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Is Ask is going for Web 2.0 Search and Getification

Filed Under: Search Engines

Looking at the new Ask.com commercial, and comparing it to the other search engine you can see some interesting developments:


First, is this the new way you as a searcher want to get results?

You definitely get more and different results from one search as before you needed to run several searches.

But then again looking at the other major search engines, they also provide you with more information than just text.
It all depends on what you are looking for…

So here are some results of one of my favorite singers, but you already knew that..

The Ask.com results page to start the comparison:

The search results page by Ask.com

So was Ask.com comparing with Google in their commercial?

Google results page for Anastacia

Or was it Yahoo?

Yahoo results page for the Anastacia search

Or was it Live.com they wanted to compare with?

Live search results page for Anastacia

As you can see, most of the search engines are already showing you more then just text, but it all depends on what you are searching for.

If you do a search on Ask for Joomla search engine optimization, you get just a result page as the other engines.

Ask results for Joomla search engine optimzation

How is Ask going to win the battle

They are working hard on better Commercials, the old ones really didn't do that well…

But most important is if the results are more relevant than before, and I must say they have made great progress in this field:
Joomla SEO search in Ask.com
Joomla SEO search in Google.com
Joomla SEO search in Live.com
Joomla SEO search in Yahoo.com

Looking at the September results of the Marketingcharts it looks that Ask is already chipping away on Live.com
Also Hitwise reports growing figures for Ask.com.

It would be nice to see next month if this growth path is going to continue with the new commercials.

Now if the would just bring the new interface to other country's….
Dutch Ask.com homepage or USA Ask.com homepage

O, and do try a search on those country specific pages, so you can see there is also a layout difference in the results.
So for us Dutchies Ask is still not giving an Instant Getification! 

Next time: How are the changes in the results pages going to change SEO, so make sure to get your RSS feed or email updates

Focus for Search Engine Results

Filed Under: SEO

If you are building a blog or a website, you need to focus on the topic of your online adventures.

Why? because search engines love websites and blogs that have only one or two topics, if there are more than two, they need to be related to the main subject.
The relevance of the site that is focused on just one topic is much easier to classify for them.
If you have pages or blog entries and categories that are “all over the place” you will have a hard time trying to get into top search results.

If however you are building a site that is highly focused on just one topic, it becomes a lot easier…

If you read How search engine help finding keywords then you have noticed that the keywords suggested are allmost always “on topic”.

How to Build a Theme based site

A theme based website means that you can have several “silos” where you can put the content.

Lets take the example of the Music site again.
If you are trying to build a website that is about music in general, you will find your self in a challenging competition with a large number of websites:
From Ask.com  Showing 1 -10 of 548,040,000
From Google.com Results 1 – 10 of about 1,110,000,000 for music
From Yahoo 1-10 of 2,660,000,000 formusic

So get realistic and focus on a more specifick group to target (find your “niche”) and bring them relevant information.
A website with just information about Anastacia is not going to do it as well, as Anastacia herself can do that a lot better and most probaly a Big fan will have something similar.

But if you want to build a site about female  singer-songwriters, now that could be a lot easier.
Doing the search on google for the term “female singer-songwriters” give you about 503.000 results.

But how many people will be searching on that term? I guess its not going to bring you masses of visitors to your site…

So how can this term help you?
It's not that difficult, you just have to use your imagination.
Check the results that came up like the one from Amazon “best female singer-songwriters”

On that page you will find a nice selection of artists like:

  • Jewel
  • Fiona Apple
  • Alanis Morissette
  • Sinead O'Connor
  • and more

    • And looking at other related singers on the term Anastacia like Pink, Gloria Estafan, Beyonce, Shakira, Joss Stone and Natasha Bedingsfield.

    So if you would build a website with information on those realted artists, you are more likely to score on the individual keywords from those female singers.
    Because they are all related and the search engines will look for information that has a relation to the topic of your site.

    So you could build a site with silos like Biographys, Lyrics, Music CD's and Music Videos.

    A more simple example

    Lets say you want to build a website about Joomla, what might be the related keywords?

    • Joomla CMS
    • Joomla Templates
    • Joomla Components
    • Joomla Modules
    • Joomla Plugins
    • Joomla Books… the list goes on…

    Next is to find the search volume for each item so you would know where to focus first if your start building the site.
    But you already know how to do that…

    Does building a themebased website work? Yes!
    How do I now?
    I just recently started building a Dutch website and I had only the Theme based structure setup, so there was no content yet on the pages…
    But the site is already ranking in the first 10 results of about 1.860.000 hits with a two word search term I was targetting. 
    And again, there was no content on the pages, just the Themebased menu structure!