Category Archives: SEO

IBM: Google’s rival for Business Search Technology?

Thanks to Bill Slawski’s posts, I’ve been aware of a few search engine technology related patents published by IBM and also about some really good articles on SEO published on their official website.

The intent of these patents and of these articles aren’t really clear. We know that IBM has been involved in search engine technology, this page gathers all kind of articles regarding IBM and its relation with search engine technology.

More recently, IBM announced that they have been chosen by The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) to develop and online clinical trials portal, that allows patients and physicians to easily find “medical information from more than 88,000 pages of ongoing and completed clinical trial studies worldwide, allowing users to search in German, French, Japanese and Spanish, as well as English.”

The search technology developed by IBM seems very advanced, and uses techniques that no other traditional Internet based search engine is currently using:

The portal uses IBM’s advanced text analytics and content discovery capabilities, extending beyond conventional Internet-based search to help interpret and understand the medical information an individual wants and needs — even if their query contains misspelled words or jargon. For example, patients are sometimes unfamiliar with medical terminology, so the system suggests synonyms for medical conditions and medicines, which helps to correct misspelled words.

IBM’s vision could be to develop search technology for companies that have specific goals and unique requirements. Google also developed products to help businesses search their information, but it doesn’t seem to be something revolutionary.

From what I understand, if a company’s using Google Mini or any other Enterprise products, it’s just a search engine with shallow functions.

On the other side, IBM’s example with their technology that allows multi-criteria search, text analysis, vertical search etc, seems to be able to provide advanced search technology to businesses that need to be very efficient and find the right information.

A nice list of Firefox extensions

Stephan Spencer published a nice list of his favorite plugins and extensions that he uses with Firefox. If you are a SEO, Webmaster, or just a regular Internet user, you’re just missing out if you’re not using Firefox yet. It’s still by far the most robust browser out there and the number of extensions that make your life easier is just awesome.

There’s just one extension that I would add to Stephan’s list: SEOpen, a tool which allows you to get any SEO related information with just one click, ie. Yahoo! Backlinks, number of pages indexed in Google, and more.

SEM Salaries: How much are you worth?

P.J. Fusco, writer for Clickz, replied to an email sent by a reader who asked “What’s considered a typical salary range for non-management and management positions in the SEM industry?”

Because SEM is still a new industry, it’s true that there’s a lack of information regarding salaries. That often causes people to wonder if their salaries match with what other earn. Of course, salaries are mainly justified by experience but it’s a good to know the tendency in the SEM job market.

P.J. said that entry level positions tend to range from $30,000 to $45,000. With 3 to 5 years of experience, she thinks that people can earn from $50,000 to $70,000, and even up to $90,000 if you are amongst the most tenured SEOs.

Senior Management Positions are able to earn up to $120,000.

She concludes her article by saying that money isn’t the most important, but rather how much you enjoy your work. I agree, if you’re all about the money, you can make more money elsewhere, SEO/M is more about providing quality, achieving great results and is also a very exciting job and our industry is very diversified and full of fun!

Supplemental Results Issue with Google seems to be fixed

The last few days, a couple of sites that I know which had for example hundreds of pages indexed in Google were only showing a few pages in Google, with the command site:url.com. Google was displaying a message saying that some results were omitted while there was no reason for them to do so. (pages having unique title tags, search engine friendly urls etc.)
The problem was reported in WebmasterWorld and also on many other forums.

As of today, these sites that  I know are showing the same number of indexed pages as they were before the issue. Matt Cutts hasn’t commented on this issue yet. “GoogleGuy” over at WMW apparently said that he knew where the error came from and that they were working on it, but we haven’t seen anything on Matt Cutt’s blog yet.

I’ll be interested to see if people are still facing this issue, so please be kind to leave a comment if you do.

SEO: why you need to keep up with the news everyday

I’ve been away for more than a week, while preparing my return to France and taking care of a few things back here. Therefore, I wasn’t able to keep up with what was going on in the SEO world on a daily basis. It took me a few days to catch up with all the posts on SEO blogs, forums and other SEO related resources.

While participating in forums threads recently, I realized that if you’re away for a while, even a day or 2, and aren’t able to keep up with SEO readings, you can really be lost… For example if you weren’t aware of the supplemental results issue in Google, which was mentioned a few times in forums, it will be hard to understand what’s happening and also, let your client know about this issue. I faced this problem and had no idea of what was going on before seeing that others were having the same issue with their sites.

The solution when you’re travelling and don’t have access to a computer: get a good mobile to surf and also the right contract…

Thank you Search Engine Roundtable

I’m finally back in France, the flight was a bit long from San Diego to Paris and I was surprised to see snow here. Anyway, I’m glad to be back and be able to see my family and friends again. I will stay a few weeks in France and then I will start a new career in the UK with whichever SEM company that would best suit my needs.

Because I wasn’t able to go to the SES in New York, I was following the news at SERoundtable everyday, as they decided to cover the events as much as they could.

I think this is the first time that we are able to get as much information from a SES conference without being there. I’d like to thank everyone over at SEroundtable for their efforts, especially Barry Schwartz (Rusybrick).

To illustrate how precious the information they provided were, you can read their last entry called Meet the Crawlers, where the audience was able to ask various questions regarding indexing and crawling to “Matt Cutts from Google, Kashual Kurapati from Ask Jeeves, a representative from Yahoo! (Tim Mayer was not present) and Ramez Naam from MSN Search.”

A good “new” blogs list

Todd, over at Stuntdubl has published a good list of his favorite “newer” blogs. I recognized a lot of sites on his list but he also included sites that I’ve never heard about before but that seem very interesting. A good example is Fiftyfoureleven, a beautiful web dev resources site and blog. The author seems very knowledgeable and his posts are quite unique. Another good blog is Rogerd’s notebook, who is one of WebMasterWorld’s administrators, his last post about copywriting and marketing is very interesting.

Thanks Todd for sharing this personal list with us!

Alibaba: the perfect SEO’d ecommerce site, to speak at SES Nanjing, China

According to this article from AuctionBytes, Alibaba, the famous chinese trading site, will be present at the next SES event in Nanjing, China. Jack Ma, who is CEO of Alibaba but also Yahoo! China, is known for being one of the most revered entrepreneurs in China, and certainly seen as one of the best Internet marketers in this country.

I’m sure Jack Ma is going to give great advice and share his experience with the SEO that has been applied for alibaba.com.

If you ever looked to buy products online or just to find information, you probably happened to find a page from alibaba.com in the SERPS of Google, Yahoo, or MSN. I personally did.

The reason behind that is that their site is just well optimized, and their thousands of pages are all search engine friendly. I’ve noticed the SEO efforts implemented into this site the first time I saw it.

For example, if you look at the homepage, you’ll first notice how usable and clean the site is. The main products categories links are displayed on the main section of the page. The featured products section is also a nice way to link to inner pages: they use relevant anchor texts and optimized title tags (short and focused on their keywords only).

The Resources box on the right is also a great way to add “fresh content” to the home page and also link to relevant information for their visitors.
If you navigate through their product pages, you can aslo notice the use of header tags (check out the source code, they use H2 tags) for products names (for example for the product “Sell Blood Easy Pass”), but also title attributes for people who use screen readers (something that their main competitor Ebay doesn’t do yet).

If you click on a product, it will open a new window, with again, a very nice title tag, short and keyword targeted.

You can also note the use of clean urls, without any dynamic variables.

I hope Jack Ma is going to give people more information about their own experience with Search Engine Optimization over at SES Nanjing. If you have the chance to hear him, please try to share your experience with with me.