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If you’re an avid Yahoo! user, you probably love the functionality of the homepage. Click any one of their tabs, like ’shopping’, and you’ve got a world of products at your fingertips. Well yesterday, Yahoo announced that as of March 11, 2010, Yahoo! Shopping is partnering with PriceGrabber . Moving forward, Yahoo! shoppers will be asked to sign up with PriceGrabber in order to take advantage of product searches and do what they love best: go shopping! What’s interesting here is that the Bing/Yahoo search deal didn’t cover Yahoo! verticals like shopping, travel, health, finance, etc. Brian Smith of SingleFeed tells us that “Here’s an example where Bing Cashback would have been a very good partner to ‘power’ Yahoo Shopping, but Yahoo decided to go a different route instead and partnered with a competitor to Bing. Not sure if this has happened with Yahoo’s other verticals.” What does this mean? Other Yahoo! tabs will probably start outsourcing their services by partnerning with related sites. Think Yahoo! Travel partnering with Kayak . And Yahoo! Health partnering with webMD . … You get the picture. Read the official letter from the Yahoo! Shopping team. Read more from Comparison Engines about the new partnership between Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Yahoo! Goes Shopping With
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Boy, don’t you just love to hate my article titles? I know this topic has been discussed numerous times. Seriously though – for all the short term talk that happens every time we take a hit from someone who gives our industry a bad rap, we’ve never yet come to a clear consensus as an industry on how to properly deal with the ramifications. I for one think it’s time we find a way to address it. And I have a proposal on how we can work towards such a seemingly impossible goal… The SEO
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The Iranian Cyber Army has done it again. Their clever team of hackers has taken hostage of Baidu.com , China’s largest search engine. Baidu, pronounced “Bidu” is to China what Google is to the rest of the English-speaking world. Sources say those in China trying to log onto Baidu.com are currently being redirected to the Iranian cyber Army’s splash page, while people in other countries are still able to log onto Baidu. Some are speculating the search engine was targeted due to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Although nothing has been confirmed, we are leaning towards the idea that the Iranian cyber Army is an undercover Google coy, in which case Google insiders are having a field day. After all, Baidu has led the way with a market share of over 77% , but perhaps not for long. The breaking news comes after the “Iranian cyber Army” (aka Google hackers) successfully hacked Twitter last week. So who’s next? Read more about Baidu, Google’s biggest competitor in China. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Bye Bye Baidu : China’s Largest Search Engine
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Have you ever typed a question into Google and the ranking results were from a mass produced “how to” site? Even if you don’t know it…you have. Instructional, Q&A, and How-To sites have popped up in a variety of forms and many of them are having a great deal of success commercially and in the rankings simply by answering the specific questions people are asking. If your business website is not seeking to do the same, then you are missing out on opportunities to get links and to offer better service. The more information you can provide a customer the more credible your business becomes. Try going to a Big Box store’s electronics department and asking the sales clerk the difference between 1080i and 1080p in an LCD TV. Be prepared for copious stammering while they desperately seek an escape via a spill on isle 3. However, if you walk into an electronics specialty store and ask the same question you will probably get an intelligent answer which makes sense to you. Suddenly you have a lot more confidence in both your purchase and the place where you are purchasing it. The more information you can provide a customer, the more comfortable they will feel about doing business with you. And that’s just real life, online, consumer confidence and corporate credibility are only two aspects of a much more important reason to fill your site chock full of useful information. That reason? Links of course! The notion of using consumer questions to drive content development has a long history: Lisa Barone once talked about creating content to answer natural questions . Dazzlin Donna, mentions using question sites when she talks about intelligently crafting content And Debra Mastaler wrote a great piece about gleaning question inspiration from Ask.com . I’d like to go even further with these ideas of using questions to build links. This method in particular is a very special brand of link building. The kind that takes forever and makes you want to hurt people, ya know, the good kind. Step 1. Find out what kinds of questions your customers are asking. This may be easier than you think. In fact, all of the information you want it is probably accessible on your lap top without ever having be a face to face with a single human being. To start with an obvious source, the Wordtracker Keyword Questions tool is a god send in this department. The numbers associated with these questions may be a bit misleading though. For starters, the tool only goes back 140 days, so there will be drastic seasonal variances. For instance at the moment the top question for the word “how” is “How to cook a turkey.” It’s doubtful that will be the case in July. Trends and seasons are a good case for re-visiting this tool every few months. If you treat the numbers as more of “popularity gauge” than a hard fast rule you’re in the right frame of mind. And numbers aside, the questions themselves can be really telling about your customers…and in some cases about the internet using world. Like the fact that the #1 question returned for the word “Where” is “Where do Jon and Kate Gosselin live”. Really people? Aside from the keyword questions tool, there are others sites which have already done the work for you. In addition to Search Engines’ “Most Asked Questions” lists there are hundreds of sites which make a living answering peoples every day questions. As a link builder, you can capitalize on those efforts. Some great examples of sites that can work for this project are answers.com , ehow , wikihow , about.com , howstuffworks and instructables just to name a few. You may notice that Yahoo! Answers is conspicuously missing form this list, it’s GREAT for questions, but the individual pages don’t tend to have a lot of back links. Once you chose a site or sites to work with, run this search operator: Site:quesiton-or-how-to-site.com “keyword relevant to your business” This should give you a boat load of questions, and how-tos. With sites that offer more than just how-to’ instructions or have questions mixed into other information, try adding a ”who”, “what” “where” or “why” to the keyword to find entries which address questions. These results should represent honest questions that real people are asking which are related to your product or service. These are the topics that your consumers want to know more about, are you trying to be the authority on these topics? Well, why not? Step 2 . – Pick the best content Now that you’ve got some great content ideas, yeah, you could re-create an article based on every question that you find, if you can afford to create 300 articles and promote them all. Sure. But it may not be in your best interest to write a detailed article about how to cook a turkey or how to stalk Jon and Kate Gosselin. If you have limited resources, the best way to start is by looking at popularity. If a question is extremely popular you should probably address it somewhere on your site for the sake of providing good customer service. But just because a question is popular in Keyword Questions, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s something that people are linking to. This is where looking at people’s existing linking patterns comes into play. When you run the site command above, I highly recommend doing it with an SEO toolbar or plug in. SEO Quake is a good choice for this project because it automatically displays each page’s back links. Using this kind of tool will save you a LOT of time. Looking for specific instructions or an answer which already has back links you can find a pre-existing audience of potential linkers which is far better than starting from scratch. But just for your own sanity, check the quality of those back links before creating the article. Step 3 – Do it better and promote it Once you’ve picked a few questions to answer in content, it’s not enough to simply regurgitate what’s already on another site or to whip off a cheap two sentence answer barely worthy of an FAQ page. It’s important to bring something new to the party. What makes you more reliable than any generic instructional site or Wiki-what-now? You are (or should be) an expert in your space. That expertise gives you credibility. I’m much more inclined to believe a carpet store’s advice on how to get a grape juice stain out of my Berber than the insights of a pretty pony-tailed avatar. We all know club soda is magic on stains, but I’ll give you bonus points if you can tell me why. Extra Tips: If you find a question that has real merit, but the answer page doesn’t have a lot of back links or even if it does, try searching that question without any operators. Find the most relevant, ranking answers and scour those back links for decent linking prospects to add to your list of contacts. If you can answer multiple, similar questions within one article go for it; it doubles the number of people you can contact for links. Find a method of organizing your articles and research. Keep track of the articles you are creating, the websites that are linking to an existing answer for the question or questions your article will address and the contact information for those people. Make sure to use the exact question you are answering or instructions you are giving as the page’s title tag. This can help you be found as a respectable answer to the question in the future. Don’t forget a call to action, as people come into your site through these new content pages; strive to keep them moving deeper into the site. The Final Step Now that you have found and answered a burning question take that information to the people who are already linking to a less impressive answer. You should have a limited number of contacts, so be sure not to waste any of them by sending out a generic email template, you’ve taken the time to research the topic, so take enough time researching the contact to at least know their name or make an insightful comment about their site. You also have brand new content that is worth promoting so continue to search for sub-par information on the subject and let people know that you’ve just done it better. Where do you get your content inspiration from? Jennifer Van Iderstyne is the Online Marketing Director for Search Slingshot, an internet marketing company based in Albany, NY specializing in SEO reports and consulting . Jen can be found on twitter at http://twitter.com/Vanetcetera Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Build Links with Better
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Welcome to another edition of ‘ 7 Days of Search and Social ‘ – We’re all back in the swing of things after the holidays, although I am still getting caught up over here…sigh. Anyway, it was a pretty good week out in the blogosphere and somewhat drama-free, (always a good thing). While there were plenty of interesting blog posts, the rest of the search geek world was still somewhat sleepy (other than some interesting patents). Without further adieu, the best from the week that was;
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Google gives you plenty of really good tools at the moment to predict the traffic to your website from Google rankings. In this post I will show you how you can make a guestimation of the %age of traffic that a particular rank will give you, this is something that I have been trying to figure out for a long time now, and with Google’s wealth of tools available we can use these to get quite fair estimations (Well I think so anyway.). So what do you need to do this: Google Adwords Keyword Tool Your Analytics Package Daily Rankings Reports Google Insights for Search Firstly some caveats, This is an estimation tool remember this and make no promises based on the results, Results can depend on many other factors other than just this such as how appealing your result looks to the searcher, Results do not take into consideration the number of sponsored listings on the page or local search results and the maps with them, real time search box and Shopping results. Collecting the
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Keyword Research is an obvious first step in researching a niche for yourself or for a client. Keywords, and their results, make up the terrain of search marketing – and knowing the terrain (and who else is playing in it) helps us navigate up the mountain (and determine when the mountain is maybe too crowded to climb). Google’s AdWords Keywords tool isn’t a bad place to start, but if you’re operating in a competitive niche there isn’t much of an advantage there – even my grandma uses it (not really, my grandma still has a rotary phone, but you get the idea). Your real advantage comes from looking in places where your competitors aren’t to identify “under the radar” keywords. Here are 10 sources of keyword data that are often overlooked in the course of everyday keyword research. 1) Misspelling
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