Is Local Search Online or Print Yellow Pages Being Used More?

Search engines have become the most popular way for the average person to find local listings. It's great news for businesses because they can get listed on Google and Yahoo for local search for free. TMP Directional Marketing (TMPDM) recently released the results of their 2nd annual Local Search Usage Study. For the first time, according to the study, the first source used for local search are Search Engines with 31% of users but right behind it at 30% are the print Yellow Pages or White Pages. Last year’s study ranked print yellow pages first with 33% of users followed by Search Engines at 30% of users. The number of people using local search over the yellow pages will continue to increase. To me, it should increase for no other reason than to save trees. It’s ridiculous, particularly in large cities with huge directories, the number of trees that are cut to produce the paper for these directories.

Eighty six per cent of respondents said they have a print directory in their home. I must admit it is hard to imagine not having the yellow pages isn’t it? I have one right behind my computer monitor but I still go to local search on Google first. Habit or laziness call it what you will but I usually only resort to the print yellow pages when I can’t find it online.

For small businesses continuing to advertise in the yellow pages is a big decision. It is very expensive and doesn’t provide the metrics that online advertising provides to determine if it is working. It makes it really important to track calls to see how people are finding your business. Doing this can help you best determine your advertising choices next year.

All businesses with a local presence should put their listing in Google Local Business Center and Yahoo! Local. They can really generate a lot of leads for your business free of charge. The Google Local Business Center allows you to list your business on Google local/Google maps for free. Google Local also pulls results from Verizon Superpages and other trusted sources. If you are a service business working from home you can use a P.O. Box located at the center of the area you want to market to for your listing. You can also use Google Adwords to buy local ads on Google Maps. Yahoo! Local offers basic listings that are free. You need a physical address to list your business in Yahoo! Local however.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO, search engine marketing company. Her focus is SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.

A Real Web 3.0 Perspective

There are a lot of definitions of Web 3.0 going around. As can be expected, everyone defines it from their own perspective. It occurred to me that defining it from your own perspective is a pretty darned good way to describe what Web 3.0 is because it will connect information for us based on its knowledge of us. Supposedly it will allow applications to work intelligently to understand the meaning (semantics) of information and then connect us with this information based on its knowledge of us. Web 3.0 will be defined by each of us based on the main benefit it is providing us. I think of it as providing efficiency to the vast amount of information available on the internet in web pages, social networks, forums, etc. Connecting and combining information we need and want and saving us all the time we spend doing it manually.

Amiad Solomon in his keynote “Semantic Web: Making Advertising More Relevant to Consumers” at the Web 3.0 Conference & Expo provided his definition of Web 3.0. He said "I believe the simplest definition of Web 3.0 is the monetization and commercialization of Web 2.0". This is a definition from his perspective, a definition from someone running a semantic marketing firm. Not that I don’t think advertising will quickly adapt to Web 3.0 technologies. I think se-mantic marketing has the potential to offer both the user and the advertiser needed benefits.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt defines Web 3.0 as “a different way of building applications. Applications are pieced together and are relatively small, the data is in a cloud and can run on any device, very fast and very customizable and distributed virally through social networks, email, etc.” These applications will make the user generated content that Web 2.0.created able to be personalized and managed more efficiently. Think of it as a personalized mashup of information coming from multiple places provided by applications that are intelligent enough to sift through it knowing our interests, history, etc. and presented to us in the format we prefer.

I guess we should figure out what Web 3.0 means to us and for us. It would be nice to understand Web 3.0 when it is happening, in real time, instead of not really getting it until Web 4.0 comes along and maybe not even then. Sometimes the light comes on and I think I get it but I know I am far from really getting it.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO, search engine marketing company. Her focus is SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.

An Explanation of the Semantic Web

Today users drive the search for the information they are looking for on the internet. They may use Google as their search agent and review the first five or ten listings to get the answer, product or service they are looking for. The interactions produced by Web 2.0 type applications like social media networks have made it easy to interact with other people and bring a whole new dimension to our information search. The computers are the tools we use to get this information. We then have to interpret this information. The computers on the web don’t understand the content of the html documents they display, they simply display it.

The semantic web is about getting web computers to understand the semantics (the content) of the information they display. The goal is to make the information available on the web able to be interpreted by computers. This involves structuring the data by creating metadata that describes the meaning of the data. It is done with open standards so that any application can understand it and the data can be shared. The web becomes a database. Now it is more like a file server. It means describing things so that computers can understand the relationships between things. The semantic web will allow intelligent agents to work for you to tell you what you need to know based on their understanding of you derived from everything the agent knows about you: your past queries, your interests, the context of your past interactions, etc. The agent will then be able to act for you to gather information from multiple sources and present it to you. Think of it as the agent doing your research for you and then presenting this information to you in the way you like to see it.

An example of this is the CALO project. Just as the Defense Department created the first network of computers as the precursor of the internet called Arpanet the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is now working on a project to develop a personalized cognitive assistant under its Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program. According to the project website “The goal of PAL is to create cognitive software systems which are systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.” The goal is to develop technology that will have a lot of value for the military so there isn’t a lot of public information about the project. However, it should have far reaching effects on the development of the semantic web.

Today we have tons of information on the internet. Search engines allow us to query this information to find what we are looking for. Most people spend too much time trying to find this information. It seems productive compared to how we did it before the internet but making the web meaningful for computers will allow us to automate this process and increase our productivity. It’s the next generation of the Internet called Web 3.0.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO, search engine marketing company. Her focus is SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.

Is Google’s Algorithm Changing to Consider User Behavior?

Google realized early success in 1998 due to their focus on the relationships between websites to determine the rankings of results. Back then search engines ranked results based on the number of times the keyword being searched appeared on the page. By doing this Google was able to return more relevant results for users and the rest is history.

Naturally search engine marketers pay close attention to any new algorithm change made by Google to develop new strategies. There is a interesting article today on search engine watch by Aaron Shear called "Google’s Algorithm is Shifting". In this article Aaron talks about Google switching to a more logical algorithm which is based more on user behavior. He thinks some of the factors that will be looked at are site performance, bounce rate and links. Links, as we all know, are the key factor now. Aaron emphasizes the importance of the diversity of the links and where they come from in this algorithm shift. He suggests blogs, social bookmarking sites, social chat engines and Facebook as areas to target.

Who knows whether Aaron is guessing right? To me it makes sense to look at site performance and bounce rate. This will bring Google’s algorithm more in line with what professional SEO’s do. Good SEO’s don’t stop at getting client’s good rankings. They review site performance, bounce rates and conversions regularly. A lot of work is put into getting good rankings for a website to generate traffic and it is important to make sure that site performance and usability work to convert that traffic. It seems that it would also make good sense for Google to have their results produce conversions – idea being their results are giving users what they want.

Google should care about site performance and bounce rates to ensure they continue to return relevant results to their users. High bounce rates indicate poor usability or irrelevant results to the user. Sites with high bounce rates reduce the relevancy of the result. Slow site performance in itself causes high bounce rates so this is another factor for Google to consider in their algorithm. If these two factors are becoming part of the algorithm I doubt that they weigh heavily.

There are other search engines being developed using different strategies. Google needs to not only keep up with existing competition but continue to be innovative in producing results increasingly sophisticated users want. Users want to spend less time finding what they are looking for. Search engines need to make sure they do this.


Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO, search engine marketing company. Her focus is SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.



Technorati Profile

Using Google Search for Everyday Essentials

Google offers so many things to users that it’s really hard to keep up. As an SEO I am constantly thinking about Google search but with a focus on getting good rankings for our clients. If you are like me (you poor thing) you put just about anything you might be looking for in the google search box and hope you will find the answer.

Here are a number of things I should have realized many moons ago and would have saved lots of time if I had. I’m wondering what the weather is like in New York City today for the opening day of SMX East. So I go to one of my most visited sites: http://www.nytimes.com/. I am rarely looking for the weather when I go to this site. Even though the area I visit the most: OPINION is right underneath the weather I have never noticed it until just now. It would have been much easier to just put: weather New York City in the Google search box. Voila! Its 62 degrees Fahrenheit and mostly cloudy in New York. I bet they don’t have Bar Harbor, Maine weather. Yep, they do, its 44 degrees and cloudy. I will definitely remember this feature and use it.

How about what time is it in Bangkok? It’s 1:54 am Tuesday and it’s now 2:54 p.m EST Monday. I will definitely use this as I can never remember what time it is in the central or rocky Mountain Time zones. It’s fast – a no brainer. And who knows we could get a client in Bangkok.

Do you need to make some quick calculations? Just enter your numbers with the proper +,-,*,/, = symbols and you get your answer. Don’t know the metric system – just enter what you want, say 2 liter in gallons, the answer is 0.528344105 US gallons. Having trouble remembering how to spell receive? Or even more trouble remembering the rule i before e except after c. Just type receive into Google and it will ask you “Did you mean receive”.

If you need a quick definition for a word just put define before the word. I got to thinking about someone I recently met, unfortunately, and the word pompous came to mind. Define pompous – grandiloquent (huh) - puffed up with vanity and a boastful manner (yep that’s him).

Local search is pretty cool too. You can find stores, restaurants and other local businesses by putting in the category of the business and the location. There are lots of other things you can find quickly too. It’s truly amazing particularly if you can get online with your cell phone. If you are wondering why I am writing about this because most of you probably already know this it’s for other people like me who can really benefit from knowing these little time savers that make everyday life easier.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO, a search engine marketing company. Her focus is SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.