Entrepreneur: Whats a business owner to do about the frequent search engine algorithm changes.
Be aware that it happens, but dont change your entire business or marketing plan every time Google burps.
For Google, the critical analysis in their information retrieval algorithms is based on relevance feedback.
What that means is that given youve done all of your SEO fundamentals and you have other websites linking to yours, the end user data kicks in.
How many times do people click on your link in the search results compared to others.
Those are basic examples, but the real secret to success is still based on creating compelling, relevant content that is both informative, and maybe even entertaining, in order to provide a richer experience.
In our experience, the two most important things are to design your website for human beings, not algorithms, and to gear your business toward multiple sources of traffic, not just from Google.
Local search, for things like restaurants or hotels nearby, is one of Google’s growing areas of focus.
Its about multimodal search — information which is aggregated from many sources to suit a given environment or set of circumstances.
Grehan: Data is the modern equivalent to black gold in digital marketing terms.
In much the same way that Google has been able to take implicit data about end users to provide more relevant results, marketers use this "big data" for exactly the same reasons.
With the exception of paid for services like Google Apps, users are not customers and can only expect a limited amount of security and privacy.
People look at Google and its a mysterious black box and nobody knows how it works or what goes on inside it.
Yet, it is looking at you, the end user, and youre a mysterious black box, and it has no idea how you work or what goes on inside.
Mining data is a way of personalizing information for you, and that includes advertising.
If you choose to set up a business online, then you should know something about how the Web works.
So the jargon involved in SEO and the process is something youll pick up pretty quickly along the way.
Search engine algorithms begin with an analysis of how many other Web pages link to yours as a sign of popularity.
