by Kristen Nicole on February 3, 2010
Search optimization is pretty important stuff for web publishers. Especially as the market moves more towards the web. As far as advertising and brand engagement, it’s increasingly necessary for publishers to keep tabs on the behavior of their web sites. Yield Software’s search optimization service addresses these needs, and now it’s doing so for free.
A new option from Yield Software gives you a taste of what the company can provide to help with your website behavior needs. Features include content recommendations and inbound link building and outbound link repair. Also included is info on URL structure and content, as as well as data on page accessibility and performance.
With these features you can see a range of options that Yield Software has with its premium service, which combines several aspects of web page monitoring and analysis. Yield Software tracks all the metrics, lets you set up various actions to be run automatically, and also recommends what areas can be improved for optimizing your web page. Creating a central hub for managing all of this is where Yield Software aims to stand out from the rest.
Having raised $6 million in funding from Draper Fisher Jurveston and launching its flagship product about a year ago, Yield Software has also spent the last few months building out the options around its service. In creating a central operations tool for website publishers, Yield Software is now looking to improve upon its own products and services to become more prevalent in its space. Yield Software has been hailed as a pretty powerful tool for what it does, and the automation of its services is a main focus of its overall goals.
As we push towards a web-based market for things like content-sharing, marketing, advertising, brand engagement, research and education, the amount of content to be published and searched for on the web will only continue to increase. While Google, Bing and other search engines look to compile all of that shared information in order to make it easier for you to find, Yield Software appeals to publishers and small businesses to make it easier for you to leverage those search tools in order to increase your visibility.
The move towards contextual search has also raised the bar for services like Yield Build, as they must also seek ways in which to provide publishers with the tools necessary for becoming a highly trafficked web resource. Search engines are looking to provide direct answers instead of mere links that reroute us all across the web. That means the very nature of the content will change, pulling its context out and shifting the way in which we consume and interact with our search results. Staying on top of the continuously changing face of search marketing is a tough task. Preserving your productivity and your sanity almost requires a tool like Yield Software.
by Brian Solis on April 13, 2009
Guest author: Todd Hogan
First off, I’d like to thank the bub.blicio.us team for a guest post – the bub.blicio.us team is a helpful voice in tracking the impact that sociality and real time information, connections, and opinions are having on the web.
This past week you’ve seen the mighty Google show its interest in the upstart Twitter. Now, whether those discussions really were as serious as many at first believed, the takeaway is the same: what is happening “right now” is becoming increasingly important to internet users of all shades. One important trend growing from this is the need to search through all of the “right now” content that is being generated every moment and make it accessible. Our team at surchur.com is one group trying to make that happen.
But who cares about what’s happening “right now”?
Here are 5 profiles that are finding real time search a big thing, you may find that you fit the bill of one . . . or several of these:
- The fan club – you are a HUGE fan, LOL, of XXXXXX (insert rock band, NBA star, rising senator etc here) and just can’t get enough of them. Someone pans them online and you’re like w/e, they launch their most recent album and its GTG – you’re off to iTunes, you get texted by your BFF when they are seen with a new flame and OMG NW! Real time search is the way you are the texter not the textee. Being in the know matters and you want the 411 before anyone else.
- The curiosity cat – you like to visit Google Trends. You can probably do a pretty good job of Alex Trebek saying “Answer – Daily Double.” Real time search is for you a way to understand why something is popular. That weird acronym that was just mentioned on CNN needs a follow up search – you don’t know what in the world they were talking about. You use real time search as an ongoing discovery tool that beats the evening news for novelty – by a mile.
- The opportunistic publisher – you are a content writer online and you constantly need new ideas, new keywords and want to capitalize on trends as they happen. The web is a big Mad Lib and the coolest story comes from she who has the voice of the moment. Real time search is to you what using the word “gnarly” first was on the playground back when we were in 4th grade – you are the channel for hip.
- The individual ego searcher – we’ve all been there, “What does ‘googling’ me bring up.” Well with the advent of massive amounts of immediacy on venues like twitter, the blogosphere, flickr, social tagging sites, YouTube and more, you, the ego searcher, are yearning to see how you’re being spoken of at this moment not just a ‘googled’ search with years of pages. You often care more about bragging rights, real or imagined, than real information. Real time search matters to you as an extension of your identity – “who I am on the web is evolving – I want to watch it.”
- The online brand manager – the corporate counterpart to the ego searcher, the brand manager cares about monitoring their brand and keeping it healthy online. They use real time search as a tool for finding bad PR to squelch or minimize, perhaps responding to blog comments about them on a NY Times article. They jump on board quickly when a great review of their product or service enters appears online, pointing to it with their blog or tweeting about it themselves. They may use more aggressive monitoring tools like Radian6 to keep tight tabs on the minutiae of their business with tailored filters on their business and their competitors.
5 different users of real time search. You may have felt a little déjà vu reading these, you may know someone who actually really is THE “curiosity cat.” Whether you agree with the mocked up profiles, one thing is certain we’ll continue to see advances in the way real time information is consumed. Urgency is driving a lot of the trends we’re seeing emerge on the web and at surchur we believe there is an incredible amount of innovation that will continue to come from services that enable the “right now.”
Todd Hogan is founder of surchur.com and can definitely mimic a good “Answer- Daily Double”
by Brian Solis on October 27, 2008
by Brian Solis
BuzzLogic partnered with Jupiter Research, which is owned by Forrester, to spotlight evolving consumer behavior and decision making processes and how blogs influence and factor into consumer purchases. The companies polled over 2,000 online consumers in the U.S. and results suggest that blog readers use blogs as the top solution for discovering other blog content in order to research and guide decisions – ranking higher than Web search.
Additional findings include:
Links more powerful than search: For frequent readers, links beat search as a navigation tool: 38 percent said blog links were the top tool for discovering new blog content as compared to 34 percent who voted for Web search.
Links signal trust: For frequent readers, blog links appear to have similar impact as a trusted recommendation from a person (a response from 39 percent of survey participants).
Blog search not yet mainstream: Blog search engines received the lowest ranking from respondents: 6 percent of general readers and 11 percent of frequent readers say they use these tools to discover new blogs.
Buying Behavior: The Nature of Blog Influence
Blogs influence purchases: One half (50 percent) of blog readers say they find blogs useful for purchase information.
Blogs sway more purchases among readers than social networks: More frequent blog readers say they trust relevant blog content for purchase decisions than content from social networking sites.
Niche focus ups influence factor: For those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, more than half (56 percent) said blogs with a niche focus and topical expertise were key sources.
Blogs go beyond tech: Outside of technology-related purchases, for which 31 percent of readers say blogs are useful, other key categories include media and entertainment (15 percent); games/toys and/or sporting goods (14 percent); travel (12 percent); automotive (11 percent); and health (10 percent).
Now if you wanted to know how and when blogs factor into the purchase cycle, the study also offers insight for us:
Blogs indeed factor in to critical stages of the purchase process, weighing most heavily at the actual moment of a purchase decision. When it comes to respondents who said they have trusted blog content for purchase decisions in the past, over half (52 percent) said blogs played a role as they decided to move forward with a purchase.
Blog readers also replied around blogging influence as it relates to the following steps of the purchase process:
Decide on a product or service – 21 percent
Refine choices – 9 percent
Get support and answers – 19 percent
Discover products and services – 17 percent
Assure – 14 percent
Inspire a purchase – 13 percent
Execute a purchase – 7 percent
According to BuzzLogic CEO, Rob Crumpler, “For a portion of Web users, blogs rival search as a navigation tool, which has really interesting implications for advertisers. Blogs are becoming trusted guides, steering users who are seeking very specific information to places of interest online. Being able to identify where this is taking place across the blogosphere gives us a window into user intent and a means to better target advertising to a qualified audience.”
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by Michelle Lentz on July 1, 2008
by Michelle Lentz
Flash pieces on web sites have traditionally been invisible to search engines. However, Adobe announced today that they are working with the search industry to change that and make Flash pieces – and Flash web sites – visible again.
Adobe has created a special Flash player, currently distributed to Yahoo! and Google. This special player allows the search engine to crawl through Flash content and get to any text or hyperlinks within the rich content. From what I read on TechCrunch, the special player acts as a virtual human, viewing the Flash content and translating it into the right information for the search engine.
This is great news for web designers and agencies who love to create Flash sites but are often dinged because of a lack of SEO. According to the Adobe press release,
…millions of pre-existing RIAs [rich Internet applications] and dynamic Web experiences that utilize Adobe Flash technology, including content that loads at runtime, are immediately searchable without the need for companies and developers to alter them.
Google has already begun indexing Flash sites, while Yahoo! plans to release the technology in an future update. Adobe has plans to roll out the technology to additional search engines as well.
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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed.
