Learn SEO Directly from the Search Engines
If you search at Yahoo for the phrase “world cup” (without the quotation marks), chances are good that the search engine will show you mostly pages about the 2010 World Cup, even though the tournament is held every 4 years and there may be many pages relevant for the phrase that don’t focus specifically upon … Read more
Query Suggestions are from search engines providing alternative queries to fulfill the informational or situational needs of a searcher. Like the information architects who organize the content on websites, search engine designers should aspire to provide users with scent at every step of their information-seeking process. Techniques like query suggestions, faceted search and results clustering … Read more
A paper by Google researchers Anne Aula, Rehan M. Khan, and Zhiwei Guan published last month asks the question How does Search Behavior Change as Search Becomes More Difficult? (pdf) The paper describes two studies in which participants were given informational tasks to perform – a mix of hard and easy questions – to see … Read more
When you type a query into a search box at Google or Yahoo or Bing on your desktop computer, chances are a drop down listing of suggested query terms will appear below the search box. If you use a smart phone, and start typing into a text box on your phone, your phone may also … Read more
This post may get you thinking about the benefits of using heading elements and lists on web pages for SEO purposes from a slightly different perspective than you may be used to. Google uses a large number of signals to decide upon the order of pages shown in search results. Some of those signals measure … Read more