When it comes to teaching machines how to understand human languages, one of the key ingredients is synonyms. Yet what is easy for humans to understand is difficult for machines to grasp.
Search engines are making progress, and Google feels they’ve made enough progress to make a significant adjustment to their results. Synonyms are now bolded in some search results, just like the keywords from the search phrase are.
Google says this will only happen when their algorithms determine its “useful and important to bold.” It’s as vague as it sounds.
Enterprise search software provider Covario has announced the acquisition of Netconcepts, a search engine optimization consultancy. The companies will merge and operate as Covario, Inc. and will be headquartered out of San Diego.
The newly merged company will have 100 clients, offering a powerful, integrated system for implementing SEM and SEO campaigns. Covario will integrate Netconcepts’ GravityStream™ technology into Covario’s SEO consulting practice and Organic Search Insight ™software.
“By coupling the predictive analytics in Covario’s Organic Search Insight with easy execution capabilities of Netconcepts’ GravityStream technology, advertisers will be able to identify the SEO actions that drive better rankings, and then deploy those strategies quickly, and in a highly scalable way to achieve their ROI goals,” said Covario CEO Russ Mann.
Google has launched a beta search platform for those certified by the company as professionals who can help manage Adwords campaigns. People can look up by location and amount they want to spend on a weekly basis. and find people who have passed the Google Adwords Professional certification.
Once you go through the initial search you can add other services you may need such as online display advertising, search engine optimization, traditional advertising (print, TV), web design, website analytics, affiliate programs, new media (mobile & social networks), creative and design services, call recording and tracking, auto-optimization tools and marketing consultancy.
Last week, while you were doing your last minute shopping, Google and Bing were going head to head – over their Webmaster FAQs.
First, Bing took to their Webmaster blog to introduce the new, official Webmaster Center FAQ. They already had FAQ content in the help section and in the forums. The new FAQ compiles that content plus additional questions into a downloadable PDF document.
Three days later, Google said “Oh yeah? Me too” with a post about the FAQ on Webmaster Central. It has been compiled and maintained by high-participating users in the forums, affectionately referred to as “Bionic Posters.”
The two tools are Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper. The concept behind both tools is grouping keywords together for easier search ad management.
The Keyword Niche Finder returns groups of keywords instead of just a long list of keywords related to the term. This is a good place to start if you haven’t already done keyword research for the campaign you’re working on.
For example, let’s enter “Christmas shirt” into the tool. The initial results return various groups:
Click on one of the groups to view the keywords and their frequency:
Video solution provider Fliqz has announced the launch of a new online video search engine optimization (SEO) tool. The tool is dubbed SearchSuccess and Fliqz says that companies who tested the product are experiencing early success.
A whopping two-thirds of the videos submitted by these early customers have reached first page Google rankings. 25% have seen the number one position.
Wordstream has released an update to their keyword research tool that integrates Google Analytics. The reason for the integration is to pull information about what keywords are actually driving traffic to your website to give you a comprehensive view of your keyword landscape.
Keyword tools are good at providing information on which keywords are searched the most, but you can’t always be sure that a given keyword will actually perform well with your site. Wordstream’s goal is to take the data from its keyword tool and combine it with your Google Analytics keyword data in order to provide better suggestions on which keywords you should focus on.
Google has updated the Keywords user interface in Webmaster Tools. The update includes:
- Daily data updates
- Details on how often specific keywords were found
- Displaying up to 10 URLs that contain a keyword
- Significance column comparing each keyword’s frequency to the most popular keyword’s frequency
This tool really helps you know how Google sees your site. You can quickly recognize problem areas or address hacked content.
Have you checked out the new user interface? Let us know your first impressions of the update by leaving a comment.
Earlier today, news broke that Google’s new index would launch soon. The news was simultaneously exciting and disconcerting since most SEOs and search marketers are in full-fledged holiday mode, and boy, would this disrupt things.
But Google spam ninja Matt Cutts took to his personal blog to assure that most people won’t get the update until after the holidays. You can breathe that sigh of relief now.
Caffeine will still be rolled out to one data center, which Cutts said will affect a small percentage of searchers.
In August, Google released a developer preview of their new index, dubbed Google Caffeine. Changes in the index appeared to be largely a “Your Mileage May Vary” situation, with some noticing hardly any changes to their rankings while others noticed bigger changes.
Now, Google has closed the preview sandbox and is prepping the new index for a larger release. It will initially roll out to one data center.
