Microsoft Labs Photosynth
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that will change forever the way you think about digital photos.
Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
With Photosynth you can:
* Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
* Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it's megapixels or gigapixels in size.
* See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
* Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing.
* Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend.
This is a really cool application that works well if you have multiple photos to create a set.
What does the engine do?
Your brain knows that your eyes are about two inches apart. But when Photosynth does its magic, it doesn't know where the cameras were, or which way they were pointing. Fortunately, when there are many cameras, and many features in common, the algorithms behind Photosynth can figure out not only where the features are in 3D, but where all of the cameras would have to have been, and which way they were aimed, consistent with the features they "saw".
I look forward to seeing what they produce out of this. If they can get it so that it will index photos online and auto plot them they could have a huge 3D world at their disposal for all sorts of uses.
10 Search Engine Optimization Tasks
As a designer or web publisher there are several things you need to keep in mind in order to have a "search successful" website. These are probably the top 10 tasks to perform correctly, in the order I believe of most importance.
1. Your Content
2. Title Meta Tag
3. Header Tags
4. Relevant Inbound Links
5. Description Meta Tag
6. Keywords Meta Tag
7. Site Map
8. Link Text
9. ALT Tags
10. Target Your Audience
I wanted to get this list up. I plan to go into detail on each of the items soon. Look for further posts or an article with more examples and specifics.
Content is King… With Attention
Content is King... With Attention
I recently read an article all about page optimization and what some of the important factors are in developing a search friendly web site. They described all the pieces from the domain name to the coding elements like meta tags, keywords, the description, alt tags, good linking structure, but touted that "Content is King."
Now, I am not disagreeing with that statement. Content is certainly the largest block of the building. But what I felt was missing from their article was the fact that content should not be implemented then forgotten. If you have a great website, but it stays the same for months or even years it grows stagnant and will start to die over time.
Think for a second about www.cnn.com. How well would the site perform if they left news up on their homepage for a year? Now that is a very dramatic example, but the principle is the same even if it is on a much smaller level. Am I saying that everyone has to update their content every day to stay on top? No!
What I am saying is keep updated information on your site. Do you have events, sales, specials, holiday giveaways, or anything that you can add, especially to a homepage, that will show search engines your web site is a living document? How about new products, or asking a question to get feedback from site visitors, anything to show that you are vested in keeping your web site active and informative.
You have to take into consideration your market, your competition, and your own web site focus. Are other sites adding or changing content every 3 days? If they are most likely they are going to beat out any site that has had no changes in a long period of time. Do you run an informative site or e-commerce? Then fresh content, on a regular - frequent - basis is your lifeblood.
One good way to keep fresh content is by starting a personal or corporate blog and making a post or two a week. I tend to post a lot and I have search engines picking up my site every couple hours. Link those post titles to your homepage with some server-side code and see a huge jump in those bot visits!
There is so much you can do, and most of it can be something quick and simple. One or two hours a month even can show that you care about your web site. Write some content, share your news, sell a new product. Trust me, by giving a little, you will be gaining a lot.
About: Ironvine Search Marketing (http://www.ironvine.com/blog/)
Author - Steve Terjeson - Online Marketing Specialist with over 10 years assorted programming, marketing, sales, and computer related experience.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steve_Terjeson
Terjeson, Steve. (2006, November 02). Content is King... With Attention. EzineArticles. Retrieved November 10, 2006, from http://ezinearticles.com/?Content-is-King...-With-Attention&id=345745
Google AdWords Editor 2.0
Google is announcing its latest AdWords Editor version 2.0. You can try AdWords Editor, the free, downloadable campaign management application for your desktop.
Version 2.0 includes new features such as Find and Replace, Find Duplicate Keywords, and Advanced Maximum CPC Changes. http://services.google.com/adwordseditor/index.html
The Colors of SEO
Tim Converse from Yahoo! had a great post about "color-coding" the SEO designers and sites. As a typically self promoted White Hat SEO specialist I feel there can be a lot of shades as well. I stay away from the Black Hat but sometimes things slip in that work well but aren't made as layed down in the Law.
Here are Tim's SEO Color-Codes
Background: A naive (non-SEO) webmaster or content producer simply makes a site, without a thought or a care to the world of search engines. Or if there's a thought it's a thought of hopeful trust: if I make a useful interesting site on topic X, then the search engine will figure that out and deliver users who care about X to my site. SEOs and SEO-aware content creators construct sites instead with an eye to how search engines work, and make content that is designed to be retrieved. The white-hat/black-hat continuum is about the extent to which SEOs are working with search engines or against them. Black-hat SEOs are also known as search-engine spammers.
Dark inky black: The SEO's (or in this case the spammer's) interests are totally divergent from both the engines and the users - the SEO wants to trick the search engine into handing over users who are ripe to be tricked themselves into a situation of malicious harm. For example, the SEO might name his domain just one typo-character away from a famous domain name, then install spyware on the computer of any user careless enough to visit, or attempt to impersonate a major portal's login page to collect logins and passwords.
Charcoal: The SEO tries to trick the engine into showing the user something totally unrelated to the query, and possibly offensive, but doesn't actually commit any illegal or fraudulent acts within five seconds of the first user click. Example: a (heinous) pr0nspammer who stuffs the page with irrelevant non-porn keywords targeting innocent queries, maybe via invisible text. 99.9% of searchers will be searching for something else and will be put off; 0.1% will be searching for something else, but will, um, flexibly and opportunistically reorient their interests.
Dark gray: The SEO collects (aka steals) random text from other sites, and uses it to create thousands (or millions) of pages targeting particular queries. The pages have nothing original of value, but do have ads.
Slate gray: The SEO creates thousands (or millions of pages), all of which point (by linkage, or framing, or redirection) to the same content, which might actually be interesting to the searcher.
Gray: The SEO reads the guidelines of search engines, and tries to juice up their sites just enough to fly under the radar on all dimensions - artificial linkfarms that remain small, automatic content duplication that is arguably not too abusive, etc. The goal is to get enough referral traffic as possible, without too much reference to whether it is interested traffic.
Light gray: The SEO creates "original" content in bulk the old-fashioned way, thinking first of all of search engine rules, secondly of duplicate detection algorithms, and lastly of whether the text makes sense to human beings and is something anyone would ever want to read. Then the SEO experiments with all the parameters (keyword density, internal linkage) trying to move up for the queries of interest.
Off-white: The SEO ensures crawlability of the site, restructures it if necessary for size of pages and internal linkage, and then injects terms to specifically target the important keywords and queries. He doesn't create linkfarms, but friends and allies are importuned to link with specific text and phrases.
White: The SEO starts (if lucky) with a site full of content you can't find anywhere else, and that answers a need that searchers actually have. Then the SEO makes sure the site is crawlable, and that titles and internal links make sense and are descriptive. Then the SEO thinks hard about the queries that really should pull up this content, and tries to discover if the right terms are present. Then (the hard, artful part), he or she rewrites content with a dual consciousness of the infovorous human reader and the termnivorous spider, making sure that the most important terms and phrases for the spider are present (in all their forms) and forefronted for the spider, without degrading the quality for the reader.
Luminescent pearly white: This would be a case where the SEO designs a site to show up for relevant queries and not to show up for irrelevant queries.
Australia Proposed Copyright Rules
Australia's Proposed Copyright Rules Would Make Search Engines Impossible, Warns Google - Google has warned Australia that if they pass a new copyright law that it will set the country back to "the pre-Internet era."
AdWords Landing page quality update
Google has posted notice of a new update to the landing page quality scoring on its official AdWords blog. Initally they updated the landing page score in July and are now revising and updating that scoring method.
In the next few days, we will be making two changes to how AdWords evaluates landing page quality. First, we'll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network. Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic across the content network decreases as a result of this change. Second, we're improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system.
As with our July system update, both of these changes will affect a very small portion of advertisers, so the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by either change. However, those who may be providing a low quality user experience will see an increase in their minimum bids for Google.com and the search network and/or a decrease in traffic across the content network. In most cases, we expect that the higher minimum bids will cause the low quality ads and keywords to become "inactive for search." Since July, we've received quite a few questions from advertisers about our landing page quality initiatives, and I'd like to address the most common ones today:
Why are you focusing on landing page quality?
The goal of our ongoing landing page quality initiative is to improve the experience of our users by providing high quality results not only in the ad text, but also once the user has clicked through to the site. We strongly believe that an excellent experience on the advertiser's site is an essential element in earning the continued trust of our users. Clearly, the better the user experience, the more likely it is that users (who are also your potential customers) will continue to seek out -- and click on -- AdWords ads over the long term. This is to the advantage of everyone: users, advertisers, and Google alike.What do you consider to be a high quality landing page?
While we suggest landing page and site guidelines, we don't provide more specific recommendations because there's no one-size-fits-all approach to best create landing pages. We therefore encourage you to focus on building landing pages that are best for your users, whether they come from AdWords or other sources. In doing this, it may be instructive to put yourself in your customer's shoes and closely examine what it is that leads you to explore and do business with a site rather than simply click the "Back" button.Will my landing page quality affect my ad's position?
Not for Google search. While one's landing page quality is directly correlated with the minimum bid required for one's ads to run, it does not affect your ads position (or 'rank', as it is often referred to) at all. However, since there is no minimum bid requirement for contextually-targeted ads, low quality landing pages will result in the need to bid higher to compete in the auction, which could also impact your position on pages in the network.
It appears that this is mainly geared towards contextually-targeted ads, but having a well designed and formed landing page in general should always be a top priority for advertizers. The quality and usability of a landing page can greatly affect sales and the users experience on your site.
Recent Yahoo! Updates
Some recent updates from the Yahoo! Search blog.
Yahoo! now supports the 'NOODP' tag.
Following in the footsteps of MSN and Google, you can now dump ODP from all the major search engines (does Ask.com count?).
They will recognize the following META tags on your pages:
[html]
[/html]
Supporting wildcards in robots.txt
In an effort to help make the functionality of the robots.txt file more manageable, Yahoo! has added 2 wildcard characters to the Slurp supported functions. (Slurp is Yahoo's crawler name.)
'*' - matches a sequence of characters
You can now use '*' in robots directives for Yahoo! Slurp to wildcard match a sequence of characters in your URL. You can use this symbol in any part of the URL string you provide in the robots directive. For example,
[code]
User-Agent: Yahoo! Slurp
Allow: /public*/
Disallow: /*_print*.html
Disallow: /*?sessionid[/code]
The robots directives above will:
- allow all directories that begin with 'public', such as '/public_html/' or '/public_graphs/' to be crawled
- disallow any files or directories which contain '_print', such as '/card_print.html' or '/store_print/product.html' to be crawled
- disallow any files with '?sessionid' in their URL string, such as '/cart.php?sessionid=342bca31’ to be crawled
Note that a trailing '*' is redundant since that is existing matching behavior for Slurp. So, the following two directives are equivalent:
[code]User-Agent: Yahoo! Slurp
Disallow: /private*
Disallow: /private[/code]
'$' – anchors at the end of the URL string
You can now also use '$' in robots directives for Slurp to anchor the match to the end of the URL string. Without this symbol, Yahoo! Slurp would match all URLs against the directives, treating the directives as a prefix. For example:
[code]User-Agent: Yahoo! Slurp
Disallow: /*.gif$
Allow: /*?$[/code]
The robots directives above will
- Disallow all files ending in '.gif' in your entire site. Note that without the '$', this would disallow all files containing '.gif' in their file path
- Allow all files ending in '?' to be included. This would not automatically allow files that just contain '?' somewhere in the URL string
Rainy Search Engine Optimization
It's raining buckets here in Seattle. One portion of the parking lot has a little bit over 3 feet of water and by Thriftway the storm drains are erupting into what has become a lake.
It is warm and dry inside the office however and the daily grind continues. Several sites are needing optimized as well as quite a few reports for the paid search program members. Monthly charges need to be sent out and campaigns reviewed.
One new change by the domain registrars at the beginning of November has caused a painful delay in most transfers, as they now require an Authorization Code to process the transfer. It can take up to 5 days per ICANN policy for the registrars to provide the code.
Send It On Organization Support
One of my friends has started a free, no cost, donation or support international volunteer organizational web site. Send It On is a place where you can go and share good deeds with others.
The goal is to impact your awareness of just how important doing things for others is, or show that you recognize things that have been done for you.
By sending on your experiences you encourage others to do the same thing in their lives. Stop by today and write a quick post about something that has happened recently in your life, then send it on to others!
Smarter Launches Visual Search
Selection from SearchEngineWatch Blog -
Seems that just last week I mentioned a shopping comparison engine launching a color search feature. Well, this week it's Smarter's turn to take the colorful spotlight.
Smarter.com today launched visual search. Visual search can be found by clicking on the Clothing & Accessories tab or by searching for any product within that section. Right now it's is a bit hidden as the consumer has to click on a small link under the header.
Differentiator here is that Smarter's visual search is all about clothing. Users select gender, then a top (shirt, sweater, etc.), then a bottom (pants, shorts, etc.), then choose the color for each. Smarter then returns two bands of products (the top on top, the bottom on the bottom) so users can see what the shirt and shorts might look like together.
More information (with colorful screenshots) on ComparisonEngines or try out Visual Search now.
Posted by Brian Smith on Oct. 31, 2006 |
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PPC Campaign Success Story
Dr. Povolny is an orthodontist in the Seattle area. His practice web site was performing decently, organically, on search engines, but it was not bringing him the exposure and patient return he wanted for his practice.
To help bring some return on his web site, I set Dr. Povolny up with our Sesame Elite Search program to boost his online marketing and presence.
Today smilesatsouthcenter.com has turned into a high performing patient generation tool. Dr. Povolny says that he is "getting so many calls from the web site" from patients who found him on search engines. He is very impressed and wanted to share his excellent positive results from the paid search campaigns I set up for him.