Google Stop Words Now Indexed

From: seobythesea.com

Not too long ago, if you entered in Google the phrase (without quotation marks) “a room with a view,” you might have received some warnings that your query contained “Stop Words.”

Stop words are words that appear so frequently in documents and on web pages that search engines would often ignore them when indexing the words on pages. These could be words like: a, and, is, on, of, or, the, was, with.

Good bye to stop words?

In that search for “a room with a view,” you might have received results like “a room for a view,” or “room to view,” or other phrases that replaced some stop words with others. That made it less likely to find exactly what you were looking for when you searched for a phrase with stop words in it.

I’m not seeing Google ignoring stop words any more. Last week, Dan Thies asked Stop Words Are Dead! Did I Miss Another Memo?

This newly granted Google Patent seems to hold some answers to the disappearance of stop words, and to potentially a number of other indexing issues from Google:

Document compression scheme that supports searching and partial decompression
Invented by Olcan Sercinoglu
Assigned to Google
US Patent 7,319,994
Granted January 15, 2008
Filed May 23, 2003

Continue Reading…..

SEO Requires Constant Improvement

It used to be possible to run a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign and then leave it alone but this is no longer the case, an expert has stated.

Matt Hopkins, managing director of search engine marketing firm Vertical Leap, made his comments through his company’s blog, advocating what he calls the Kaizen approach.

“Kaizen is a Japanese term that effectively means continuous, incremental improvement,” he explained, adding that this philosophy is a “large part” of Vertical Leap’s management of SEO campaigns.

Mr Hopkins agreed that a lot of work is necessary at the beginning of an SEO strategy but that a Kaizen-inspired attention to detail and “pig-headed determination” is what creates a successful approach.

SEO company Phoenix Realm also describes optimization as a continuous process and suggests that a methodical persistence will give a marketer long-lasting results.

Furthermore, it advises that organic optimization will protect a website from falling in search engine rankings if the algorithms change, whereas so-called black hat techniques risk detection and a fall in rankings.

SEO can lower costs of PPC

From:  www.directnews.co.uk

Effective search engine optimization (SEO) can help to lower the cost of paid search campaigns, it has been claimed.

International property publication Global edge aims to assist overseas estate agents to derive greater benefits from the internet.

Designing a website with SEO in mind can help to achieve this, the publication asserts.

By incorporating between six and ten keywords into a site’s content, search engine visibility can be improved and paid search budgets reduced, Global edge explains.

“Users will convert at higher rates - and besides, you’ll have done your SEO right at the design phase so you’ll be getting lots of free natural traffic,” the publication contends.

“A good website will inspire your audience and position you as an authority in your chosen niche,” it adds.

In a recent presentation, Global edge advised its readers on the best ways to identify gaps in the search market before optimizing content, as well as how best to strike a balance between site design and SEO considerations.

Wikia Search: Wikipedia Search Engine Review

by Kevin Heisler

Debbie Richman posted two social search engine analyses reviews of Wikia Search that didn’t bash Wales and his Build-A Bare Engine Workshop.

VentureBeat’s Saumil Mehta (product manager, vertical search engine competitor) has the most thorough user review of Wikia Search here that makes others superfluous. Bloggers, If you haven’t reviewed the features yet, wait until the next release.

We say “Wikia Search”, Saumil says “Search Wikia.” Should Wikia Search call the whole thing off?

Jimmy Wales weighed in at TechCrunch where a great debate is brewing. So we’ll give Jimmy’s comments a wider audience here.

After the jump, Eli Feldblum will explain why SEOs (and corporations using SEOs) could make Wikia Search grow exponentially — thru better search results — but may stay on the sidelines, along with hundreds of millions of searchers.

Wikia Search will likely take the advice of Ask exec and former Search Engine Watcher Gary Price: in short, watch out for “manipulation.” (by SEOs? by webmasters of the world? We’ll look for more from Gary since Wikia Search will be a (4th Place) Ask.com Killer before it ever gives Google the Sweeney Todd treatment.

In TechCrunch, Jimmy Wales said: “(Wikia Search) is a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine … So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it. We aren’t even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are building something different.”

continue reading….