. Simply put, a lot of sites were “optimized” for a particular keyword and ended up having little more than tons of the keyword placed throughout the page with little genuine content holding it together. Far too often, this led to bad quality websites being at or near the top of the search queue, while better sites lagged behind.

A website is really only as good as its content, so perhaps it would be best if companies like Google stepped backward in time and hired people specifically to review website quality for websites vying to get onto the critical first two pages of search results. While this could easily employ a team of hundreds of people full-time, it might end up producing better quality search results. In the end, this could end up putting better quality information and better-produced sites at the top of the search results, where they belong in the first place.

 

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Do Search Engines Check for Quality?

July 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Another view of the south side of the Googlepl...

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The content of search engine approved websites has long been considered to be of subpar quality. While Google has declared war on bad content, a lot of people have figured out that the algorhythms have a long way to go in order to remove all of the bad content from the Internet’s most used search engine.

While this search engine is depended on by most people whenever they want to search for anything, its content has always relied on things like keywords. This reliance on keywords ultimately resulted in website owners and content producers stuffing huge amounts of keywords into their content. This tended to result in badly written content that bordered on being gibberish and has contributed to lessening the online world’s trust of most content. However, the quality level that a website uses for itself can vary tremendously between one site and another.

Website quality is a bizarre thing. High quality sites tend to attract more links than any other kinds of sites do, and in some cases large numbers of links still found their way onto sites of dubious quality. To date, for all of Google’s tough talk about being all about separating the wheat from the chaff, they have done very little to curb second rate quality. Culling the worst of the work from their roster has been a very slow process for the major search engines and has seemed almost impossible. Checking for quality is still a ways off from a software perspective.

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Content Network and Remarketing

April 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Whether you are an SEO expert or a simple site owner who simply wants to improve your site’s search engine rankings and conversion rate, owning your own content network is certainly beneficial. In terms of advanced SEO campaigns, a solid content network can be used for remarketing purposes.

For those of you who don’t know already, remarketing is the process of repeating a certain message using a subtle method of communication. Visitors exposed to remarketing messages will form a clear understanding and will certainly have higher chance of visiting the advertised site and purchasing the products and services offered.

Through your own blog network, you can disperse a series of remarketing messages fine-tuned to advertise your main site (or the site you are working on if you are an SEO expert). Visitors browsing your network of sites and blogs will then be exposed to these messages and turn into targeted leads.

When executed properly, remarketing through a highly relevant content network will only boost not only your search engine rankings but also the overall conversion rate of your site. The impact can be seen instantly. You will be surprised to see just how effective this particular advanced SEO trick can be.

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E-mails And Chatting

March 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

One of the most effective ways to pass your time is to talk to someone. If you are enjoying the chat with someone then you won’t realize how fast the time flies away. One moment it is just your break hour and the next thing you know is that hours have flied away and you are overdue on the tasks you have to do. It is something which happens to everybody.

When the internet was first invented, one of the primary things that the people used to do was keep in touch with their friends and family who were settled elsewhere or gone at some place away from them. At this time, it was a simple thing and e-mailing was relatively a new concept. People used to think of it as something very awesome and out of the world.
Today e-mailing is something which you do on a daily basis. It is a part of life. You can e-mail to your friends and family via your mobile apart from the personal computers and laptops and it is nothing to be so shocked about. The same goes for chatting. There was a time in the past when chatting was considered to be something very fascinating and totally magical.

People used to chat with others who may be known or unknown to them. They used to get completely absorbed and hooked to the computer through chatting with others. Today it is something which is very common and normal, mostly taken for granted if you look closely. All these conveniences have been blessed on to you through the great technology of the internet without which life would have been very different indeed.

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Internet And Blogging

March 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The internet has not only been a place to gather information about various sources, it has become a destination for sharing one’s thoughts and ideas with the rest of the world. You can consider the internet as a source that can alter the whole world’s outlook with the ideas and concepts shared by people around the world and coming together to discuss about a common topic.
Internet blogging is one of the most widely practiced techniques these days. People are flocking on the websites to share their views on some topic and put forward an issue which might be troubling them or the world. A blog is something which may either be a website or a part of the website. The term blog is a blend of the terms web log.
The blogs are usually maintained or looked after by a person. You can’t exactly call it supervision because the owner of the blog is not exactly supervising the blog; rather they are just looking after the various aspects like whether there are any offenses or something similar and remove the problems. The blogs may be both interactive and restricted.
Most of the blogs allow the outsiders, which are the visitors to leave their views or comments on a topic. They are usually interactive and quite friendly. Some blogs may have a particular theme, like technology or art, or something similar while others have a mixture of topics and various opinions on them. It depends on the type of blog that you are using and maintaining.
All blogs have similar rules, about offenses and insults. They discourage everybody from using obscene comments and offending a particular person or community. If you look at it in a way, it is like a diary where you leave your comments. A blog is very communicative and an interesting part of the internet.

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Keeping in Touch from Far Away

January 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Hierarchy of Customer Satisfaction Needs
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Your business is something that you get up every day and face head on. But for your customers, your business might just be little more than a name that comes up at the top of their web browser. The Internet has replaced many parts of the business experience, all the way from having large numbers of employees (who may now either be replaced with distant, outsourced freelancers or simply with software) to dealing directly with customers in a face-to-face setting. And just as the face of business has changed, businesses themselves have had to adapt to this new way of life. No matter how you slice the situation, we live in a world where a few clicks of someone’s mouse can spell the difference between great success and failure.

Your customers, who may once have had to visit your business physical address in person, may now see and otherwise interact with your business completely over the Internet. While it was once very easy to simply ask people questions such as, “What do you like best about what we provide,” it is a bit more complicated to do nowadays. Of course, while it is complicated, you can still both ask and be answered with reasonable ease. This is the purpose behind the customer satisfaction survey, which nearly every serious business website has among its gadgetry.

After all, just because your business is online does not mean that you have to seem cold and “corporate” in how you address people. Your email blasts can be very colorful if it is congruent with how you do things. And if your surveys reveal that your customers prefer a certain color scheme, a particular style of presentation, or even a whole new line of products, there has never been a better (nor has there been an easier) time for giving the people precisely what they want. And all you have to do is keep in touch.

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Pinpointing Your Target Audience

January 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Casinos have always been run by slick businesspeople, and it’s no different in the online gaming world. Traditional advertising methods prove as useful in the digital realm as they do on a street corner. The basics are simple: reel people in, entertain them, provide a quality experience, and make a reasonable profit doing all of the above. Of course, it helps to attract the correct market segment, as trying to reel in a bunch of the uninterested crowd will be a waste of your time as well as theirs. In this case, the segment is online gamblers, but the subset to focus on is positioning. This involves placing the ability to play the correct game in front of the right player.

Everyone has their strong suit when it comes to games. Some like to methodically count cards, or at least pretend to have a higher than average retention of past cards that have appeared. This can be sheer frippery, but is still different than the calm, rational bluffing that goes on at many poker tables. Here, its money placed on one’s belief in their ability to read another’s actions. Good players are worth retaining because they’ll return often, and with plenty of cash to wager, so a savvy online casino manager will be sure to send incentives along to ensure a return visit.

This can be as simple as some free starter money to get the “chips” rolling on another day of gaming. Few people say no to free money, especially when they can use it from the comfort of their home to get a few rounds of fun gambling in. With blackjack’s easy form, it’s quick, simple, and doesn’t need to take up a lot of time. That’s perfect for the gambler that just came into an extra five hand’s worth of betting cash. With clean, rapid fire graphics pelting the customer, they won’t be able to resist a return trip!

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Using Keywords in Web Copy

December 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment
screenshot of then OSL Desktop Search engines ...
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When writing blogs or articles on your websites to catch the eye of the search engines and to hopefully be ranked high, it is important to use SEO techniques. However, it is more important to write text that flows and makes sense.

All too often articles and blogs are bombarded with keywords. This is called keyword stuffing. Some believe that this technique of maximum keyword saturation is what will enable your site to rank higher than others. These sites seem to forget, however, that people actually read their blogs and articles. If an article is so ridiculously stuffed with keywords, then it is not going to read well at all. In fact, some articles that are keyword stuffed are just off-putting due to the lack of content and obvious tactics.

Like searching for apartments for rent in Seattle, search engines will crawl over your site looking for the keywords, so they are in fact important. On the other side of the fence are the people who believe that using the keyword only once or twice will suffice in attracting the most attention from the search engines. The fact of the matter is that nobody knows for sure what sort of algorithms the search engines like Google use to rank sites.

The best course of action is one that uses the keywords in a logical and judicious manner. Content is more important than using the keyword in every other sentence. Stick to having current and relevant articles on your site with no more than a 1% or 2% keyword saturation. As long as the article reads well and makes good sense, then you’ll be sure to have appeased both your readers and the great search engine gods. Treat your readers like the intelligent beings that they are and you’ll have won an audience and great rankings.

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How to Give Your Content Keyword Lovin’

December 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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While hitting a specific percent for keyword density is now a defunct technique, that doesn’t mean that keywords are no longer important. What it does mean, however, is that repetition will no longer suffice to make the search engines aware of your content. So, how can you give your keywords some love, and make sure the search engines notice it?

Use exact matches.

If your page contains the exact phrase that a searcher looks for, you’re much more likely to be seen as a “relevant result” by the search engines. As such, if you want to appear under any specific words or phrases, be certain to include that exact phrase at least once in your content. You will want this to be a word for word, letter for letter rendition of the search term that you’re expecting people to use.

Use related terms.

In addition to having the exact keywords, you will want to use terms that are related. The Google Keyword and Sets tools both provide an opportunity to find words and phrases that Google thinks are connected. The more you use related terms, the more appropriate Google will think the content is.

Be Bold (and Italic)

When you use your keyword in the content, don’t be afraid to put it in bold or italics. While the amount of weight given isn’t significantly different, these stylistic changes do help the keywords stand out to your visitors, both organic and robotic.

Organize Your Content

Use headers and sub-headers, along with the appropriate HTML tags, to organize the content on your page. When you do so, be certain to place appropriate keywords in the different headers of your content.

Provide a Shiny, Shiny Title

Google has come right out and said that meta titles and descriptions are an important part of how they rank results. As such, using important keywords and key phrases in your title and meta description will help your relevance.

Make a First Impression

Words used in the first paragraph, or about the first seventy-five words of content, will be seen as more relevant than keywords placed elsewhere, so be sure to include your important key phrases here

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The Benefits of Outsourcing

October 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

More and more companies are turning to outsourcing for their business needs. Outsourcing jobs to those in developing countries has a number of benefits, including the following ones:

  • Savings. Companies who outsource frequently save a great deal of money on labor costs. This is important in down economies, when sales or business slows and companies are looking to cut costs and save money. Labor is frequently much less expensive, and because work is usually short-term, employers also save on benefits and insurance, as well. In some cases, companies may even eliminate training costs.
  • Better efficiency. When you outsource, efficiency tends to be higher. Companies that specialize in the areas you outsource, such as technical support or human resources, are able to start immediately on your project without having to spend time training or setting up a system.
  • More focus on your business. Outsourcing certain tasks can help your managers focus their time and talents on growing the business. For example, say you have a manager with an MBA from an excellent school (you can see examples of the best MBA college rankings online) who excels in marketing yet spends the majority of his time handling tasks you could outsource. With outsourcing, you free up your management team to do the jobs they do well.
  • Increased customer satisfaction. When you outsource customer service and support for your products, your company is able to afford access to more support for your customers. This can lead to an increase in satisfaction.

If you are considering outsourcing for your business, think about the many benefits it can bring to your company. You can save by cutting costs that come with training and benefits, focus your talents and skills elsewhere, and improve customer satisfaction. There are many reputable companies that can provide you with outsourcing services for your business.

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