Ranking in Google News

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: either [...]

What the Yahoo/Bing Merger Means for SEO

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 [...]

The Buyersphere & Your Social Media Strategy

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 benefits [...]

Twitter Tricks of the Trade

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 people to follow, [...]

How To Do Good on the Internet

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 – [...]

Geosocial Networking: The Newest Dimension of Social Media

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 reality [...]

Crowdsourcing the Creation of Content

CBC Radio 3 hosted a session at Northern Voice called “Wikifying the CBC: Social Software at CBC Radio 3”. The session took a look at the new Canadian Music Wiki which is expected to launch this Friday. The wiki allows the Canadian public to contribute to an online music database of information about Canadian music. The project is best defined as a user-generated, participatory online resource on Canadian music.
People tend to be very enthusiastic about the subject of music. CBC Radio 3 is fortunate as they have a substantial base of online users currently using their web properties. The wiki [...]

The ABC’s of Blogging

Tris Hussey lead a session at Northern Voice called “The ABCs of Blogging”. He is the author of Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Blogging Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro and Using WordPress. Here are some of the highlights of his session:
-          People get tied up with technology when they get into blogging. Remember: it’s writing.
-          A good blog post is about the story: whether this is a personal or for business, it doesn’t matter.
-          Sometimes voice is the issue; you may be using a personal or academic voice in your writing when a different voice is more appropriate for your [...]

Upcoming Social Media Conference

Northern Voice 2010 is getting underway in Vancouver, BC this weekend. It’s a conference put on by the local tech community focusing on social media and blogging. There’s a wide range of topics, from Wikifying the CBC: Social software at CBC Radio 3 (crowdsourcing the creation of content) to Finding Your Online Voice (defining you and your brand online). Tickets are sold out if you are interested in attending, though I did see a few floating around on Twitter in the last few days.
If you are interested in getting an idea of what the conference is about, a number of [...]

Models of Information Seeking: The Standard Model vs. The Tetris Model

The standard model of information seeking, developed through observation, is one that outlines the basic actions involved in finding information. Variations of the standard information seeking model has been developed through work by Salton and Ennis, Shneiderman, and Broder, among others. The most developed model from Marchionini and White describes the information seeking process as:

Recognizing a need for information
Accepting the challenge to take action to fulfill the need
Formulating the problem
Expressing the information need in a search system
Examination of the results
Reformulation of the problem and its expression, and
Use of the results

(Marchionini and White in [...]