The Optimizer - Weekly SEO News

Another new kid on the Search block is strutting his stuff, and he goes by the name Hakia. Hakia, with results and sponsors powered by Ask.com, integrates an interesting new feature into the end-user experience: Community. Say, doesn't that look familiar?



After searching a question, phrase or keyword, the user's results appear along with a linked icon reading, "Meet Others Who Asked The Same Query." Clicking this icon after a search currently invites the user to start or participate in a forum topic regarding the query, allowing users to create communities based around popular topics.

Does this make Hakia's search results inherently better? Not any better than Ask.com's. What it does do, both for the showrunners at Hakia and for webmasters, is use community (the C word rises again!) to create loyalty both to the products under discussion and to the search engine which hosts the discussion.

Will it pay off for Hakia? I'd put my money on yes. Will it benefit the user? I'm giving good odds on that, too, but time alone will tell. Stay tuned.

Labels: community, hakia, search, search engine

coComment, a leading provider of online conversation management solutions, announced the launch of two Facebook applications for owners and users of web sites and blogs. The applications will allow Facebook users to share comments and conversations, drawing from the Facebook networks to drive traffic to the source material.

"We think this will be a tremendously popular service for Facebook
users, as well as bloggers or site owners who want to share what they are
saying, or what is being said on their site," stated Matt Colebourne, coComment CEO. "People who spend a lot of time on Facebook and a lot of time commenting on blogs and sites will especially love this -- it's a great way to share your thoughts and bring friends and groups into the topics and conversations that interest you -- while adding a level of
personalization to your home page -- through your views and opinions,
whenever you make a comment anywhere on the Web."

coComment plugins for WordPress, Movable Type, LifeType, Drupal and other blogging platforms are already available at the company's web site, http://www.cocomment.com.

Labels: blogging, cocomment, community, facebook

Social media sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Youtube can be very lucrative for SEO efforts. From link building to increasing online traffic to branding, social media sites are getting more and more popular amongst all age groups.

One way to drive traffic from social sites is to show off your blog.

Here's how to add your blog to your Facebook profile:

1. Register and login to facebook.com

2. In the top-left corner, click "Edit" (next to Applications)

3. At the top-right click "Browse More Applications"

4. At the top-right type "blog" or "blogs"into the search box to the right of Application Directory and press enter.

5. Now just choose an application that will post your blog or RSS feed to your Facebook profile and click "Add Application" on the top right of the application's profile.

Note: If Facebook does not recognize your blog or the articles don't link correctly, then try signing up for an account on Feedburner.com to "burn" your feed. Then paste the new burned feed ( http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName ) into the applications settings.

Labels: community, facebook, seo tips

It's a maxim as old as the art: "Content is King." Well, brace yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, because there's been a shakeup in the Kingdom. Let's talk about the deposed ruler for a moment.

Content has been royalty from the first days of SEO, when the sum total of the science was fitting the right keywords to your page and hoping for the best. The end user could pretty much fend for him- or herself, take what the engines put at the top and be happy with it or keep scrolling.

Over time, we learned the hard way what advertising and marketing geniuses had known for decades: it isn't the fisherman with the quickest wrist that gets the bites, it's the one with the best bait. Getting your link to the top of the hits is great, but unless your visitor sees something there he likes, and plenty of it, that click doesn't mean much.

So we got the message... and got it, and got it some more. Right? Well, here it is again: a recent study by OPA and Nielsen/NetRatings shows that content-based sites still draw the most attention:

• Content - 49.6%
• Communications - 32%
• Commerce - 13.8%
• Search - 4.5%

The numbers seem to reinforce Content's claim to the throne, but let's not go back to bowing down just yet, because those numbers don't tell the whole story. While the increased power and presence of blogs and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook has driven the growth of online readership, online commerce has actually decreased 2% from a year ago.

And let's consider that while reading content -- well, good content, at least -- is time consuming, the goal of online marketers is to do all they can to decrease the distance between Point A - the page hit - and Point B - the sale. Compare the average social networking site user profile, between two and four minutes of reading, to the average few seconds worth of reading time for a product blurb on an ecommerce site.

So if Content has lost its grip on the ecommerce throne, let's look at Community for a moment. Many vendors have wisely adopted the strategies of building fan communities, forums and blogs. By creating an environment where consumers can interact with the company and fellow consumers of that company on a more personal level, ecommerce providers can build brand recognition and customer loyalty, a combination that thoroughly unseats Content as King and leaves Community at the top of the heap.

Labels: community