How the Search Engines Interpret Searchers' Queries

It is a common sight to watch searchers crib, grumble, and howl, whenever they type a search query in a search engine and are shown results that they were not looking for. But have you ever, as a searcher, wondered that may be your request was not formed in the right way? Or may be the context was lacking in your query? It is very important to realize that we as searchers also have a responsibility to provide well formed, relevant, and contextual queries to the search engine, instead of blaming the poor search engine everytime we don't get what we need.

It is negligence, carelessness, and sloppiness on our parts most of the times that we are not able to explain our needs in a proper way to the search engines. If we spend some time brainstorming what exactly we want to find out about, it would save both us and the search engines a lot of valuable time finding out what we want. That is precisely the reason why search engines provide us with search refinement tools to supply them with additional or more specific information or query related terms.

But search engines do not rest while we keep entering all sorts of query terms in their search box. They are constantly observing our behavior and trying to improve their search results by studying our hit and trial kind of searching activities. They take the help of artificial intelligence guys to understand and make sense of our search terms. Though discarded in 1980s for some reasons, AI is back again in vogue and your search can learn a lot from it. Search engines make use of similar systems as 20Q.net which makes you think of an object and then answer some questions. The system will then guess what object you are thinking of on the basis of your answers and interaction with the system. The system identifies the object you were thinking of correctly most of the times. Search engines also work in a similar fashion taking clues from the search terms offered by you and finding out possible matches for your search queries.

The idea behind this blog is that it takes quite an effort on the part of the search engines to provide you exactly the same information that you are looking for. The search engines are an ever evolving entity and they work hard to give you good results, even if means millions of irrelevant and mismatched searches and queries.

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The Art of Successful SEM Copywriting

Writing on the web specifically for the purpose of service engine marketing is also an art that requires careful and serious introspection like any other marketing strategy. Your website should be a mirror reflection of your company, business, products,and services. Try to answer the following questions to find out whether you are on the right track or not:

Are You Targeting Your Keywords in the Copy?

If not, then start doing it right away. Ideally, your pages should have 2-3 keywords used 3-4 times in order to make your site profit generating.

Is Your copy Short, Sweet, and Crisp?

Well, short is always sweet. What you can say in two lines, why stretch it to a paragraph? There is no need to stretch your writing imagination too far as you are not writing a novel or a pulitzer prize winning book. Here you are writing for the regular, normal public who are searching for specific information. So your copy needs to be not only short, but also self containing, having all the information people want conveyed in a very straightforward, clear, concise, and simple manner.

Are You Writing for The Search Engines and the Visitors Both?

Again, if you have answered in the negative, amend this mistake. Start writing for the search engine spiders as well as the human visitors. Times have changed now and so has the copywriting techniques for better conversion rates and traffic generation on the net. Today, it has become essential to write for the search engines and humans alike if you want to make an impression on both.

Are you Putting too many Links In your Pages?

Nothing can spell more doom for your website than having too many links on a page. You are boggling the visitors' mind by providing them too many gateways to reach somewhere. Have links but only relevant and restricted use is advised. Don't create chaos for insite linking strategy by putting too many links on one page only.

Is your website All Graphics and Flash?

If yes, too bad for you. You may have satisfied your creative and imaginative juices doing that, but from online marketing point of view, you failed. All Flash sites with no text at all serve no purpose than just looking nice. But your aim of creating a website is not just beauty and looking good factor. You plan to sell something through your website. So include text on your page, especially the keywords and phrases that talk about your products and services and their benefits as this is what is likely to appear in SERPs.

SEM copywriting is an important area of web marketing and ignoring it would mean trouble for your online business prospects.

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Forums For Better Generation of Targeted Traffic:Part III

What Not to Do in Your Forum

Keep in mind these 'not to do' things in your forum in order to multiply your targeted traffic. These are simple, yet very effective tips for accentuating and aggravating the interest of the visitors.

If you start with many topics at one go, it will be like sailing in more than one boats. The result is but obvious. You will lose your balance and fall down. Begin with the area that you are quite confident about and comfortable with. As time passes and your forum gains momentum, experts in different fields might start joining your forum and then you can add some more threads with the existing ones.

Never ever leave any posts unanswered. That would be height of irresponibility, carelessness, and casual attitude towards your forum. You have to respect the time, and views of the participants and community members by responding to their queries or thoughts regularly. Otherwise your forum will collapse as fast as it gained momentum.

It wouldn't help to have several accounts of your own created simply to show people that your community already exists. There is no need to indulge in this as it will be detected soon to dash all your hopes and put an end to all your efforts made till now. The reason being that these kind of posts are deleted and that means a tarnished reputation for you.

You can try using hint promotion where while answering others' questions, you place links to your site and to some posts on your forum. The benefit of this would be that if the posts on your forum are of some help to your posts on other forums, you may be able to attract some targeted traffic.

To conclude this series on forums, I would like to add that a forum is like a well planned, well kept, and well managed garden that provides the visitors with comfort, refreshed air, and a beautiful ambience-something that they are looking for in a garden. Similarly your forum should attract the visitors with its interesting, informative, and relevant content to generate targeted traffic.

You can read the the previous blog here.

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