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Archive for February, 2007
A woman switches on a tiny wireless chip that has been surgically implanted behind her ear, which then synchs up with the Web wherever she is in the world. The simple thought of logging on to the Internet triggers the system to turn on and connect to the Web. She could be on a bus or at the beach and from all outward appearances she’s just staring off into space. But she sees a three dimensional artificial world before her that she can manipulate any way she chooses by mere thought alone.
By looking at the trends of today we can begin to develop a image of what the Web of the future will look like. I believe the Web will improve and grow in a way that will dwarf its present existence and will improve and enrich everyone’s lives way beyond what we can imagine today. The Net will become as integrated into everyone’s everyday lives as much as, and even more so, than the television or telephone (in developed nations first, then everywhere). Television, communications and the Internet will merge.
The Web will become increasingly realistic, interactive, and three dimensional. Two dimensional displays will evolve into three dimensional displays. And the Web will probably incorporate more than just the two senses of seeing and hearing. It will first be incorporated into all other electronics found in household appliances, copy machines, automobiles, and anything else with a microchip. Then it will be integrated directly into our brains.
I also envisage this new Web creating an unimaginably sophisticated data sphere that surrounds and envelops the world like a warm electronic blanket, connecting everyone and everything. And it may some day become an autonomous and sentient entity in its own right that we may even come to depend on for life itself.
When a person switches on his wireless Web chip and connects with the Net, he’ll be looking at and interacting with the Web of the future. He’ll manipulate objects, cl?ck on links, download information, and communicate with anyone by simply thinking it. In fact, when he navigates to a grocery store to b??y food, for instance, he’ll be able to “pick them up”, “feel them” and even “smell” the food he wants to b??y just by thinking the appropriate thoughts.
In the future, Web-based software agents will constantly build dynamic lists and instructions to help people in personal and professional activities. These software agents are subroutines, or small programs, which may be part of a responsive ‘Internet Operating System’ that serves humanity, or possibly even destroy it. Programs may become responsible for doing some of the basic thinking that we get stuck routinely doing today. Additionally, it may be responsible for storing a percentage of our memories as well.
The Web has already become something we rely on for memory, and that reliance will only grow. We’d rather look something up on Google two or three times instead of trying to remember it initially. And eventually, we’ll come to rely on the Web for memories and immediate information so that it will seem like we are missing a part of our own brain when not “jacked in” to the Net, to borrow a phrase from science fiction writer William Gibson. The Net will be such a part of our existence that we may even feel profound separation and isolation when not connected.
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Maybe you own your own business, or perhaps you’re a critical cog in the corporate machinery responsible for marketing your company, brand, product or service. If that describes you, here’s eighteen things you need to know about Web-marketing but were afraid to believe. 1. Time To Be Heard
Your mother told you ‘children should be seen and not heard,’ but you’re not a kid anymore. So why are you listening to all those guys telling you not to use audio on your website. If you want to deliver a lot of content that people will remember, try letting your website do the talking.
2. There’s Nothing Like the Real Thing
In a world of virtual everything there’s nothing like the real thing. The sound and image of real people delivering your marketing message makes it a believable, memorable presentation.
3. Unlock the Conventional Wisdom Straightjacket
Driving traff?c to your site is great, if those visitors stay long enough to find out why they should be doing business with you. If your website traff?c is leaving as fast as it’s arriving, maybe search engine optimization isn’t the answer you’ve been looking for.
4. Linking Your Way To Obscurity
You know the reciprocal linking strategy everyone is talking about as a way to generate leads? Did you ever consider that each link to another website is an invitation to leave your site? Is that really what you want – to invite people to leave? I think not!
5. Your Company’s Voice Is It’s Personality
Give your company a professional voice, with a finely crafted scr?pt delivered by a professional voice-over announcer that presents a compelling, memorable marketing message and a unique brand personality. Or do it yourself and sound like an amateur. The choice is yours.
6. Addressing Ass-backwards Priorities
If your website design firm is twisting your marketing message out of shape to conform to the technical ‘technique du jour’ that only looks good in one popular browser, then you hired the wrong guys. It’s not about technology; it’s about communication.
7. Text-Ads Are Dead. Long Live Web-Video
Squeezing your marketing message into a pay-per-click text-ad is like trying to attract leads using one of those newspaper real estate ads where every word needs to be decoded. Start communicating with a Web-video that tells a story – your story.
8. Nobody Ever Bored Anybody Into Buying
The vast majority of website text is boring, unimaginative and self-promoting. If you don’t present a compelling focused story then you are just wasting peoples’ time. Seduce your audience with an informative, entertaining, and memorable presentation created by marketing professionals.
9. Too Much of Good Thing, Isn’t So Good
You were worried about load times and search engine optimization so you dumped most of your images and multimedia and proceeded to put enough text on your site that would take a month to study; but have you considered whether anybody is ever going to actually read that stuff? And that’s assuming people could ever find what they were looking for in the first place.
10. Stop Hiding Behind Your Email Address
You’ve got a killer website. It tells visitors everything. All they have to do is place an order. But wait ??¦ somebody has a question. So they go to your contact page and find an email address. No contact name. No address and no telephone number. You’ve provided a Q&A, an FAQ, and a l?st of technical specs. What more do they want? Well, what they want is to talk to somebody to make sure you’re legit and if they have a problem that you’ll stand behind what you’re selling. Silly them.
11. Do You Suffer From Redundant Redux Reflux?
Search engines love content. They index all your text, searching for keywords and phrases. So what do you do? You repeat and repeat stuff, over and over to make sure the search engines understand what you’re all about. To bad all your Web-visitors get indigestion from reading your redundant copy and leave because they forgot why they were there.
12. Inform. Enlighten. Persuade.
Knowledge is today’s high-value commodity. If you have a set of skills that people want to acquire, then you’ve got something to sell: something to build a business around. But if you don’t know how to present that knowledge to an audience, then your skills are unmarketable. If you want to get paid for what you know, you better find out how to deliver your content.
13. It’s Not About Numbers; It’s About Quality
It’s not the number of hits you get on your website, it’s how long visitors stay on your site and how much information they retain after they leave that counts. It’s about the quality of traff?c not the quantity. And the best way to create quality traff?c is to provide easy to find, easy to understand, easy to remember content.
14. Don’t Play Constant S.E.O. Catch-up
Every time an S.E.O. whiz kid comes up with a trick to beat the search engine algorithms, the experts at the search engines change their criteria. This means you’re constantly playing S.E.O. catch-up. Good for the whiz kid, not so good for you. And have you ever wondered how all those search engine optimizers can guarant?«e you, and everybody else they are selling, top billing – kind of hard to believe isn’t it?
15. Show Me What To Do
Anybody who has ever spent the night before Christmas trying to decipher the arcane instructions provided by the manufacturer of the bicycle you bought your kid, or the bizarre graphics included with the do-it-yourself kitchen you bought from ‘you know who’, knows that there is nothing like a good video to explain how Part A actually does fit into Part B.
16. Even Cows Have Brands
If you’ve got a business, you’ve got a brand. We’re not just talking about a logo. We’re talking about every thing you do: your website, your print collaterals, everything, including how you answer the telephone. You do answer the telephone don’t you? If your website design firm doesn’t get it, if they aren’t creating a brand personality, what are they doing?
17. Lost In Space
Ever go to one of those websites that’s impossible to navigate. Maybe the navigation system doesn’t work in your favorite browser, or maybe the navigation system is so confusing visitors get lost in cyber-content-hell. Information architecture, how people find the content they are looking for, is critical to creating a satisfying user experience.
18. You Can Have It Both Ways
Remember when your mother told you, you couldn’t have dessert if you didn’t finish your broccoli? Sounds like those know-it-all search engine gurus telling you that you can’t have multimedia on your site. Well you’re a big boy now, and if you want that multimedia hot fudge sundae you can have it. And you can also have all the good-for-you search engine friendly copy too. Who said you couldn’t have it both ways?
Internet marketing involves more than getting traffic to your site. Sometimes the smallest things can have the biggest impact. The following five actions you can take to improve your Internet marketing and Web site are simple and often over looked when creating or marketing a site.
1) Create a unique 404 error page.
What is a 404 error page? It’s the page you see when someone clicks on a broken link or a page that has been renamed. When that happens the site visitor will see a standard page that simply tells you the page is no longer available. It has no thrills, no other links, no branding and above all, very little helpful information.
The page usually starts off with these words:
The page cannot be found.
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
Your unique 404 error page should look like a regular page of your site. It should include your site’s header, footer and navigation bar so that the site visitor can easily click on another area of your site. The content of this unique 404 error page should contain text explaining that the page selected is no longer available along with contact information so the site visitor has the option of emailing or calling your company.
2) We value your privacy.
This simple four word sentence can have a tremendous effect on your email or form conversion ratios. Be sure to have the sentence, or at least the word “privacy” linked to your privacy statement.
Use this sentence next to any email form on your site or on your contact page. Clearly and simply stating your privacy policy assures the site visitor that you will not sell, give or trade their email or personal information to a third party.
While a privacy page is standard practice for most professional site builders, lawyers usually have their hand in writing a company’s privacy policy. That results in having the privacy policy looking like a long legal document.
Using the simple sentence with a link to the privacy policy gives the site visitor assurance that you care about their privacy without having a long explanation.
3) We vs You.
Re-read your home page copy and make sure it is customer focused text. Customer focused text is text that focuses on the customer and not YOU. When you re-read your home page content see how often you use the term “we, us, or our” rather than “You”. If your text reads something like: “We offer bla, bla, bla,” or “Our services includes, bla, bla, bla,” then it is focusing on you rather than the customer.
4) Email Signatures.
Create standard email signatures for ALL your employees. Anyone that uses the Internet in your company should have a company standard email signature.
What’s an email signature? Did you ever notice that at the end of some emails you will see not only the email creator’s name, but their phone number, fax, number, company name, logo, Web site address, etc. It’s amazing how easy this is to do and how many companies simply over look it. Or they let everyone do their own thing.
Having the company’s contact and Web site information makes it easy for the recipient to contact you or visit your site. Making it standard email signature improves your overall branding strategy.
5) Call to Action.
A call to action is a statement that asks the site visitor to do something. Two of the biggest mistakes made on a Website is not using call to actions or using the wrong call to actions.
You have probably been on sites that do not give you a clue as to what to do next. They have text and links but nothing that tells you to learn more, buy, compare, read, or call now. Look over your site and see what call to actions are on your site. Try to view it as a first time visitor and create a scenario or action you want your site visitor to take.
The most common and most boring call to action is “Click Here”. Sometimes it’s unavoidable or it’s the only phrase that makes sense, but consider using other statements. Instead of “Click here” use words like learn, save, read, compare, etc.
Call to actions are usually linked to another page on your site. This is a great opportunity to use a keyword in a link on your site, which helps with search engine optimization. Use the keyword in the link for your call to action.
These five suggestion are basically simple things to do that can help improve your site overall. They are often over looked but can prove to have a tremendous effect on your site.
For one of our client’s Web sites we suggested item number 2, adding “We value your privacy” just above their email form. The sentence was linked to their privacy policy. The link was hardly used, but having that simple statement was all that was needed. The added statement increased their form’s conversion ratio by over 250%.
This article aims to provide readers with an overview of the very basics of information retrieval. Understanding these principles can help you to optimise your website content for the search engines and also help you to analyse search engine algorithm changes. However, the details in this article are not intended to describe how modern search engines work, as they use many additional factors, including link analysis.
Information retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for documents / within documents. Information retrieval techniques form some of the most fundamental elements of web search engine technology. This article will discuss information retrieval in the context of search engines.
Indexes
It is unrealistic to remotely access documents in real-time when performing a search, as it would be exceptionally slow and unreliable. Therefore a local index is created, which for search engines is done by a crawler (aka spider). Thus, when you perform a search you are not actually searching the web, but are searching a version of the web as seen and stored by the crawler at some point in the past.
The index would not usually contain the whole document (this may, however, be stored in a separate document cache), but stores a representation of the terms relevant to the document that is quickly and easily searchable. There are various stages to this process (not all systems will include all of these stages):
1. Document
This is the document in its raw format with all text, structure and formatting.
2. Structure Analysis
Recognising headings, paragraphs, titles, bold text, lists, …, etc.
3. Lexical Analysis
Converting the characters in the document into a list of words. This process may include analysing digits, hyphens, punctuation and the case of letters. Proper Noun Analysis can use the case and format of words/phrases to identify important information such as names, places, dates and organisations.
4. Stopwords Removal
The removal of words which occur very often and provide no ability to discriminate between documents. For example: “the”, “it”, “is”. However, it can be seen that some search engines leave these words in the index and remove them at the user query level. This allows “+word” queries to be performed.
5. Stemming
This is a conflation procedure which reduces variations of a word into a single root. For example, both “worked” and “working” may be reduced to “work”. The Porter Stemming Algorithm can be used to perform stemming.
After these processes have been performed we have a list of index terms for this particular document.
Index Term Weighting
We now need to calculate to what degree a term is relevant to a particular document. The following is an example of a weighting scheme:
* Index Term Frequency
This is the frequency of a term inside a document. The frequency is usually normalised within the particular document:
TermFrequency(term, document) = (no. occurrences of term in document) / (no. occurrence of term with max occurrences in document)
* Inverse Document Frequency
The inverse of the frequency of a term between all the documents in the set. Terms that appear in many documents are not very useful as they do not allow us to discriminate between documents.
IDF(term) = log([no. documents in collection] / [no. documents in collection containing term])
* Weight
This is the actual index term weight for a particular term in a particular document:
Weight(term, document) = TermFrequency(term, document) * IDF(term)
Other items may be a factor in deciding weight, such as: the terms position in the document, whether it was in the title, whether it was bold, whether it was in a list, …, etc.
Reverse Index
We now have a list of terms (with their weights) for a given document. However, a list of documents that contain a particular word would be much more useful, rather than a list of words for a particular document. This is called a reverse index.
For example, if we had the following three documents:
1. This is a file about website search engine optimisation
2. A website design tutorial file
3. A file about bespoke software design and development
Then the index terms for each document may be as follows (weights would be in parentheses):
1. file(?), website(?), search(?), engine(?), optimisation(?)
2. website(?), design(?), tutorial(?), file(?)
3. file(?), bespoke(?), software(?), design(?), development(?)
However, the reverse index would be:
file: document1(?), document2(?), docuement3(?)
website: document1(?), document2(?)
search: document1(?)
engine: document1(?)
optimisation: document1(?)
design: document2(?), document3(?)
tutorial: document2(?)
bespoke: document3(?)
software: document3(?)
development: document3(?)
The reverse index then allows us to easily find the relevant documents for a particular word.
Similarity Matching
This is the process for computing the relevance of a document to a particular query. It can comprise:
* Query Term Weighting
Applies weights to each term in a query. For example, terms at the beginning of a query may be weighted more heavily.
* Similarity Coefficient
Uses the query term weights and document term weights to compute the similarity between a query and a document. The similarity could be calculated using the vector space model and calculating the cosine coefficient (this will not be discussed here).
Refreshing the Index
Documents can continually change, therefore the index needs to be continually refreshed. The crawler needs to decide how often to reindex particular documents, based on how often they are updated. If a document is not updated very often, then reindexing it very often would be a waste of resources. However, documents that are always changing need to be continually reindexed as they may no longer be relevant to terms they are currently indexed for.
Measuring Accuracy of IR Systems
Two of the simplest ways to assess the accuracy of a basic information retrieval system are Precision and Recall. These are calculated using the number of relevant documents and the number of retrieved documents (the documents perceived to be relevant by the system), the documents actually returned to the user are where these two sets of document overlap.
* Precision
Ratio of no. relevant documents returned to the total number of documents retrieved – i.e. the number of documents returned that are relevant.
* Recall
Ratio of no. relevant documents returned to the total number of relevant documents – i.e. the number of relevant documents that are returned.
The documents actually returned from the retrieved documents set will be decided using some form of ranking mechanism (discussion of this is beyond the scope of this article).
Generally, there is a compromise between precision and recall, as increasing the number of documents retrieved is likely to also increase the number of irrelevant documents in the set of retrieved documents.
Web Search Engines
Web search engines (such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN) usually combine information retrieval techniques with link structure analysis, as well as many other unknown techniques. Obviously, the above techniques are very easily spammed, so any useful search engine would need to try to filter out spamming where possible.
How you might be affected by Google’s plans for the next weeks:
It is likely that you will see more variance in your Google rankings because Google’s internal databases are going to be updated every 1-2 days instead of every 3-4 weeks.
Google usually reveals PageRank updates quarterly to the public. A new PageRank update is underway. However, this does not mean that your Google rankings will change because the new PageRank values are already incorporated into their ranking algorithms.
Google’s supplemental results should be nothing to be afraid of. If your site shows up in the supplemental results, then don’t worry. According to Matt Cutts, the PageRank of a web page determines if the page appears in the regular or supplemental results.
The supplemental results continue to get fresher, “and website owners may see more traffic from their supplemental results pages.”
Google plans to change the “filetype:” operator so that it doesn’t require an additional query word.
Google discovered a small anomaly with .com domains that are hosted outside the US. A fix has been submitted so the rankings of the affected sites might change.
There will be no “major infrastructure-related” ranking updates in the near future.
What you can do to get high rankings in the new Google
Matt Cutts makes it clear: “The approach I??™d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).”
That’s why our award-winning web promotion tools focus on white hat SEO methods. Using ethical search optimization methods requires some work but the results last much longer.
Search engines continually change the way they rank web sites. If you use shady tricks and techniques that exploit current flaws in search engine algorithms then you won’t get lasting results.
You have to create web pages that are interesting to human web surfers. These are the web pages that search engines want to display in their results.
Don’t use the wrong tools and risk getting banned by Google – use IBP and ARELIS. IBP and ARELIS are continually updated, they are always up-to-date and they help you to create web pages that are interesting to human web surfers and search engines.
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