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Posts Tagged ‘version’

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about real-time search, but is it necessary? First, let’s look at the current state of search and crawl.*

Unless your site is decidedly authoritative, like CNN.com, you’re likely to get crawled as Google indexes more authoritative sites that are linking to your own. Your site will end up on a particular crawling schedule.

The lengthening or shortening of the crawl schedule, with blogs especially, is largely determined by the amount of new content found on the site each time it’s crawled. In the chart below, the diagonal lines represent getting crawled by the search engine and the ominous black spots represent posting new content.  In this case, if you haven’t posted in a while, you’ve probably worked up a fairly large interval between crawls. If you suddenly return to posting on a consistent schedule, over time the crawl interval will be narrowed until your content gets indexed soon after posting.

In essence, you can and should train Google to index your site more frequently by posting new content regularly or by getting new backlinks to your site.

Real-time indexation is just what it sounds like. Content is indexed and searchable immediately upon publication. None of the big three engines are there yet.

Is real-time indexing by search engines (and hence real-time search) inevitable? It’s starting to appear so.

Twitter is already considered to be real-time, though it’s far from a genuine search engine. Microsoft seems to have tweaked Bing to place higher value on more recent news. In tests, Google Caffeine, the new under-infrastructure version of the search giant, seems to be indexing a lot more pages and giving higher placement to the newest content than the current version. And Facebook’s FriendFeed acquisition suggests they’re definitely eyeing the real-time search space.

Real-time search helps anybody who reads or writes content with a short shelf-life. If you post about an in-progress disaster, a celebrity death, or a limited-time offer, your content is hot one minute, cold the next, so quick indexation by search engines means that your content will be found while it’s still relevant. You would probably gain a good amount of site traffic just by riding the wave and capitalizing on long-tail searches, regardless of how frequently you post.

The real-time search goal has plenty of obstacles. Real-time indexation takes a mountain of data computation power. Plus, algorithmically, how do you consistently showcase an on-scene Twitterer’s play-by-play updates over the Huffington Post side commentary during a crisis? Or do you? You can’t use backlinks as a determinant. Authority is negligible. One practical solution would be to house real-time search separate from regular search, just like Google News is separate from the primary index. Regardless, real-time search is only as valuable as the relevance of the top-ranking content and is likely to look different from today’s version.

Until we get there, the most important thing you can do now is get your site as close as possible to real-time indexation using the available SEO techniques.

• Create good content on a consistent schedule, applying other relevant SEO tactics to optimize your site, and building up your authority
• Create sitemaps for your site so search engines know which pages to crawl
• Use NoFollow tags on non-critical pages as a way of shining a light on the more important ones
• Submit your site and content to directories and social bookmarking sites
• Work on building links from more authoritative sites pointing to your own

*For clarification, crawling (or spidering) is the method search engines use to populate their data repositories so people can search using their websites. It involves running programs called bots (or spiders) that go from link to link scouring web pages and returning information to be indexed.

Conducting keyword research can be a bit of a challenge if you aren’t using the right tools. When you conduct a search for “keyword research tools,” you’ll come across so many choices it can be hard to choose just one. So what are some strong keyword research tools available today? I’ve come across a few that seem to be effective.

Aaah, Google AdWords. This is probably one of the more popular tools out there, and all of you SEO experts are familiar with how it works, or at least should be. So what other tools are useful for keyword research?

Let’s take a look at a few.

Google’s SK tool works really well for generating niche keyword ideas. When you get to the SK tool page, click on the link, “Or see top keywords across all categories.”

Now it will display a list of categories for this search. From there, you can search through a various categories such as health, food, computers, travel & tourism, and more.

Let’s click on Sports & Fitness. Now, if I click on the Boating & Water Recreation, it will pull up a list of ideas and corresponding monthly search volume.

From here, you can find some great ideas for niche marketing. This tool can be useful for finding long-tail keyword ideas as well. To do this, simply do a search for a keyword (such as ski boats) and it will generate a list of long-tail keyword suggestions.

Additional Free tools for keyword research include:

• Wordtracker – Can help you compile associated keywords.  A more robust, paid version is also available.
• Keyword Discovery – Free version of the keyword research tool from Trellian.
• Spacky.com- Generates a monthly search volume for a given keyword.
• Seo Book Keyword Research- As stated on their site, “The Coolest Keyword Research Tool Today!”
• Keyword Spy- A site that allows you to spy on your competition and find their keywords.

Paid Subscription Tools

If you’re looking for added features, some good tools to check out:

• Spyfu.com- This is a great way to spy on the competition. They provide a Keyword Smart Search generates keyword ideas based on what the competition is doing. You can use some of their basic tools by creating an account, but in order to get the most out of it, you have to subscribe for a membership. 
• KeyCompete.com- KeyCompete is a keyword research tool that recognizes the keywords your competitors use in their pay-per-click campaigns and also reveals the competition that is bidding on your keywords.
• Wordze.com- Facilitates finding niche markets and locates market growth.
• Adgooroo.com- Helps you to get more traffic by finding traffic opportunities, PPC monitoring, and more.
• Nichebot.com- According to their ad, it’s “keyword research on steroids.”

The best tool that I am utilizing is Market Samurai. This tool is amazing! Really. I’ve been using it for the past month or so, and it makes keyword research so simple. In addition to keyword research, it provides tools like a rank tracker, finding content, and analyzing the competition. If you don’t want to pay for it right away you can download a free trial version for 12 days.

Have you found other tools useful when conducting keyword research? If so, I would love to hear about them.

Microsoft recently announced that it’s going to ramp up MSNBot 2, which is currently in beta version. Webmasters may now notice the new bot in their log files. The beta version was released in December 2008, and the useragent is similar to the original bot.

New Bot:

msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Current Bot:

msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

The new bot promises a more efficient crawl. Microsoft states:

“We are busy working on our improved crawler and plan to ramp up its workload as we move toward the goal of putting it into full production. As a result, webmasters may begin seeing an increased amount of traffic from the new bot on their sites.”

Feel free to report any issues about MSNBot 2 at the Bing forum.