SEO / SEM blog

Adobe have announced that they team up with search engine industry leaders to improve the quality of search results of Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s).

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

Until now Flash technology was unreadable to search engines, therefore websites build with this technology were invisible to the search engines, they didn’t show on high SERP positions, they couldn’t optimize their websites at the same level as HTML websites loosing potential visitors from search engines.

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”

The new technology lets crawl Flash (SWF) content and no update/reorganization of the website/content is necessary. It’s good news to millions of website owners as they don’t need to worry any more about their website indexation. Simply because their website became visible to search engines (at least Google for a start).

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”

Google have already announced Flash indexing algorithm technology and they answer many vital questions about this new Flash algorithm.

Some of more important questions they answer are:

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

It means that Google can crawl and index Flash (SWF) files, read the text inside of them, follow the links, create snippets for a website and associate the words in the Flash file with query terms in Google search engine. That way a website becomes visible to Google.

There are some limitations about Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library. Google can not see images in Flash files, Flash file loaded from JavaScript, content written in bidirectional languages (Hebrew and Arabic language) and Google will index separately any files loaded by the Flash file (such as external HTML file, an XML file or another SWF file).

Yahoo! will also gain ability to index Flash files…but not at the moment. They always seem to be one step behind Google. And this time is no exception.

Yahoo! also expects to deliver improved Web search capabilities for SWF applications in a future update to Yahoo! Search. “Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation,” said Sean Suchter, vice president Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering.

Adobe Searchable SWF library FAQ: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.htm l

Google Webmaster Central blog on Flash: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-inde xing.html

Official Google Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.ht ml

Adobe FLash technology: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200806/070108A dobeRichMediaSearch.html

Microsoft announced acquisition of Powerset, a natural language search engine.

We’re excited to announce officially that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Powerset.

Powerset has always been a small company with big dreams, with the ultimate goal of changing the way humans interact with computers through language.

Powerset licensed breakthrough technology from PARC, hired world-renowned computational linguists and search engineers, and recently released a search and discovery experience for Wikipedia articles. Our technology helps to improve search results and also makes new features possible, such as Factz, which aggregates information from many articles to summarize a topic.

Powerset became part of Microsoft…

because our goals around improving search align so well… We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale.

No argue with that. Microsoft is a company with huge budget and i’m sure Powerset will only benefit from that acquisition. Their technology will be developed much faster than before with much more money involved.

With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale.

The deal between Powerset and Microsoft enclose that…

Powerset will continue to operate much as we currently do, working in the same building, with the same organizational structure, and with the same uniquely talented and growing team.

The financial details of the acquisition were not published. The time it will take Microsoft to incorporate Powerset’s technology into the Live Search are not known.

Powerset’s blog: http://www.powerset.com/blog/articles/2008/07/01/microsoft-to-acquire- powerset

Live Search’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/07/01/powerset-joins-liv e-search.aspx

The Marketing Pilgrim SEM contest that i participated in with my “Link Juice: How to make people link to your website” article has finished already. But we still have to wait for final results. This year the organizers decided to keep all traffic data confident until the winner is announced. In previous years the traffic numbers were published, top 5 participants advanced to the finals where the expert judges voted to chose a winner.

This year no traffic stats will be published until the winner is announced, so no one can be sure if they succeed to advance to the next stage. It is so the judges don’t feel influence by anyone.

The winner will be announced on July 11th, 2008 together with all traffic statistics. It’s a little bit later than it was supposed to be because of coming 4th of July holiday in U.S. To give more time to the judges Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim decided to announce the winner after that holiday.

So we have to wait some more time to see who is the winner. I will let you know as soon as the results are published.

Congratulations to all participants, those were great articles you have written. Good luck!

Really funny video. Enjoy it!

Google Zeitgeist is a list of most searched terms in Google search engine published on monthly and yearly basis. It is a detailed list of search queries divided into regions/countries, so may see what people are looking for in your own language and country.

The name comes from combination of German words Zeit (time) and Geist (spirit).

Google Zeitgeist is a good tool that you may use in search for keywords/keyword phrase ideas. It’s a good list of keywords people actually use to search informations on Internet.

Google Zeitgeist website: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist.html

2007 Year-end Zeitgeist: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2007/

Ever wandered who is Satan, how to kiss or who is God? Well, your not the only one. Check out this funny real life searches on Google: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2007/mind.html

I guarantee that your website for desired keyword will appear on 1st place in Google search engine.

And now seriously, how many times did you heard that before? How many companies “guarantee” you will get first place in any search engine?

I’m sure it’s tempting offer. But ask yourself this question: can any company order Google to do anything? I don’t think so. So how can a company guarantee you WILL get top rankings? Well, they simply can’t.

They can guarantee they will do all they can, that they will use all their knowledge and resources to make as much positive impact on your website as possible. They can guarantee the use of white hat seo techniques in their work. But they simply can not guarantee you will certainly, 100% sure get to position no.1 for desired keyword.

Of course if your desired keyword is “guaranteedfirstplaceingoogle” than you may be sure you will be on first place in Google, but do you really want that?

In general im very skeptical when i see guaranteed-like offer in seo business. So why so many companies use that marketing language in their business plan? I guess they believe people are skeptical too about thngs they don’t know and they want to be sure they will get desired results for money they pay. And in some way it makes sense.

But IMHO it’s far better to educate your clients, tell them how they can benefit from long time seo process and how can they succeed in their business without chasing for no.1 position for “hosting” keyword.

So stop guaranteeing top rankings and start concentrating on high ROI, high CTR (when involving PPC campaign) and long term steady targeted traffic to your clients websites.

Google Trends for websites is a tool that lets you see how popular your most favorite websites are. It gives you a general idea on how popular a certain website is on Internet, where the traffic is coming from, what regions/countries, what users were also searching for and which websites they also visited except the studied website.

The tool is a “new layer” to standard Google trends that gives you opportunity to follow your own website popularity, see how it grows over time and where your visitors are coming from and where they are going to. You may also use it to research your main competitors to find out where the traffic is coming from and how their website behaved over some period of time.

Example: Wikipedia.org - shows daily over the years, associated searches, websites also visited by the same users that visited wikipedia.org and regions with highest volume of search traffic to that website.

Google Trends for websites: http://trends.google.com/websites

Google blog post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/new-layer-to-google -trends.html

Google Hot Trends extends the functionality of Google trends by giving you almost real time user search queries in one place. It is updated through the day and changes very frequently. It is a projection of what people are searching for on Google search engine.

For each Hot Trend, you will see results from Google News, Google Blog Search and web search, which help explain why the search is hot.

That feature helps you find out why is some query popular at the moment. You may also go back to some day to see what queries were most popular during some specific day.

It’s a great tool to help you find the best keywords for your website, ad copy or text on your site. If you are looking for real live search queries this tool is a great addition to your SEO tools.

The tool is available only in English but other languages will be introduced with time.

Google Hot Trends website: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

Google blog post about Google Ht Trends: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/whats-hot-today.html

Google trends is a tool that enables you to see what topics are popular in Google search engine over the years. The informations about user searches are stored, sorted and presented in easy to understand way.

Google trends is a great way to follow trends and user behavior over a long period of time. It’s also a good way to see when you should start prepare special holiday promotions, start a contest or introduce a new product.

Looking on user behavior may help you predict what is the best time to make the right move and when can you expect to gain the most from your actions. It also gives you a general idea on user preferences based on search volume of keywords.
Exampes:

Valentines day - see how soon should you start promoting your seasonal products,

Nike shoes - see in which cities/regions/countries this search query is most popular,

Firefox vs. Internet Explorer - check how fast did Firefox gained popularity over past years and became more popular than Internet Explorer.

Google Trends website: http://www.google.com/trends

Google introduced a new product called Google Ad Planner. The tool is available in beta version at the moment. The Ad Planner gives you an inside view on your targeted audience by giving you detailed informations such as gender, age, yearly income etc. of your audience.

By entering demographics and sites associated with your target audience the Google Ad Planner returns you a detailed list of sites that are likely to be visited by your audience. It gives you also further informations about each of those websites and displays related searches for a particular site.

As the name indicates, the tool is designed for media planners to help create their media plans.

Google Ad Planner website: http://google.com/adplanner/

The tool is in beta version and you need to request invitation at http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/request.py?contact_type=si gnup

Google blog: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/06/introducing-google-ad-planner.html