SEO by the SEA
Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Research, Consulting, and Services

When stockbrokers who spend their day searching for financial information about different businesses type the word “Starbucks” into Google’s search box, chances are that they are more likely to be looking for stock price information than the closest place that they can get a mint mocha chip frappuccino.

When a city-dwelling college student, who likes to meet up with friends at new places all the time, using his cell phone to find and map out those places, types the word “Starbucks” into his phone’s browser, the first thing he wants to see is probably a map to the nearest Starbucks.

Can a search engine be smart enough to serve a stock price quote at the top of search results to the stock broker, and a map to the college student, even if both are using hand held devices to connect to the Web?

Relevance and Informational Needs

Read: Google on One Boxes and Grouping Result Types to Fill Informational Needs »

I thought that she was trying to hack my computer the first time I visited her website, and it asked me if I wanted to have files ftp’ed to my computer…

I went shopping for a ring this week…

We both fell in love, with drunken noodles, on our first date in a little Thai restaurant, and have been back for a few more helpings.

A fish watched over our table tonight at dinner, ok, a wooden fish…

She likes tweeking templates, messing with the CSS, the PHP, the HTML, the XHTML, and any other acronyms that she can get, and I love it when she inserts images into pages.

We split a jumbo heated chocolate chip cookie topped with ice cream for desert, after she squeezed in next to me at the table…

Read: The Happiest SEO in the Sea »

As a webmaster, when you put a page up on the web, there may be parts of that page that you may not want to have indexed by a search engine.

Many web pages contain information that isn’t unique to each page, such as the navigation for a site, copyright notices, advertising, links to other sites such as blog rolls, and other sections that may not contain information about the main topic of the page itself.

Yahoo’s Robots-Noindex Classes

In May of 2007, Yahoo made a post on the Yahoo Search Blog about how webmasters could let the search engine know that content in certain sections of pages shouldn’t be returned in search results to searchers, titled Introducing Robots-Nocontent for Page Sections.

Read: Which Sections of Your Web Pages Might Search Engines Ignore? »

Yahoo was granted a patent this week which describes how anchor text in links may be used to increase the relevancy ranking of a page pointed to by that anchor text. The patent was originally filed in 2002, and it discusses how anchor text might work while naming the Altavista search engine as a possible place where the methods it describes might be implemented. Yahoo acquired the company that owned Altavista, and the technology is theirs.

While the patent is fairly old, it provides some details about how anchor text might be used by a search engine in a search index that may not be widely known.

It’s fairly common knowledge that the major commercial search engines pay attention to the anchor text in links pointing to pages, and may consider a page to be even more relevant for a query term if the term not only appears on a page, but also appears in the linked anchor text pointing to a page. Some pages may even be determined to be relevant for words that they don’t contain, but which show up in links to those pages.

Read: Yahoo Patents Anchor Text Relevance in Search Indexing »

Search engine optimization is an ever growing and ever changing field, and as search engines and the Web change, so does SEO.

There are no classrooms, nor college courses, no single one site or conference series or book that can help you keep up with those changes.

Paying attention to a lot of blogs, news reports, press releases, and other sources of information can help provide some insights about changes in SEO, and discussions at forums and conferences and social sites can present a lot of signals and noise about what might be new in search. It’s not always easy, and not always even possible to distinquish between the signals and the noise sometimes.

Read: How a Search Engine Might Rank Bookmark Sets, Playlists, Directory Pages, and other Collection Items »

Have you ever searched at a search engine and received results that weren’t very good matches?

You may have searched again after changing the query terms that you used, or you may have given up on the search.

For example, you perform a search, such as “pizza in Elkton, Maryland,” and you don’t receive any actual matches on “pizza” in the locality of “Elkton.” It’s possible that there may be “pizza” results in nearby areas.

Should a search engine display those results from the nearby area, even though they weren’t quite what you were looking for?

How would a search engine go about expanding your original query, to return results to you that might be relevant, but that don’t match the words that you used when searching?

Expanding a Searcher’s Query Based upon Popularity Rankings

Read: How a Search Engine May Expand Search Queries Based upon Popularity Measured by User Behavior »

How well would a food search engine work on the Web?

One that let you search for meals available at local restaurants, or through recipes, or at local markets where you could find the ingredients to make your meal?

What if it provided information about each dish based upon flavors such as saltiness or bitterness, leanness or fattiness, hotness or coldness?

Would it help if it also provided a composition of dishes providing amounts of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals? If you’re concerned about your health and diet, or have special dietary needs, that could be nice.

Would recommendations for alternative meals, and complementary sides and beverages based upon other searchers’ selections help?

A Yahoo patent application published last week describes such a Meal finder search (US Patent Application 20080147611).

Read: Yahoo Cooking with Gas: Food Search on the Web »

My original title for this post was, “The Yahoo Site Explorer Patent Application,” because the post is about a new patent application from Yahoo that describes some of the information that they would like to receive from webmasters to make their efforts towards indexing the web easier.

The majority of this post does describe what is found in that patent application, but as I was writing the post, I thought about how difficult Yahoo makes it for webmasters to find information about how they can use Yahoo.

This includes how fragmented Yahoo’s FAQs and Help sections are, and how much effort a webmaster has to go through to learn about all of the different services that Yahoo offers that could be helpful to those site owners, from using Site Explorer, to participating in MyBlogLog, to many other tools.

Read: Site Explorer is a First Step: How Could Yahoo be Friendlier to Site Owners? »