Network analysis is defined, simply, as the analysis of the relationships between objects. It’s a field based on both graph theory (a branch of mathematics) and sociology. The final output of network analysis is a network graph, which visually maps the relationships that exist between objects. These relationships can then be expressed mathematically based on an object’s position on the graph and the number of relationships they have. Read the full story on our new blog…
Last year’s Yahoo!/Bing merger increased the importance of optimizing for Bing, since the engine now accounts for additional market share. But optimizing for Bing has been a bit hard to do, partially because of limited functionality within the Bing Webmaster Tools interface. Bing Webmaster Tools got a facelift in the middle of last year that left it with minimal functionality. However, a few recent changes show there’s been some nice development with the tool. Bing has been particularly bad at handling duplicate content. Bing didn’t have the same parameter handling capabilities that you can find in Google Webmaster Tools, but [...]
The Bing Search Summit was held yesterday in San Fransisco, and Bing announced a significant list of new features. Much of Bing’s strategy builds on the same principles as those presented during their 2009 Search Summit. In this post we’ll review the highlights of last year’s Bing Search Summit and take a look at the new features introduced this year. The keynote for the 2009 Bing Search Summit was Satya Nadella, SVP of Microsoft’s Online Services Division. At the time, Bing demonstrated its current state of search through the following graph, highlighting the problems people were having with Bing search [...]
We’ve been keeping an eye on the impacts of Google Instant for our SEO clients, monitoring both the changes in the length of keyword queries driving traffic to sites and the change in the number of impressions in the Google search engine. We recently ran an analysis for one of our clients of the length of keyword query (whether it is one-word queries such as “dog” or two-word queries such as “dog catcher”, etc.) for the two weeks leading up to Google Instant compared to the two weeks prior. For this particular client, three-word search queries are the main driver [...]
If you are a publisher looking to get your content surfaced in the search results page, you may want to consider using Google News. Unlike web results, which use the number of incoming links (among other factors) to judge the value of a website, news articles are more recent and haven’t had the same amount of time to generate incoming links. Therefore, optimizing for Google News is a bit different that traditional web SEO. There’s a three stage process in ranking in Google News. First, Google must crawl your news articles. There are two ways Googlebot can find your article: [...]
Yahoo! and Bing announced their intentions to merge in mid-2009 and that transition is starting to come to fruition. As of June, comScore reported that 64% of searches occur on Google, 18% on Yahoo! and 12% on Bing. Assuming no one migrates from Yahoo! to Google after the transition, Bing will be powering 30% of all search results in the U.S. Yahoo! confirmed last week that they are starting to conduct systems integration testing with Bing, though if recent ranking results from Yahoo! are any indication, there has been algorithm testing taking place for the past couple of months. Systems [...]
Tackling the field of social media can be daunting. Many clients have been asking us: “Do I need to be on Facebook? Do I need to be on Twitter?”. This isn’t the first question your business needs to ask – it’s actually the last one. You need to know who you want to reach before you can know where to reach them. There’s a number of different methods you can use when developing your social media strategy. One that we’re fond of at Enquiro is Forrester Research’s POST method. POST stands for People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology. One of the [...]
Twitter’s API allows for external web services to use the platform. This has led to a host of applications that help make managing your Twitter account easier – whether it be for business or personal. Here’s a few worth looking into: Twitterfeed – Twitterfeed integrates with your blog so that every time you publish a new blog post, your Twitter feed is updated automatically. Tweetmeme – For finding new memes and top tweets on Twitter. Sort options include subject, media types (news, images or video), and period of time. We Follow – A director of Twitter users if you are looking to find [...]
One of Enquiro’s core values is to make the world better by contributing to the community. This topic was delved into at Northern Voice by Darren Barefoot, who led a great session on how we can do good deeds online (he also took a little time to bash Luongo). Good deeds don’t necessitate spending money. They can be as simple as retweeting a valuable post or liking something on Facebook – just spreading the message can help to advance social causes. Here are six websites Darren highlighted that are creatively allowing for people to contribute to social issues: - Procrasdonate [...]
Social location sharing is about to hit the mainstream. Services such as Foursquare and Gowalla have been in increasing use by social media hardcores for the last year or so, but haven’t really taken off to a large degree. Foursquare itself only recently hit the one million user mark. But with Facebook announcing that it will be launching new location-based features (known as “Foursquare Killers”) imminently, social location sharing is going to be put front and centre in front of a much broader audience. Social location sharing is not the only location-based tool gaining attention. MyTown and other location-based, augmented [...]