All the top Search Engine Optimization news.

The Web is filled with uncrawled web pages, and some of them may be yours. One of the important first steps in optimizing a web site for search engines is to make sure that the pages of the site are search engine friendly, so that a crawling program from search engines can follow the links on pages to your site, and collect information from those pages. There are three major functions of search engines - crawling pages, indexing content, and displaying results to searchers - and the last two can’t happen until pages are crawled. The purpose behind crawling web pages focuses upon:…

One way to help in that process of organizing the Web is to use what people do in the Web. - Ricardo Baeza-Yates, from a presentation on Extracting Semantic Relations from Query Logs How related might different search queries be when they share a number of pages in search results, and searchers tend to click upon those shared results more than other results? If you go to Yahoo’s search, and perform a search for the term [wcca], the first result that you see in the search results is a page titled “Wisconsin Circuit Court Access.” If you search for [wisconsin circuit court],…

Some words that you might search for at a search engine may have more than one meaning. For example, the word fencing can mean a sport involving swords, a man-made barrier enclosing an area, or activity to make a profit from illegally gained goods. Words or phrases that can have two or more are sometimes referred to as polysemous words. That can pose challenges for: Search engines - trying to identify the intent behind searches. Searchers - seeing results unrelated to what they were trying to find. Site owners - finding their pages in search results surrounded by sites offering something very…

When people in the mideastern United States don’t hear something that someone says, they may say “excuse me,” to ask the person whom they are having a conversation with to repeat what they just said. If you’re having a conversation in the Southern United States and you say “excuse me” to get someone to repeat themselves, it might evoke a blank stare (I’ve seen it). Non-verbal communication that doesn’t seem to match the message sent with words might also cause confusion and misunderstanding (been there, too). Many websites are set up…

In my last post, I wrote about how Google may be incorporating Sentiment Analysis into the snippets that they showed for some search results. Another new feature that was announced at Google’s Searchology was the display of user ratings for products on some pages. We were told that these reviews can be found in “rich snippets” which show up under the title to a page in a search result, and above the snippet, or description for a page. A recent patent application from Google explores the topic of ratings, assigning quality scores to raters, and discounting or eliminating…