Welcome to Natural Search Blog
Natural Search Blog provides articles on search engine optimization including keyword reasearch, on-page factors, link-building, social media optimization, local search optimization, image search optimization, and mobile SEO.
In addition to natural search optimization topics, we also cover internet marketing, ecommerce, web design, usability, and technology.
Recent Entries
Google Pushes Reading Lists of Politicians & Pundits
Google announced today that they’re introducing reading lists from major politicians like Barack Obama and John McClain along with reading lists from political commentators like Ariana Huffington and Mark Halperin. Google promoted the new service today on their homepage by touting the ability to read what Obama and McCain are reading, with a link line just below the search form:
The Google Reader blog states that you’ll now be able to “read what they read” and here their commentary as they share and discuss news. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/18/2008
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Filed under: Blog Optimization, Google blogging, Google Reader, politics, rss readers
Web 2.0 Conference: SEO 101 Workshop
I’ll be delivering a brief course on the basics of SEO at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in New York, September 16th. The Web 2.0 Expo is co-produced by TechWeb and O’Reilly Media.
My course on “SEO 101” is a not-to-be missed session for any search marketer who wishes to learn the basics of “organic” or “natural” search engine optimization (a.k.a. “SEO”). While basic SEO principles are really very simple to incorporate in web site design, most companies fail to exploit them when building out their web pages and internet applications — losing out on traffic and marketshare. Adjusting a site to include just a few of the basics can increase traffic and associated sales significantly.
I’ll be speaking along with the legendary Neil Patel, who is renowned as a social media marketing guru. Neil will be covering the basics of social media optimization, or “SMO”.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/07/2008
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Filed under: Conferences, Search Engine Optimization, Seminars, SEO, Social Media Optimization Search Engine Optimization, SEO 101, SEO basics, SMO 101, Social Media Optimization
Text In Street View Could Be Used For Quality Improvement
Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped observes that Google could potentially use OCR (optical character recognition) to attempt to derive text from signage and such within Google Street View images in order to create further enhancements.
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Street View, Los Angeles.
However, I see a much more immediately valuable use that could be put to text scanned from the images — quality improvement of address pinpointing functionality. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/05/2008
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Filed under: Google, Maps, Research and Development Google Street View, Google-Maps, Mapping
Great Material For In-House SEOs
I’ll be giving a presentation at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies “SES” San Jose conference on “How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively With Your IT Department to Get Stuff Done“.
Search Engine Strategies Conference
This promises to be a great session, and I have some cool tips to impart on how to effectively communicate with one’s technology department staff in order to break down barriers, cut through red tape, and get changes deployed to bang up site traffic. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/05/2008
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Filed under: Conferences, General, Marketing, Seminars Conferences, Googledance, search-engine-strategies, ses
Marriage Proposals Via Google Maps
What is it with Google Maps that seems to inspire people to propose marriage?
(Click to enlarge – Marry Me Leslie)
Googler Michael Weiss-Malik, a member of the Google Geo Team, planned ahead and stood at the side of the road when the Google Street View pictures were being updated in a drive-by photo shoot. (Read Michael’s explanation of what he did and why.) Google has been aggressively expanding Street View images this summer.
Michael isn’t the first to have a marriage proposal appear in Google Maps. Here’s a few more we’ve collected in the past: (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/05/2008
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Filed under: Google, Maps Google-Maps, marriage-proposals, Roofvertising
W3C Issues Mobile App Guidelines
The World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C”) announced today a mobile web best practices document, providing standards intended to improve the user experience of the web on mobile devices.
This is good, because it will help promote better standards across mobile application development. Until now, developers have been all over the map in terms of how such apps or mobile-enabled sites are created.
So, the big question in my mind — what sort of domain name do they recommend for mobile apps?!? Do they recommend using the .mobi top level domain (“TLD”)? (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/29/2008
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Filed under: Mobile Search .mobi, mobile applications, mobile standards, wireless applications
Print Yellow Pages Usage On Decline Or Not?
My article on how the “Yellow Pages Usage Stats Are Likely Wrong” went up earlier at Search Engine Land, and the details I highlight in it provide some strong circumstantial evidence that this year’s earlier industry statistics stating that print YP book usage hadn’t dropped over the year previous are likely incorrect.
As I point out, those statistics were all based on telephone polling, and those polls missed having representative samples of cell phone only households, according to their published methodology. Various research groups and government agencies have been saying that this is a significant chunk of the population — anywhere from 13.6%, growing to as much as 25% by the end of this year. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/29/2008
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Filed under: Advertising, Local Search, Market Data, Yellow Pages cell phone usage, polling, polls, Yellow Pages, YP
SMX LoMo Keynote: Gur Kimchi
Gur Kimchi, Principle Architect for Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, also spoke Thursday morning at the SMX Local & Mobile conference in San Francisco.
Gur Kimchi, Principal Architect, Microsoft Virtual Earth
Gur provided a lot of demonstrations of existing and upcoming features from the Virtual Earth teams: (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/28/2008
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Filed under: Conferences, MSN Search, Research and Development Local Search, Maps, MicroSoft, SMX LoMo, SMX-Local-&-Mobile, Virtual Earth
SMX LoMo Keynote: Frazier Miller
Frazier Miller, General Manager of Yahoo! Local, spoke yesterday here at the SMX Local & Mobile conference in San Francisco.
It was very interesting to hear the take on local & mobile from one of Yahoo! Local’s top thought leaders. It was obvious that Frazier has a very tight grip on understanding what motivates consumers and where the trends may be headed in local/mobile evolution.
Some highlights of Frazier’s presentation included: (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/25/2008
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Filed under: Conferences, Local Search, Mobile Search, Yahoo Local Search, Mobile Search, SMX LoMo, SMX-Local-&-Mobile, Yahoo-Local
Australian Yellow Pages Finally Optimizes For Search Engines
The Australian edition of Lifehacker reports that Sensis, Telestra’s yellow pages division, has finally allowed bots to crawl their online yellow pages so links to their listings are now showing up in Google SERPs and other search engines. Previously, they were apparently blocking Google and bots by either using robots.txt disallow rules and/or blocking the bots with network access rules.
Australian Yellow Pages in Google results (click to enlarge)
Amusingly, Lifehacker mentions, (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/24/2008
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Local Search Optimization, Online Directories, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Yellow Pages Australian Yellow Pages, local-SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Sensis, SEO, Telestra, Yellow Pages
