Launch of Search Engine CUIL Premature?
July 28, 2008
The internet has been abuzz with the news of a new search engine created by former Google engineers called CUIL today. It offers a new interface and a new take on search, sporting its own algorhythm. However, a few quick searches reveal deep holes in CUIL’s index coverage. Not only is it lacking key data in its search results, questions arise with respect to its search’s hierarchy. For example, the very first result for “Pete Lacis” brings a old, but hardly ever used domain of mine where there is much more relevant and valuable information to be found for the same search in Google and Yahoo. Time will tell if CUIL has any competitive power in this market. I would expect for over 30 million in venture capital funding, the search results to be a little more compelling.
How to Improve Traffic with Micro-blogging
July 24, 2008
One of the most popular off-shoots of the Web 2.0 space has been the advent of micro-blogging. This capability enables users to post short “updates” (usually no more than 140 characters long) in lieu of lengthy blog posts and has means to share this information within a specific community or the internet at large. While this can be as simple as status updates on the popular social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, there’s more to it than just that. Micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, Pownce and Plurk take things further and enable users to embed url’s and rich media items (pictures, music, video, etc).
However, just because you have these new capabilities doesn’t mean you’re going to generate SEO gold. You have to know how to author your content properly.
When promoting url’s via micro-blogging, its important to give the link context as concisely as possible without coming across has being spammy. Use these resources to share things that you think others will find useful or entertaining. If you’re promoting a product or service, position the link so that it comes accross as being useful or entertaining to others.
So if you’re going to mention that you really like the content of a particular site, be sure to mention “why” so that your post has context so that Google, Yahoo and the other search engines have something they can sink their crawler’s “teeth” into.
WordPress 2.6 Upgrade Available
July 15, 2008
For all those WordPress users out there, be certain to upgrade to version 2.6 which is out today. WordPress is certainly a favorite blog/cms platform of ours, for its ease of use it matched equally by its search engine optimization friendly design.
Be sure to check out this video about all the new features and improvments as well as upgrade instructions. Remember to backup your existing web files and database BEFORE you upgrade!
Google, Yahoo to Index (some) Flash
July 1, 2008
With the announcement that Adobe was providing optimized Flash Player technolgoy to Google and Yahoo, the SEO community has been a buzz about what this could mean for the industry. Until now, practically all content located within a flash or shockwave file has been invisible to search engines. The news here is that this new technology would enable search engines to read some text elements within flash….but any graphical text would still be invisible to search engines (save for ALT Text descriptions).