Is someone really trying to compete with a search engine that has successfully secured 70% of the online search market share, introduced a revolutionary means of revenue for many firms and businesses, and become a daily activity instead of simply a website? The phrase “just google it” is the new “Kleenex” or “Xerox.”
What do you think will happen? Will Cuil be able to successfully secure a fraction of the search engine market share?
Created by a team with a successful track record, many founders coming from Google, funded by $30 million - does it have a chance?
If you are familiar with Robert Scoble, author of the blog Scobleizer, you know he is one of the great opinions of the web. According to the Scobleizer:
Is Cuil going to be able to get into the game?
No way, no how.
So, why is Cuil here?
I think it’s a play for Microsoft money. Microsoft needs to get back into the search game, so will continue buying companies to try to get back into the search game. Yahoo, if run by management that’s rational, will probably start doing the same thing.
Yesterday when I first heard about the ambitious new engine I tried it out on phrases related to my website – which I have spent a great deal of time ‘optimizing.’ Much to my dismay my website was absolutely no where to be found. Naturally, this did not make me too happy - especially after my July 16th post: Axis’ Own SEO Campaign. I searched for several keywords and key phrases. Overall - I am leery about the new ‘magazine style’ layout and the fact that with many of my searches it return no results - zero!
In an interview with a technology forecaster, Paul Saffor, and ABC News, Saffo comments on Cuil:
“You don’t get $33 million to compete against Google. That’s a suicide mission. You get $33 million to create a search experience that’s different from Google.”
“While all the people involved seem competent and have great resumes, the site itself out-and-out stinks.”
If Cuil is trying to offer a search solution that truly differs from (for the greater good) Google and the other mainstay search engines, good for them - it’s going to be a long road.
It will be interesting to see if only $30 million can change the way the world searches the Internet.
Former employees of Google.com have developed and launched a rival search engine called Cuil (pronounced “Cool”). Cuil, Gaelic for knowledge and hazel, claims to do a better job of indexing online information.
The ambitious new search site, Cuil.com, maintains a minimalist appeal - similar to Google.com. While Google has stopped reporting the number of pages it uses to build its index, Cuil claims that its 120 billion is greater than that of Googles.
While many others have tried to compete with Google and failed, Cuil believes that by deviating from the traditional methodologies of Google it can overcome the giant.
In response to Rachel’s comment from a post on July 17, 2008 titled Axis’ Own SEO Campaign here is some food for thought when planning your website and/or SEO campaign.
Content
Relavant Content: Write good copy that is relative to your site. When writing the content keep your customer, viewers, ideal market in mind - write copy they want to read. Write copy they will link to.
Professional Copywriter: We recommend (of course) that you use a professional seo copywriter to write the copy for your website. Writing copy for your website is not as simple as putting words together to form a sentence. First, you must research your keywords - we recommend using Google’s Keyword Analysis Tool. After researching the phrases that best fit your goals incorporate the site-wide phrases at a rate of 1-3% and the deep phrases at a rate of 2-4%. Although it’s not a complete science thats a good rule of thumb. Don’t forget your audience is still a human - NOT Google. First and foremost your copy must read well and make sense to us humans - Google comes second.
Update Often: through the use of blogs, press releases, dynamic database-driven systems, and content management systems, you should update your site as often as possible. Get yourself into a routine of updating your site on a regular schedule - maybe every day or every week at the same time. With modern content management systems and blogs you can add a post or update content in literally minutes. This will keep viewers coming back for more. Don’t be afraid to share information with your websites’ users - after all you are considered a professional and expert in their eyes.
Structure & Usability
User-Friendly: I don’t like going to the grocery store and walking down the produce aisle for cleaning supplies - do you? Organize your website in a logical sequence. If you have different product categories; widgets, gidgets and gadgets, arrange them within a single products page. Add links to each category page, from the products page, which will link to each individual product within that category. Each page should have UNIQUE copy and content relevant to that product. Make it easy for your users to get back to the main page or to another categories page. Consult with usability experts if you already have a website that you fear is not user-friendly.
Page Names: Search engines like to know what the page is about. For example if you have a page about how to install a gadget into your gidget name the file; gidget-installation-into-gadget.html - again, this is not a science but sometimes it helps.
Functional & Accurate Sitemap: Make a sitemap for your users and link to it on each page. List all pages of your site in a logical structure.
SITEMAP EXAMPLE:
Home
About Us
History
Press Releases
Management
Products
Gidgets
Blue
Black
Purple
Gadgets
Hot
Medium
Large
Cold
Widgets
Gold
Silver
Bronze
Contact Us
Link Building & Directories
Directories: Subscribe to, or sign up for directories that relate to your field or product. These generally have the most relevant information about your field. It’s a one-stop-site for Internet users to get information about that product genre. For many fields and industries when searches are conducted these sites come up first. And, depending on the searh it might feature the page you are listed on, or, even better it might feature your listing.
Social Networking: Social networking in terms of SEO can be fun. Go on sites like myspace.com, youtube.com, facebook.com, linkedin.com and others. Register yourself and your business.
Get Involved: In general, you want to get involved with the Internet community that is internal and external of your field or industry. Share information, posts messages on forums, blog, answer message board posts and have fun doing it. You’ll learn a lot - I have.
Only a few weeks ago we started optimizing our new website. There are many variables that play into good search rankings; creation date of your domain name, keywords, keyword research, backlinks (read our other post on backlinks), content, copywriting, … the list goes on.
We are targeting primarily local and state-wide traffic. The majority of our focus has been spent optimizing for Google as they hold nearly 70% of the search engine market share. Our site is progressing equally as well in Yahoo and MSN Live.
Long story short we wanted to share our results. Within 3 weeks we are on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) 1-3. We still have a lot of work to do but we are off to a great start. Look below for some of the phrases where our site shows up.
What are backlinks? To answer this question I am going to introduce Google’s ‘define’ command. Google’s define command provides the definition of the word immediately following the command. For example you could type, define: blog, and Google would return the definition of the word ‘blog.’ For more information on Google’s Advanced Search Operators visit this website: http://www.google.com/help/operators.html
So, back to our original question of, What are backlinks? Backlinks are links from other websites and web resources back to your site. Backlinks are also referred to as; reciprocal links, inlinks, incoming links, inbound links and inward or inbound links. Yes, they all mean the same thing.
As the video above states backlinks are incredibly important. There is a fine line between quality and quantity when talking about backlinks. If you are an attorney you might want backlinks on legal directories, free web resources that offer advice or information related to the area of law you primarily practice or, if you specialize in real estate law, you might want links on real estate websites. What you would not want are links from any old website that will list you. The sites linking back to your website determine your popularity. If your backlinks all relate in some way to your field you are more popular in that field.
I recently read the book, Get to the top on Google - Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of the Search Engine Rankings - and Stay There, by David Viney ‘The SEO Expert.’ In this book Viney compares the likeness between in-text citations in research papers and backlinks to a website. In the eyes of many, the more an author or source is cited in research papers and text, the more legitimate their information is. Similarly, the more valid and relative backlinks you have the more credibility your site has.
When Adobe introduced Creative Suite industry professionals were using QuarkXpress as their preferred layout program. Over the past few years as Adobe has been working hard to improve its offerings and as a result, on March 27, 2007 Creative Suite 3 was officially released. With Creative Suite 4 currently in development and expected to be released in late 2008 or early 2009, the offerings keep getting better and the features more rich.
Adobe Photoshop has been the preferred raster and photo manipulation software for both commercial and home users for many years. Users of the software have most likely learned the keyboard shortcuts, tips and tricks and more importantly spent hours and hours dwelling in tutorial books and websites. Needless to say, people are comfortable with Photoshop, and other Adobe products for that matter - they have invested hours and hours of their time.
With the first release of Adobe Creative Suite came the ‘new and improved’ Adobe InDesign (previous versions were 2.0, 1.5 and 1.0). Although, the software came with some bugs and quirks, and had significant issues with drop shadows and transparencies it was a step in the right direction. Right around the time InDesign CS was released (October 2003), many people were still using QuarkXpress version 5. When it came time to upgrade to QuarkXpress version 6.0 people hesitated. This is when InDesign started to take off. The hesitation stemmed from a couple reasons; cost, features, ease of use to name a few.
Many believe there are two primary reasons why InDesign started to become so popular shortly after its release; it was bundled with other software that was viewed as a necessity and people were familiar with similar products by Adobe. Most designers and industry-folk were comfortable with other Adobe products, the tools, techniques, shortcuts and the fact that they could maneuver around the menus quite quickly.
So designers and other industry professionals were asking themselves why they needed to spend, in some cases, double on QuarkXpress. After having used Quark for about 6 years and InDesign for about 4 years i clearly prefer InDesign.
With this said, will Quark make a comeback with version 8?
Version 8’s big claim to fame is the fact that it will have a new user interface and built-in Flash authoring. Which, in my opinion is somewhat odd seeing as how Flash is an Adobe product.
“We really sat down to change QuarkXPress and change the number of mouse clicks it takes to get things done,” Tim Banister, General Manager of Desktop Technology for Quark, told Macworld. “Really, we went back to the fundamentals.”
Beyond the interface and Flash capabilities, Quark 8 will feature a new Bézier pen tool for illustrating, drag and drop photos and text from Word, iPhoto, Adobe Bridge or any other software that supports drag and drop. The new version will also allow paragraph-by-paragraph control of hanging characters. Quark claims its new version is the only layout program with this capability.
I look forward to seeing the results and hearing the feedback.
A long-standing customer, Andy & Linda Smith, have been working with Axis Creative Group (formerly Canarelli Design) since the beginning.
Andy & Linda have joined the revolution! Their new website is now a comprehensive content management system that affords them the flexibility to edit their site whenever its convenient for them.
