http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Design/Web-Design/Search A listing of the most recently indexed works about Design and Web Design and Search in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Design/Web-Design/Search http://tc.eserver.org/35769.html http://tc.eserver.org/35769.html Which pages have the search engines crawled? What kind of pages are they? Has the search engine Indexing indexed all of the crawled pages? How’s the search engine ranking traffic? http://tc.eserver.org/35648.html http://tc.eserver.org/35648.html In this installment of Search Matters, we’ll continue our discussion of ads in search results. Understand what makes a good ad. Limit cannibalization. Provide ads for internal merchandise instead of third-party advertising. Pay special attention to ads on pages that appear if there are no search results. http://tc.eserver.org/35657.html http://tc.eserver.org/35657.html Conflicting demands make many UX professionals think of ads as a necessary evil. Customers frequently go out of their way to say they hate ads, while marketers always seem to try their hardest to stuff as many of them as they can on each search results page on your site. This leaves many UX design professionals caught in the middle, trying to balance the ad equation—and frequently failing to fully satisfy either customers or marketers. For this 2-part column, I’ve teamed up with advertisement and eyetracking research guru Frank Guo to present real-world strategies for successfully integrating ads into your search results. The goal is making money without unduly turning off your customers. http://tc.eserver.org/35514.html http://tc.eserver.org/35514.html Over the past year we have worked with a number of organizations that have chosen to relocate their sites from an existing domain to a new domain. One of the questions that always comes up early in the process is “how much traffic are we going to lose?” It is an excellent question and not an easy one to answer, but in today’s column I am going to explore that exact question. http://tc.eserver.org/35426.html http://tc.eserver.org/35426.html Google is no longer the only hub for content discovery. The statusphere is introducing new channels that now serve as our attention dashboards and it's the collection of streams of consciousness from those we choose to follow. Collecta, Twitter Search, Facebook News Feeds, FriendFeed, etc., serve as the gateways to insight and enlightenment. http://tc.eserver.org/35384.html http://tc.eserver.org/35384.html How can you enable readers to naturally find the content in your archives? How can you make the hundreds of posts you write more visible and prominent, especially if readers are looking for it? This is partly what the field of findability is all about. You can implement several easy aggregation techniques to increase the findability of your content. You can add tags and categories to your posts, and readers can navigate your content this way. http://tc.eserver.org/35161.html http://tc.eserver.org/35161.html Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, it’s also the place where the user experience designer bears the least influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the search experience, much less strategize ways to improve it. When it comes to site search, user experience designers are often sidelined like the single person at an old flame’s wedding: Everything seems to be moving along without you, and if you slipped out halfway through, chances are no one would notice. But relevancy testing and precision testing offer hope. These are two tools you can use to analyze and improve the search user experience. http://tc.eserver.org/35162.html http://tc.eserver.org/35162.html Now when people show up at a website, many of them ignore our lovingly crafted navigational elements and jump to the site search box. The increased use of site search as a core navigation method makes it very important to understand the data that site search generates. http://tc.eserver.org/35163.html http://tc.eserver.org/35163.html While goal-driven analysis is wonderfully useful, we’ll explore a different, “bottom-up” approach that relies on pattern analysis and failure analysis to help you understand your users’ intent in qualitative ways that complement the top-down approach. http://tc.eserver.org/35096.html http://tc.eserver.org/35096.html Recently, Office Depot redesigned their search user interface, adding attribute-based filtering and creating a more dynamic, interactive user experience. Unfortunately, Office Depot’s interaction design misses some key points, making their new search user interface less usable and, therefore, less effective. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Office Depot site presents us with an excellent case study for demonstrating some of the important best practices for designing filters for faceted search results. http://tc.eserver.org/34964.html http://tc.eserver.org/34964.html The purpose of this research is to explore a method for the determination of users' representations of search engines, formed during their interaction with these systems. Determines the extent to which these elicited "mental models" indicate the system aspects of importance to the user and from this their evaluative view of these tools. http://tc.eserver.org/34969.html http://tc.eserver.org/34969.html The purpose of this research is to examine search goal redefinition during users' interaction with information retrieval systems. http://tc.eserver.org/34761.html http://tc.eserver.org/34761.html The ten essential categories for good optimization are: important HTML tags, search engine indexing limits, title tag syntax, common canonical issues, 301 redirects on Apache, search engine robot user agents, common robot traps to avoid, robot meta tags syntax, robots.txt syntax and site map syntax. http://tc.eserver.org/34739.html http://tc.eserver.org/34739.html Many web editors spend a lot of their time writing news stories for the company web site. However, traffic analysis frequently reveals that this content is not very popular - and that users may in fact miss the key content they come to find (product data, addresses etc.) because it's practically drowning in news stories. http://tc.eserver.org/34742.html http://tc.eserver.org/34742.html If your company web site is currently not ranking well at search engines, you are missing out on a vital source of web traffic. Here are some tips for improving your search engine rankings yourself (without hiring a search engine optimization company). http://tc.eserver.org/34693.html http://tc.eserver.org/34693.html The internet is more like the heliocentric model championed by Galileo, with search as the sun. It is an ever-growing collection of distribution channels, each with their own audience, revolving around an increasingly contextual search experience. It’s time to expand your perspective to account for this. But, like Galileo, you may have a hard time with the authorities as you start to act on this understanding. http://tc.eserver.org/34694.html http://tc.eserver.org/34694.html SEO techniques will increase your search rankings and SEM will get you traffic on the top search engines. But a boatload of quality content will also accomplish these things and prepare you for the more contextual future of search. http://tc.eserver.org/34665.html http://tc.eserver.org/34665.html Web databases do much more than passively store information. Part of their power comes from indexing records efficiently. An index serves as a map, identifying the precise location of a small piece of data in a much larger pile. For example, when I search for “web development,” Google identifies two hundred million results and displays the first ten—in a quarter of a second. But Google isn’t loading every one of those pages and scanning their contents when I perform my search: they’ve analyzed the pages ahead of time and matched my search terms against an index that only references the original content. http://tc.eserver.org/34564.html http://tc.eserver.org/34564.html Faceted search, or guided navigation, has become the de facto standard for e-commerce and product-related websites, from big box stores to product review sites. But e-commerce sites aren’t the only ones joining the facets club. Other content-heavy sites such as media publishers (e.g. Financial Times: ft.com), libraries (e.g. NCSU Libraries: lib.ncsu.edu/), and even non-profits (e.g. Urban Land Institute: uli.org) are tapping into faceted search to make their often broad-range of content more findable. Essentially, faceted search has become so ubiquitous that users are not only getting used to it, they are coming to expect it. http://tc.eserver.org/34504.html http://tc.eserver.org/34504.html This presentation describes how creating an accessible website takes care of its (organic) search engine optimization to a very appreciable extent taking reference from the WCAG 2.0 working draft and the Google webmaster guidelines.This presentation was created and presented by Abhay Rautela to the Sapient creative community at the New Delhi office in February 2007. http://tc.eserver.org/34477.html http://tc.eserver.org/34477.html In the last six months, we've been lucky enough to help quite a few companies and websites drive significant traffic to their sites. Many of these campaigns have been constructed around the goal of building search engine rankings, as this is our primary business, but we've also found that our ability has given us great power in the fields of brand-awareness and marketing overall. Thus, the following ten processes are primarily about building traffic and through it, attention. http://tc.eserver.org/34478.html http://tc.eserver.org/34478.html This guide is designed to describe all areas of search engine optimization - from discovery of the terms and phrases that will generate traffic, to making a site search engine friendly, to building the links and marketing the unique value of the site/organization's offerings. http://tc.eserver.org/34483.html http://tc.eserver.org/34483.html This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value - although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google's algorithm is contained below. http://tc.eserver.org/34406.html http://tc.eserver.org/34406.html In search results, the old adage a picture is worth a thousand words rings true. When it comes to making your search results more efficient to use, more relevant, and more attractive, images reign supreme. There is simply nothing else on your search results pages that can come close to offering the same potential as thumbnail images for dramatically increasing your conversion rates and revenues. http://tc.eserver.org/34238.html http://tc.eserver.org/34238.html The primary function of current Web search engines is essentially relevance ranking at the document level. However, myriad structured information about real-world objects is embedded in static Web pages and online Web databases. Document-level information retrieval can unfortunately lead to highly inaccurate relevance ranking in answering object-oriented queries. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift to enable searching at the object level. In traditional information retrieval models, documents are taken as the retrieval units and the content of a document is considered reliable. However, this reliability assumption is no longer valid in the object retrieval context when multiple copies of information about the same object typically exist. These copies may be inconsistent because of diversity of Web site qualities and the limited performance of current information extraction techniques. If we simply combine the noisy and inaccurate attribute information extracted from different sources, we may not be able to achieve satisfactory retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose several language models for Web object retrieval, namely an unstructured object retrieval model, a structured object retrieval model, and a hybrid model with both structured and unstructured retrieval features. We test these models on a paper search engine and compare their performances. We conclude that the hybrid model is the superior by taking into account the extraction errors at varying levels. http://tc.eserver.org/34239.html http://tc.eserver.org/34239.html Previous studies have highlighted the high arrival rate of new content on the web. We study the extent to which this new content can be efficiently discovered by a crawler. Our study has two parts. First, we study the inherent difficulty of the discovery problem using a maximum cover formulation, under an assumption of perfect estimates of likely sources of links to new content. Second, we relax this assumption and study a more realistic setting in which algorithms must use historical statistics to estimate which pages are most likely to yield links to new content. We recommend a simple algorithm that performs comparably to all approaches we consider. We measure the overhead of discovering new content, de- fined as the average number of fetches required to discover one new page. We show first that with perfect foreknowledge of where to explore for links to new content, it is possible to discover 90% of all new content with under 3% overhead, and 100% of new content with 9% overhead. But actual algorithms, which do not have access to perfect foreknowl- edge, face a more difficult task: one quarter of new content is simply not amenable to efficient discovery. Of the re- maining three quarters, 80% of new content during a given week may be discovered with 160% overhead if content is recrawled fully on a monthly basis. http://tc.eserver.org/34178.html http://tc.eserver.org/34178.html Understanding the extent to which people’s search behaviors differ in terms of the interaction flow and information targeted is important in designing interfaces to help World Wide Web users search more effectively. In this paper we describe a longitudinal log-based study that investigated variability in people’s interaction behavior when engaged in search-related activities on the Web. We analyze the search interactions of more than two thousand volunteer users over a five-month period, with the aim of characterizing differences in their interaction styles. The findings of our study suggest that there are dramatic differences in variability in key aspects of the interaction within and between users, and within and between the search queries they submit. Our findings also suggest two classes of extreme user--navigators and explorers--whose search interaction is highly consistent or highly variable. Lessons learned from these users can inform the design of tools to support effective Web-search interactions for everyone. http://tc.eserver.org/34181.html http://tc.eserver.org/34181.html We consider the problem of dust: Different URLs with Similar Text. Such duplicate URLs are prevalent in web sites, as web server software often uses aliases and redirections, and dynamically generates the same page from various different URL requests. We present a novel algorithm, DustBuster, for uncovering dust; that is, for discovering rules that transform a given URL to others that are likely to have similar content. DustBuster mines dust effectively from previous crawl logs or web server logs, without examining page contents. Verifying these rules via sampling requires fetching few actual web pages. Search engines can benefit from information about dust to increase the effectiveness of crawling, reduce indexing overhead, and improve the quality of popularity statistics such as PageRank. http://tc.eserver.org/34188.html http://tc.eserver.org/34188.html The aggregation and comparison of behavioral patterns on the WWW represent a tremendous opportunity for understanding past behaviors and predicting future behaviors. In this paper, we take a first step at achieving this goal. We present a large scale study correlating the behaviors of Internet users on multiple systems ranging in size from 27 million queries to 14 million blog posts to 20,000 news articles. We formalize a model for events in these time-varying datasets and study their correlation. We have created an interface for analyzing the datasets, which includes a novel visual artifact, the DTWRadar, for summarizing differences between time series. Using our tool we identify a number of behavioral properties that allow us to understand the predictive power of patterns of use. http://tc.eserver.org/33950.html http://tc.eserver.org/33950.html Page layout forms the foundation in presenting search results. Your layout decisions for search results pages will have tremendous impact on the user experience for your entire site. Choosing the right width for search results is important, and the optimal width for search results may be a great deal narrower than some people using big monitors would believe. http://tc.eserver.org/33956.html http://tc.eserver.org/33956.html Search results pages are some of the most visited pages on typical e-commerce sites—to say nothing of a search engine like Google. Many articles appear each year about optimal search algorithms, database performance, and the like. In contrast, very few publications focus on improving the search experience from the customer’s perspective. http://tc.eserver.org/33947.html http://tc.eserver.org/33947.html The words we use when we search are not always the words we like to read when we arrive at a website. Over the years, I have discovered that the way we think and the words we use when we search give strong clues as to what we want, but only clues. The words that will help us complete the task we came to the website to complete can be subtly-and sometimes substantially different-to the words we used when searching for it. http://tc.eserver.org/33925.html http://tc.eserver.org/33925.html Welcome to Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it'd be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites' interaction with both users and search engines. Although this guide won't tell you any secrets that'll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content. http://tc.eserver.org/33867.html http://tc.eserver.org/33867.html I don’t “really” know anything about SEO. What I do know is the folks at Google and other big search engines are just human beings like us who have created and constantly tweak the search algorithms. Their goal is to give us what we want when searching, the best possible websites relevant to what we are searching for. So let’s set aside all the fancy technical stuff and just use some good ol’ common sense. http://tc.eserver.org/33750.html http://tc.eserver.org/33750.html In a recent article on Netimperative, Mike Grehan examined if the traditional role of SEO was becoming outdated, given the rise of social media. In this article, Eliza Dashwood, Director of Sales and Marketing, Ambergreen Internet Marketing offers a counter-point to Mike’s argument. http://tc.eserver.org/33632.html http://tc.eserver.org/33632.html Within the realm of computational semantics, there is still a fairly broad disconnect between triple pair semantics, the use of RDF (or turtle notation) to create atomic assertions, and the realm of semantics as reflected on the web. I do not expect this to change much in 2009, save perhaps that the gulf between the two will likely just get wider. http://tc.eserver.org/33585.html http://tc.eserver.org/33585.html The Sphere team had already put a lot of work into returning fresh, relevant search results, and had several ideas about how to evolve the standard search experience. Filtering results appropriately (to let users easily get at the exact result they were after) would be paramount. Deep context for results would also be offered, along with related items (from traditional media to podcasts). http://tc.eserver.org/33406.html http://tc.eserver.org/33406.html Both AdWords and YSM are much more complicated beasts than the old banner networks ever were, and coming to grips with them can be a bit of a headache. http://tc.eserver.org/33234.html http://tc.eserver.org/33234.html In 2001, Bernard determined that users were able to form a schema for the location of web objects on informational websites. The current study investigates whether users' expectations have changed since the 2001 study. Changes were found in the expected location of the site search engine, internal links, and advertisements. http://tc.eserver.org/33107.html http://tc.eserver.org/33107.html Intranet search often fails to meet the needs or expectations of users, with confusing and complex results provided for even the simplest searches. http://tc.eserver.org/33085.html http://tc.eserver.org/33085.html Search is often the greatest source of frustration on intranets. Irrelevant results, hard to read results pages and ‘untitled document’ entries plague many intranet searches. With the size and scope of most intranets, search is a key tool used by staff to find information. While the expectation is that it should be quick and easy to find information on the intranet, this is often not the case. Beyond generating staff frustration, these problems can reduce trust and confidence in the search tool. http://tc.eserver.org/33092.html http://tc.eserver.org/33092.html Thanks to Google, intranet users expect to be able to type in a word (or two) and find the page they are looking for, preferably in the first few results. This is not an unreasonable expectation. At the most fundamental level, search on an intranet is supposed to make it quick and easy for staff to find things, thereby saving them time and improving their productivity. This can be distilled down to a very simple concept: search should work like magic. As much as is possible, search should always give staff the information they need, somewhere in the first few results. http://tc.eserver.org/33046.html http://tc.eserver.org/33046.html The SEOs with white hats conduct legitimate optimising of web pages to make the site come up appropriately in the Search Engine Results Pages (also called SERPs). The back hat SEOs implement tricks to appear high in the results pages even if the web site is not necessarily relevant. The range of tricks is astonishing. But most of the techniques used by white hat SEOs were similar if not identical to the guidelines given by accessibility experts. http://tc.eserver.org/33035.html http://tc.eserver.org/33035.html The shift in how search engines treat keywords is significant. They tend to ignore the keyword metatag and rather look for keywords in the actual page content. This means that you need to figure out your keywords before you write any content. Then, you include them throughout your content, particularly in headings and summaries. http://tc.eserver.org/33038.html http://tc.eserver.org/33038.html Topical metadata have been used to indicate the subject of Web pages. They have been simultaneously hailed as building blocks of the semantic Web and derogated as spam. At this time major Web browsers avoid harvesting topical metadata. This paper suggests that the significance of the topical metadata controversy depends on the technological appropriateness of adding them to Web pages. This paper surveys Web technology with an eye on assessing the appropriateness of Web pages as hosts for topical metadata. The survey reveals Web pages to be both transient and volatile: poor hosts of topical metadata. The closed Web is considered to be a more supportive environment for the use of topical metadata. The closed Web is built on communities of trust where the structure and meaning of Web pages can be anticipated. The vast majority of Web pages, however, exist in the open Web, an environment that challenges the application of legacy information retrieval concepts and methods. http://tc.eserver.org/32838.html http://tc.eserver.org/32838.html In traditional marketing you're looking to define your targeted audience for your business or organisation. In Internet marketing things work in the same way. Unfortunately, with the growing popularity of the Internet in the past years and with the growing number of people building sites, a certain part of the online audience has been overlooked. http://tc.eserver.org/32862.html http://tc.eserver.org/32862.html One of the main benefits of Web accessibility is that a Website that's more accessible to people is also usually more accessible to search engines. The more accessible your site is to search engines, the more confidently they can guess what the site's about, giving your site a better chance at the top spot in the search engine rankings. http://tc.eserver.org/32769.html http://tc.eserver.org/32769.html Attracting the attention of Google and other search engines is crucial for bringing visitors to your website. To achieve this effectively, search engine optimised copy should run parallel with good website construction. http://tc.eserver.org/32740.html http://tc.eserver.org/32740.html Website visitors do not arrive magically… they follow recommendations from others, such as links, display ads, or even offline word of mouth. As 2007 turns into 2008, here are 5 easy ways to substantially increase the amount of traffic coming to your site. http://tc.eserver.org/32752.html http://tc.eserver.org/32752.html A findability strategy cheat sheet that will guide you through all of the stuff you should be doing when creating new websites or even redesign existing ones. http://tc.eserver.org/32753.html http://tc.eserver.org/32753.html You can communicate information about your site to search engines and see your site from their perspective using some free services and utilities from Yahoo! and Google. http://tc.eserver.org/32755.html http://tc.eserver.org/32755.html You’ve built a great site-now get the word out! There are plenty of places where you can promote your site for free. http://tc.eserver.org/32757.html http://tc.eserver.org/32757.html Desperation, ignorance, and a moral compass that doesn’t point due north often get perfectly logical, good people and companies in trouble with search engines. Because being listed high in search results is such a desirable goal to attain, many people search for shortcuts to the front of the line—which can land them in serious trouble. http://tc.eserver.org/32550.html http://tc.eserver.org/32550.html Search engines are one of the most important traffic drivers to sites these days, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more and more important. SEO is often thought to be just a set of some technical tricks, and as a professional SEO, I confess to spending a lot of time with clients fixing technical issues. A site's structure though, is just as important. Your site's structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site's purpose and intent. By creating a good structure, you can use the content you've written that has attracted links from others, and use your site's structure to spread some of that "linkjuice" to the other pages on your site. http://tc.eserver.org/32529.html http://tc.eserver.org/32529.html So what is POSH? No, it's not just some new clothing fashion hype amongst web designers - POSH is the acronym for Plain Old Semantic HTML. The term Semantic HTML is used for a variety of things, but it has it's origin in one objective: creating (X)HTML documents using semantic elements and attributes, as opposed to using presentational HTML. http://tc.eserver.org/32452.html http://tc.eserver.org/32452.html Should advanced search be called something else to sound more friendly and inviting, and would it make more people to use it when they need to? http://tc.eserver.org/32327.html http://tc.eserver.org/32327.html This study investigated use of collaborative recommendations in web searching. An experimental system was designed. In the experimental system, recommendations were generated in a group report format, including items judged relevant by previous users, search queries and the URLs of documents. The study explored how users used these items, the effects of their use, and what factors contributed to this use. The results demonstrate that users preferred using queries and document sources (URLs), rather than relevance judgment (document ratings). The findings also show that using recommended items had a significant effect on the number of documents viewed, but not on precision or number of queries. Task difficulty and search skills had significant impact on the use. Possible reasons for the results are analyzed. Implications and future directions are discussed. http://tc.eserver.org/32332.html http://tc.eserver.org/32332.html This paper examines a large number of failed queries submitted to a web image search engine, including real users' search terms and written requests. The results show that failed image queries have a much higher specificity than successful queries because users often employ various refined types to specify their queries. The study explores the refined types further, and finds that failed queries consist of far more conceptual than perceptual refined types. The widely used content-based image retrieval technique, CBIR, can only deal with a small proportion of failed queries; hence, appropriate integration of concept-based techniques is desirable. Based on using the concepts of uniqueness and refinement for categorization, the study also provides a useful discussion on the gaps between image queries and retrieval techniques. The initial results enhance the understanding of failed queries and suggest possible ways to improve image retrieval systems. http://tc.eserver.org/32273.html http://tc.eserver.org/32273.html Searching the web is a common activity of web users. English and non-English speakers utilize international or local search engines so as to satisfy their information needs. Most of the attempts at evaluation of search engines focus on English queries and on English document collections. In this paper an evaluation methodology is presented and the capabilities of international and local web retrieval systems using Greek queries are evaluated based on this method. We aim at identifying difficulties and knowledge requirements when using a Greek supporting search engine. The importance of interface localization and the effects of standard information retrieval techniques such as case insensitivity, stopword removal and simple stemming are studied in international and local search engines. The evaluation methodology is applicable to other non-English natural languages as well. http://tc.eserver.org/32275.html http://tc.eserver.org/32275.html SHIL on the Web is the website of the Israeli Citizens' Advice Bureau. It provides information about rights, social benefits, government and public services and civil obligations. Activity on the site approaches 10,000 pages visited per day. It has interfaces in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. Logfile analysis of the SHIL website revealed to our surprise that about 60.7% of the requests reaching SHIL from external sites (excluding requests from robots) are from general search engines (e.g. Google and MSN), and users reach a specific page on the site linked from the search results page. This finding seems to indicate that the site is not known well enough to the public. On the other hand the site is very active, thus it seems to serve Israeli citizens well, even without being a well known brand. In this paper we analyzed the external requests coming from search engines. The analysis is based on the 266,295 queries from search engines that reached SHIL during March—October 2005. Studying queries submitted to search engines is a novel technique for analyzing the access patterns to the site and provides a better understanding of the user needs and intentions than analyzing the distribution of the visited pages only. We are not aware of any previous study that analyzed the relation between the query submitted to the search engine and the webpage the user clicked on the search results page. Since search engines provide snippets, when the user clicks on a specific page he already has some information on what is to be found on the page and the user makes a conscious decision to click on the specific result. Thus, this type of analysis provides additional information about the users' actual information needs. http://tc.eserver.org/32139.html http://tc.eserver.org/32139.html Users hold search to a human standard of understanding that computers cannot as yet achieve. This is more than just a curiosity: The Turing test has something to tell us about how we can better design our website search interfaces today. http://tc.eserver.org/32064.html http://tc.eserver.org/32064.html There are many reasons to use mod_rewrite to create informative, useful URLs for your website. Most dynamic websites use some form of PHP or ASP to pull the data from the database and often times use that data in the URL as a string. This is not only a potential security flaw, it also gives the user and search engine alike a very uninformative destination for your website. http://tc.eserver.org/32058.html http://tc.eserver.org/32058.html While many niches depend on PPC search traffic, there’s a wide group of sites that benifit from bought traffic from individual sites. Often times you can get very high quality traffic that converts very well from niches that tend to deal in a more direct site to site type traffic deal, rather than 3rd party ad networks. This guide is mostly to be used when buying traffic from forums, from individual websites, and from “plug” type packages, yet there are many things that transfer over to more traditional PPC outlets. http://tc.eserver.org/32067.html http://tc.eserver.org/32067.html Sometime Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seems to have morphed into a mystical creature. Most people, even those who design and develop websites for a living, know they need it, but don’t know exactly what it is. They have been feed so much rheteric and sales speaches that they seem to have given up on SEO long ago. http://tc.eserver.org/31801.html http://tc.eserver.org/31801.html The content on your website is key for your search engine ranking - find out why this is. http://tc.eserver.org/31623.html http://tc.eserver.org/31623.html User Vision's top seven tips on how to ensure your internal search is capable of meeting the needs of your users. http://tc.eserver.org/31396.html http://tc.eserver.org/31396.html Branding has been called the most powerful idea in business, yet few companies consciously craft and promote their brand. Making a brand visible to an online audience can be an additional challenge. Studies show that searchers regard the companies that are placed on the first page of search engine results as the major players in the field. So how do you get the coveted page-one positioning? New technologies like RSS feeds are one way to accomplish this and make your brand more visible in the process. http://tc.eserver.org/31128.html http://tc.eserver.org/31128.html What bugs me is not the results of the major search engines, but the results of internal web site searches. http://tc.eserver.org/31068.html http://tc.eserver.org/31068.html To get the first spot on Google, Yahoo, or MSN, all it used to take was the highest bid. Today, even the experts aren't sure exactly what it's going to take. http://tc.eserver.org/31066.html http://tc.eserver.org/31066.html The introduction of Google's 'Universal Search' has had a large-scale negative impact on the natural results of many online retailers and vertical market websites. http://tc.eserver.org/31054.html http://tc.eserver.org/31054.html Marketing to social media websites such as Digg and del.icio.us has become an integral part of any SEO campiagn - find out what you need to do. http://tc.eserver.org/31055.html http://tc.eserver.org/31055.html Submitting your website to directories is a great way to increase your search engine rankings - get the full lowdown on how to do this. http://tc.eserver.org/30795.html http://tc.eserver.org/30795.html Advanced search is the ugly child of interface design--always included, but never loved. Websites have come to depend on their search engines as the volume of content has increased. Yet advanced search functionality has not significantly developed in years. Poor matches and overwhelming search results remain a problem for users. Perhaps the standard search pattern deserves a new look. A progressive disclosure approach can enable users to use precision advanced search techniques to refine their searches and pinpoint the desired results. http://tc.eserver.org/30770.html http://tc.eserver.org/30770.html The updating of massive indexes by Google is not a smooth affair by any means. Notably, as a result of updating process, old indexes do not simply yield to new indexes, but there is quite an haphazard movement in transition. It takes a couple of days for Google to complete its update. Especially during this period, both old and new indexes get their place on www.google.com, albeit alternatively or even in unpredictable ways before new indexes stabilize there for all to see. The fluctuations witnessed on Google between transition from old indexes to new indexes seem as if Google were dancing. Hence, in SEO parlance comes the word Google Dance. Varying indexes have a say in the final rankings just when PageRank calculation sets in action. So, the fluctuating indexes of your site should not be a cause of concern when Google is dancing. Wait for Google to come to a halt and you will see all the things stabilize. http://tc.eserver.org/30769.html http://tc.eserver.org/30769.html No webmaster worth his salt can rule out the indispensability of Google for enhancing the prospects of one's business potential the online way. The ways and means to augment your business statistics are fine as long as they are paving the way in your business interest. The fact is that end results are always important and determine the continuation of a set of strategies or tactics in the future. Notwithstanding the enormous benefits accruing from top positions in Google's rankings, you will end up to lose sight of the long term survival if you drive your business on a Google-only focus. http://tc.eserver.org/30768.html http://tc.eserver.org/30768.html Google has earned its giant position in search engine marketplace through real innovative solutions, and of course, strategic moves all aimed at users ultimate convenience. It has been almost customary for Google to bring in some exciting features initially for a price then slashing the rate drastically to making it FREE for all. This sort of repeated move could be seen as first serving the target market with its innovative solutions, and later making it free to give many a business in similar or remotely similar categories a run for their money. Critics claims have to stand the test of contemporary business realities. http://tc.eserver.org/30217.html http://tc.eserver.org/30217.html Hidden text, doorway pages and mirror sites are all examples of search engine spam and could get you banned from the search engines - make sure your site avoids all of these! http://tc.eserver.org/30205.html http://tc.eserver.org/30205.html Recent redesigns at Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search, and Ask.com are providing graphically rich alternatives to the minimalist search giant. http://tc.eserver.org/29766.html http://tc.eserver.org/29766.html Many web sites and applications include a search feature. Often they provide an extremely simple search interface consisting of a single text box and a "Go" button. Sometimes, however, the users' tasks call for more sophistication, and guidelines for complex search interfaces are difficult to find. This paper details four levels of search interface, and it provides heuristics (guidelines) to use when designing complex search interfaces. Different solutions are appropriate, depending on the users' motivation and knowledge of their subject, experience using search interfaces, and search goals. Finally, PubMed serves as a useful example to illustrate how these guidelines can be used to analyze existing search interfaces. http://tc.eserver.org/29676.html http://tc.eserver.org/29676.html Acquiring and installing a search engine is just the beginning of creating an effective enterprise search system. John Ferrara walks us through strategies for addressing critical aspects of the user experience often overlooked or ignored. http://tc.eserver.org/29493.html http://tc.eserver.org/29493.html Now that you've got a website it's time to start thinking about promoting it. Search engine listings are the number one way to generate traffic to your website. http://tc.eserver.org/29491.html http://tc.eserver.org/29491.html The Google Sandbox is a filter that was put in place in about March of 2004. New websites with new domain names can take 6 to 12 months to get decent rankings on Google. Some are reporting stays of up to 18 months. The Sandbox seems to affect nearly all new websites placing them on probation. Similarly, websites that have made comprehensive redesigns have been caught up in this Sandbox. Does this Sandbox Really Exist, or is it just part of the Google algorithm? This has been a big controversy with many different opinions. Most now believe that this is an algorithm. In either case, the Sandbox functions to keep new sites from shooting to the top of Google in just a few weeks and overtaking quality sites that have been around for many years. This appears to be an initiation period for new websites. http://tc.eserver.org/29489.html http://tc.eserver.org/29489.html Google's increasing use of anti-spam features has meant that optimising websites for Google has become much harder and it's now not just a case of opening your websites source files in notepad, adding some keywords into your various HTML tags, uploading your files and waiting for the results. In fact in my opinion and I'm sure others will agree with me, this type of optimisation, commonly referred to as onpage optimisation will only ever be 20% effective at achieving rankings for any keywords which are even mildly competitive. Those of us who aced maths in school will know this leaves us with 80% unaccounted for. http://tc.eserver.org/29490.html http://tc.eserver.org/29490.html Explain some of the first steps to get your website not only optimized for the search engines, but to push your website up in the rankings war. http://tc.eserver.org/29492.html http://tc.eserver.org/29492.html Outbound links' anchor text affects a page's search engine ranking in much the same way that inbound links' anchor text affects search engine ranking. http://tc.eserver.org/29263.html http://tc.eserver.org/29263.html The new search engines that may stand the best chance to become the next Google all share one common element--the use of Web 2.0 technology that they hope will increase search result relevance. http://tc.eserver.org/28860.html http://tc.eserver.org/28860.html This introduction to search engine optimization will outline some of the basic principles of SEO and explain how they can be used to improve your web pages' performance in search results. http://tc.eserver.org/28358.html http://tc.eserver.org/28358.html Why haven't we figured out search yet? Amanda Spink talks with Christina Wodtke on why searchers still can't ask a useful question of a search engine, and how Google may be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. http://tc.eserver.org/28343.html http://tc.eserver.org/28343.html Many Web sites allow users to search for information contained in the site. Users access the search capability by entering one or more keywords into an entry field--usually termed a 'search box.' When there are words in the Web site that match the words entered by users, users are shown where in the Web site those words can be found. Each page of a Web site should allow users to conduct a search. Usually it is adequate to allow simple searches without providing for the use of more advanced features. Users should be able to assume that both upper- and lowercase letters will be considered as equivalent when searching. The site's search capability should be designed to respond to terms typically entered by users. Users should be notified when multiple search capabilities exist. http://tc.eserver.org/28297.html http://tc.eserver.org/28297.html Search engines may be crucial to your internet marketing strategy but it can be dangerous to rely on them. Find out why and what other marketing options are available to you and your website. http://tc.eserver.org/28286.html http://tc.eserver.org/28286.html You can hear the sighs of relief as the website localization project comes to a close or enters maintenance mode. However organized the client and however professional the localization vendor, website localization is a painful process. Now it's over--at least we can tick the box that says 'have multilingual website.' After all, is that not the reason we localized in the first place? http://tc.eserver.org/28260.html http://tc.eserver.org/28260.html The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems. http://tc.eserver.org/28209.html http://tc.eserver.org/28209.html Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of analyzing your site and modifying it to enable search engines to read it, understand it and catalog it correctly. This is not rewriting the site or changing the look and feel. It is subtle changes, adding or modifying inconspicuous visible and invisible text so that the search engines can read the site. SEO is not 'spamming' the search engines - it is simply helping the search engines help you - by specifying information using a variety of methods. http://tc.eserver.org/28134.html http://tc.eserver.org/28134.html This paper presents an empirical investigation of the stability of five search engines, namely Altavista, Google, Hotbot, Scirus and Bioweb, carried out over two different time periods with different search queries selected from 'LC List of Subject Headings' with a closer examination of the URLs and their contents. The three different fluctuations identified, one of them being significant, show that Hotbot is prone to result fluctuations while Scirus is inclined to indexing fluctuations, and Bioweb is the most stable. http://tc.eserver.org/28053.html http://tc.eserver.org/28053.html When owners of the big money tree use their excess profits to subsidize unrelated services, independent software vendors (ISVs) are driven out of business. Although such behavior got Microsoft into trouble in the past, ISVs shouldn't expect relief from search-engine-sponsored software from the U.S. Justice Department or the European Commission any time soon. These government agencies are notoriously behind the times, as proven by the fact that they attacked Microsoft only after it had won the browser war by cutting off Netscape's air supply. http://tc.eserver.org/28052.html http://tc.eserver.org/28052.html Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors. http://tc.eserver.org/28048.html http://tc.eserver.org/28048.html Familiar words spring to mind when users create their search queries. If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won't find your site. http://tc.eserver.org/27988.html http://tc.eserver.org/27988.html Google's 80/20 rule means they apply a lot of of importance to off-page optimisation, such as inbound link text. On-page optimisation is now considered to be far less important. http://tc.eserver.org/27607.html http://tc.eserver.org/27607.html Never underestimate the importance of the page title and meta description - they're used by both search engines and people to judge your website. http://tc.eserver.org/27546.html http://tc.eserver.org/27546.html This study evaluated the effects of white space on visual search time. Participants were required to search for a target word on a web page with different levels of white space, measured by level of text density. Screens were formatted with one of four types of graphical manipulation, including: no graphics, contrast, borders and contrast with borders under two levels of overall density and three levels of local density. Results show that search times were longer with increased overall density but significant differences were not found between levels of local density. Only the use of contrast was found to be significant, resulting in an increase in search time. http://tc.eserver.org/27537.html http://tc.eserver.org/27537.html This article examines user performance and satisfaction of a university schedule of courses using the FlipViewer® digital FlipBook format. This format was compared to a schedule of courses website and subjectively compared to the university’s printed schedule of courses catalog. Results indicate that the participants performed some tasks faster with the FlipBook format and found it to be engaging and easy-to-use. http://tc.eserver.org/27534.html http://tc.eserver.org/27534.html In 2001, Bernard determined that users were able to form a schema for the location of web objects on informational websites. The current study investigates whether users' expectations have changed since the 2001 study. Changes were found in the expected location of the site search engine, internal links, and advertisements. http://tc.eserver.org/27523.html http://tc.eserver.org/27523.html The title tag is one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. http://tc.eserver.org/27514.html http://tc.eserver.org/27514.html Discusses buying text links, and whether it's good or bad for your SEO campaigns. http://tc.eserver.org/27521.html http://tc.eserver.org/27521.html For years, when people thought about search engine optimization, in all likelihood, gateway pages, doorway pages or informational pages probably came to mind. If you're a search engine optimization specialist, you've probably had clients requesting that you create these types of pages for them. http://tc.eserver.org/27512.html http://tc.eserver.org/27512.html Directory submissions, unlike search engine submissions, are reviewed by human beings and undergo a great deal of scrutiny by the editors reviewing them. It is important that your website is submitted correctly in order to obtain the listings you need. http://tc.eserver.org/27513.html http://tc.eserver.org/27513.html Sending out link requests is a time-consuming business. So wouldn't it be wonderful if other sites linked to you without being asked? Sound impossible? Well, it can be done and here are ten strategies to prove it. Why not start 2006 by making sure you use them? http://tc.eserver.org/27520.html http://tc.eserver.org/27520.html For years, 'link popularity' and 'Google PageRank' have been the talk of the town in the search engine optimization community. However, the definition of link popularity and how it differs from PageRank (PR), as well as how much effect these actually have on search engine rankings, is often misunderstood. http://tc.eserver.org/27519.html http://tc.eserver.org/27519.html The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don't affect your page's ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns. http://tc.eserver.org/27515.html http://tc.eserver.org/27515.html There are simply no quick fixes regarding search engine optimization. Adding META tags on your site neither a quick fix nor a slow fix. It won't fix anything and it won't have any effect on your search engine traffic. http://tc.eserver.org/27516.html http://tc.eserver.org/27516.html Even keyword phrases that nobody's searching for can sometimes be difficult to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you're doing. And even then, those rankings may be here one day, and gone the next. http://tc.eserver.org/27522.html http://tc.eserver.org/27522.html A question on many Webmaster's minds these days is whether or not they should bother with optimizing their site to rank high in the search engines. We've discussed this in previous articles, and it always seemed to come down to a big 'it depends.' However, I'm starting to realize that for many clients, good search engine rankings can actually make or break a business. http://tc.eserver.org/27518.html http://tc.eserver.org/27518.html When practiced at the level of those of us who've been in the game for 5-10 years, SEO is in fact very Zen-like. We can look at a website and know exactly what needs to be done to make it the best it can be for the site visitors and the search engines. Often, it's easiest for us when we can just roll up our sleeves and do what we know needs to be done, rather than try to explain the whys and wherefores. Many times it's not even possible to explain exactly why we are doing a specific thing, because it simply comes from the gut. http://tc.eserver.org/27517.html http://tc.eserver.org/27517.html Having a website that gets found in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, etc. isn't hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are my latest and greatest tips to get you started. http://tc.eserver.org/27504.html http://tc.eserver.org/27504.html This article will try to tell you about the basics of copywriting and its advanced application on the SEO aspect. This article aims to provide the beginners in the Search Engine Optimization industry, an in-depth but friendly guide to seo content writing, as well as providing the more advanced copywriters with a guide to remind them of the several tricks they might have forgotten about the craft. http://tc.eserver.org/27480.html http://tc.eserver.org/27480.html Every year is always rocked by a plethora of changes in the search engine marketing world. The acquisition of smaller companies by the Big 3 changes the marketing landscape as we know it every month and with every update to the index that is made, we hold our breath and hope that we come out better (if not, the same) in the end. So when it comes to the new year, there are many things that we should look out for to stay on top of the rankings. http://tc.eserver.org/27326.html http://tc.eserver.org/27326.html If you have been looking into Internet marketing, you have probably seen Adwords mentioned now and again. Why don’t we cover the basics of the program. Adwords is the name of the pay-per-click system offered by Google on its search engine. http://tc.eserver.org/27158.html http://tc.eserver.org/27158.html Search engine optimization or SEO is very important to get your website listed in search engines. Even if this is the first website you have built there are a few basic and easy steps that will help you with optimizing your website without being a pro. http://tc.eserver.org/27062.html http://tc.eserver.org/27062.html There's actually quite a lot to take into account when targeting a new geographic territory. I asked my two experts to share just two or three of the most important tips they would give to someone launching in the German marketplace. http://tc.eserver.org/27060.html http://tc.eserver.org/27060.html The purpose behind the Search Engine Roundtable is to report on the most interesting threads taking place at the SEM (Search Engine Marketing) forums. By enlisting some of the most recognized names at those forums, the Roundtable is able to not only report on these outstanding threads but also provide a synopsis that provides greater detail into those threads. http://tc.eserver.org/26989.html http://tc.eserver.org/26989.html Google是一个什么样的公司？对于大多数人来说，对这个问题的回答会是“搜索”。虽然说Google确实是一个关注搜索的公司，它却并不靠搜索来生存。与之相反，和其它公司一样，由利益来决定。并且就像John Gruber所指出的，它通过出售广告来生存。 这使得Google成为一家广告公司。这意义也许比你一开始猜测的要深远的多了。 不过让我们不要走得太远。让我们来谈一会儿可用性。我将要向您解释Google对于广告的必要关注可以让我们学到很多可用性的内容。更严格的讲，这篇文章将描述一个困境，一个与Google对于发布商如何防止广告的建议紧密相关的困境。可用性解决了这个困境，也因此告诉我们许多如何将商务与用户体验结合起来。 http://tc.eserver.org/26988.html http://tc.eserver.org/26988.html Google's necessary focus on advertising can teach us a lot about playing the usability game. Specifically, this article will characterize a dilemma that is tied to Google's advice to publishers on how to place advertisements. The dilemma is resolved through usability, which in turn will teach us a lot about how to mix business and the user experience. http://tc.eserver.org/26904.html http://tc.eserver.org/26904.html Google 的真实情况是怎样的呢？回答是：它并不简洁。 瞧，我喜欢 Google。它是个很棒的搜索引擎，但是我比较反感听到有人表扬它的外观优雅而简洁。见鬼，所有的搜索引擎都有一部分是优雅而又简洁的：在输入框中输入要查询的词语，然后按“回车”键。 “不”，有人会马上反对说：“Google的搜索页面是那样的简洁、优雅，没有和其它的功能挤在一起”。 http://tc.eserver.org/26886.html http://tc.eserver.org/26886.html Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 1, you'll receive a foundation in search engine optimization so you can organically optimize your Web site and create Web pages that are usable, accessible, and friendly to search engines. http://tc.eserver.org/26884.html http://tc.eserver.org/26884.html Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 1, you learned the background of why white hat SEO is good for your site. In Part 2, you'll start optimizing. You'll create a strategy for choosing and optimizing your keywords from the top-left-down and learn more about other factors that can influence your success in search engines. http://tc.eserver.org/26879.html http://tc.eserver.org/26879.html Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 3 of the series, you'll learn how to get the pages of your Web site into the search indexes. http://tc.eserver.org/26873.html http://tc.eserver.org/26873.html Making your Web site obvious to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In this final part of the series, learn specialized techniques for large Web sites or sites with many dynamic pages. http://tc.eserver.org/26881.html http://tc.eserver.org/26881.html PHP, a dynamic Web-based programming language, takes a variety of input formats and uses a built-in SOAP client to obtain information from the Web. PHP, combined with applications using search engine optimization (SEO), is a powerful tool for obtaining information from major search engines, allowing this information to guide a webmaster's online marketing and SEO strategies.