Simarprit’s Weblog

SES 2008 San Jose August 18, 2008

For all my posts on SES 2008: http://simarprit.wordpress.com/category/ses-2008/ 

Long Tail of Search & Semantic Search

It is my first time at Search Engine Strategies 2008 – San Jose, California (SES 2008, San Jose), two sessions down and currently attending the panel discussion here are my early thoughts on what’s going on:

Random Gyan:

Long Tail of Search

1. Long tail can count to about 30% of the organic search
2. Use blogs to harvest long tail traffic
3. Use local long tail terms in local listings
4. Use attributes in Google Maps
5. Look for the “very Long Tail” and not just the long tail
6. Weigh your advertising options
7. Smaller Niche sites maybe a cheaper option, and may give great results at fraction of cost
8. Links with navigation can help
9. SEO’s have a role in online search market
10. Mind your Traffic vs. Bounce rate
11. Three phrases per page maybe the most optimum and effective targeting
12. Live out of logs, they hold he key
13. Shoot upto 20 “me too”: terms per key phrase
14. Make sure your pages get indexed, search engines are busy, they may miss you.
15. Divide your site into Key Phrase Zones
16. SEO is no longer dead, it is making a comeback, and a big comeback
17. PPC is becoming expensive
18. Understand your Page Yield
19. Account for your bottom 100 pages, analyzing them may help
20. Attack your freeloaders
21. Plan your SEO Dashboard, ensure it has everything you need, right under your mouse
22. Measurement is critical, Measure visitors per page
23. Know the lifetime value of your customers
24. Search friendly URLs are important, but there is also life beyond them.
25. Use “No Follow” effectively to increase your page rank
26. Slicing and Dicing the content is critical
27. Ideal length of the URL is a very subjective thought
28. Anchors within the documents help
29. Rate your keywords and assess your value
30. Optimize Pagination
31. Re-look at your internal linking structure
32. Surrogate sites can help
33. Getting high value back-links remains critical

Semantic Search:

1. Let us talk to search engine and forget abstract codes and mono syllables
2. Semantic Search engines attempt to understand underlying structured data
3. Semantic search engines tend to eliminate ambiguous queries
4. Search monkey project by Yahoo is an attempt to open up Yahoo Search platform for further development, based on semantic qualities and natural language expressions.
5. Boorah claims that semantic search is happening. A quick 20 word analysis revealed little and exposed lots of limitations to the project.
6. Google is implementing high degree of behind the scene semantics
7. Hakia is a full blown version of Semantic Search (Beta), some of the attempts looked to be right, results are coincidentally close to Yahoo
8. Powerset claims to have extreme semantic capabilities, which were not visible when I gave a set of questions to the website
9. Ask.com claims to be amongst the best semantic search engines around with best results in Natural Language Query processing
10. Generalization Vs. Specialization, Parallelization, Question Type, Categorization, Compressions, Content Characterization, ontology science applications are amongst some of the terms introduced.
11. Inside the page semantic results could be another deliverable.
12. Semantic Search has a lot to do with Aggregation of facts
13. Improving relevance would remain a challenge
14. Linguistic capabilities aided in ample measure with AI can deliver a great product over couple of years.