Yahoo Shines Light On Search Shifts

The online world evolves faster than most environments. It is influenced by many factors that happen around us, seasonal changes, product releases or what happened on Master Chieft last night can be a major factor in shift in search trends or our behaviour online.


According to a white paper that Yahoo! Labs scientists Ravi Kumar and Andrew Tomkins have released the follow has been found:

Patterns in online behavior are tending to shift away from traditional search, though user behavior shows a notable opportunity in searches for highly specific items, or “structured objects”—things that include restaurants, products, cars, real-estate listings, cities, bands, sports teams, celebrities, sports players, and companies. (source)

The data analysed by the two Yahoo! Lab scientists included data from the Yahoo! Toolbar, including about 50 million pageviews in March 2009. They found that users spent 21.4% of their time online time performing searches of one kind or another. These included main Web searches (6.2%), multimedia searches (1.4%), and searches for items such as those on eBay or Amazon.com (1.4%). In addition, search’s 9% of pageviews was responsible for 8.9% of direct referrals and 3.5% of indirect referrals.

One interesting point to note for those that have e-commerce websites:

The paper found that 20% of checkout pageviews were reached through search activity. But Kumar and Tompkins also noted that users spent about half their time browsing and one-third communicating.(source)

So how does Yahoo! see the future of search? According to the report:

The future of search will include increasing focus on gathering, understanding and, when appropriate, serving structured information.(source)

How To Approach Social Media In 2010

While most companies have come to agree that social media use is important, the “how” remains unclear in many cases. Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist of Ustrategy, was good enough to give her thoughts on the subject.

Lichtenberg tried to dispel what might be one common misconception by stating, “Social media itself is not a tool. It is a strategy.” She then added, “Every business should have a strategy around social media.”

Lichtenberg thinks it’s best to form this strategy in a vision-driven way. The question companies should ask themselves is, “Who do you want to be as a business when people see you online?” Coming up with an answer will help organizations pick their approach.

Deciding on an online identity will also help employees – who can be a business’s biggest advocates – know how to act online. And Lichtenberg thinks it isn’t wise for companies to forbid access to social networks, by the way.

Then here’s one last tip: before trying to use social media to help with lead generation and sales, conduct specific campaigns around factors like awareness, market share, and buzz. These things are better-suited to social media and serve as good starting points.

Article Source – WebProNews

Website Speed Now A Ranking Factor

It was only a few months ago that Matt Cutts put the record straight regarding website relevance or website speed for better search rankings.

Website speed is now being considered as a ranking factor for your website, however it does not carry as much weight as relevancy. Google as commented on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog that few than 1% of search queries will be affected and only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

Personally I think that it is fantastic that Google as added site speed as a ranking factor, even if it is only a minor factor. In the future it may gain more weight and sites that are built with nice clean code will be rewarded.

Free Tools To Evaluate Your Site Speed

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.
• Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.


Other Helpful Resources
• Site Speed, A Ranking Factor – Yoast
• Google incorporating site speed in search rankings – Matt Cutts
• Using site speed in web search ranking – Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Photo Credit – NASA

The Rise Of Mobile Through The Eyes Of PayPal

Thanks to the ever-increasing market share of smartphones, people are doing a lot of things while on the move that used to require a separate computer, keyboard, and monitor. PayPal exec explained how he’s seen these trends take shape.

Francesco Rovetta, director of business development for PayPal Mobile, has said that a lot of PayPal users have gone mobile. Indeed, the number of mobile transactions that went through PayPal increased fivefold last year, which Rovetta regards as a “very encouraging sign.”

Mobile eBay transactions have come to involve everything from computers to Lamborghinis, too, which is pretty remarkable.

PayPal’s of course doing its part to encourage mobile uptake. Not too long ago, the organization put out an iPhone app that lets users transfer money by “bumping” their phones, and this app has already been downloaded over 685,000 times.

What’s more, PayPal’s reached out to ordinary developers, making APIs available and trying to help them monetize their efforts.

Mobile definitely looks ready to play an important part in the future of business and sales online.

Article Source – WebProNews