Welcome to the latest issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. So, what has Google been up to lately? We know you're always wondering that, and eWeek has an answer. Check out the article we've linked to for a look at all the goodies the search giant revealed at its Searchology event. Google introduced a ton of new search products and a very interesting new Android application, all of which may change the way users search.

While these new products might encourage you to tweak your approach to SEO, at least one of the articles we published this week should leave you rethinking your strategy. We all know content is king...except when it isn't, as Monday's item pointed out. On Tuesday we reviewed Majestic SEO, a link analysis tool. On Wednesday we took a look at what you need to do to optimize for Yahoo it may be the number two search engine, but it delivers a fair bit of traffic for some.

Once you get all that traffic, of course, you'll want to convert them into customers, which brings us to the topic of this week's thread. How do you get into the head of your customers, or more precisely, potential customers, and convince them to buy from you? That question sparked quite a lively discussion, well worth checking out.

If you're looking for more ways to round out your SEO education, visit Tutorialized and take advantage of our SEO-related tutorials. You'll find nearly 100 items covering keywords, links, marketing, promotion, and more. And if you want to share your own expertise, you can always submit your own tutorial.

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of this newsletter, shines on Google's latest experiment. They're asking a few strategic questions of some of their users. What kinds of questions, and to what purpose? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

As always, thanks for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

• If your name is Stephen King and you write horror novels, we have a message for you.
• Our idiot of the week is Hugo Chavez. Just kidding. It's Jenny.
• Tech Heaven makes its prodigal return. Praise Jeebus.

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Google may seem to own the search space these days, but Yahoo still sees a respectable amount of traffic. Unlike Google, Yahoo is a content producer as well as a search engine; additionally, they didn't start out as an algorithm-based search engine. How does that affect it today? And what does that mean for you if you're trying to get your site viewed by Yahoo users? Keep reading for the answers. According to Comscore stats, Yahoo holds around 20% of the search engine market share. Compete(dot)com also supports this, giving Yahoo 19.4%. Hitwise awards Yahoo 22.55%, so it's safe to say Yahoo holds around 20% of the search engine market share in the United States. That number differs for UK, Canada and other countries.

Yahoo Inc originally started in 1994 as a web directory by Jerry Yang and David Filo. Its original URL resided on akebono(dot)stanford(dot)edu/yahoo, and the name Yahoo translated to "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." After keeping up Yahoo for a bit, the founders saw business potential and attracted $3 million in investments. On March 8, 1997, Yahoo acquired Rocketmail, which became Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo Search Technology

Yahoo outsourced search to Google for four years. The partnership started on June 26, 2000, and ended in February 2004. It ended after Yahoo and Microsoft realized the importance of search as a standalone business. Yahoo purchased Overture for $1.6 and the Inktomi search engine for $280 million. Yahoo renamed Overture to Yahoo Search Marketing, and Inktomi, along with other search technologies, were combined into Yahoo Search.

Read Optimization for Yahoo

Majestic SEO Review
by Ivan Strouchliak
2009-05-12

Majestic SEO is a link analysis tool, with an index of 52 billion pages, a record of 350 unique URLs and 2.6 trillion mapping relationships (URL pointing to URL). Majestic SEO maintains its own web crawler, "MJ12," and keeps its own database of the web (like the major search engines). The project belongs to Majestic-12 Ltd and is run by volunteers, with the goal of establishing a quality search engine to compete on the worldwide market. Majestic SEO is a side project of the Majestic 12 search engine, designed to raise funds. In this article we take a detailed look at the Majestic SEO tool and its use in search engine optimization.

Technology

Majestic 12 adopted the concept used by SETI(at)home and distributed(dot)net called distributed computing. The idea of distributed computing is to use private computers (like yours) to work on the task and then send data back to the source for analysis. If you want to participate in Majestic 12's project, you can download MajesticNOD, which will deploy a web crawler from your computer each time it is idle. As the crawler gathers pages, it will send those pages to MJ12 servers for indexing. The crawler is only deployed at times when the computer is idle, so it does not affect performance or Internet speed.

Once crawled pages reach the server, they undergo indexing, link and anchor text analysis in a similar manner to large commercial search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Once content is indexed (turned into number variables), information is merged into one large, searchable index which can be explored using keywords.

Read Majestic SEO Review

When Content isn`t King
by Terri Wells
2009-05-11

The idea that content is king when building a web site, and especially when trying to climb to the top of the search engine results pages, is one of the first things that an SEO learns. You can't reach the top for your keywords without lots of good content. I believed that too - until I was proven wrong.

Daryl Clark, former Director of Online Marketing for Gatlin Education Services and now SEO consultant and president of Internet Search Marketing provided me with a much-needed education. He happens to be a regular poster to our SEO Chat forums, and he'd gotten tired of hearing everyone say that content means everything, when he has the experience (and the case studies) to show that this isn't so. So I challenged him to show me.

Before I dive in to show you what he showed me, I need to explain something about how Google classifies queries. Many SEOs received a bit of an education themselves recently when one of Google's internal documents was leaked to the net. That document detailed the guidelines that Google's human quality checkers use when determining whether a web site is spammy or relevant. From this document, it was discovered that Google tries to understand a user's intent when they put search terms into the engine - and to further that goal, it classifies search queries as being of three different types: informational, transactional, and navigational.

Read When Content isn`t King

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How Can I Boost My Google Rankings?
A definitive guide that teaches you how to boost Google rankings.
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How to get ahead with RSS!
A tutorial on using RSS feeds to increase traffic in your niche.
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Submitting your URL to Search Engines
How to get search engines to crawl your site as often as possible.
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Submit Wordpress Sitemaps
Submit your Wordpress sitemap xml to Google and verify it.
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Learn Techniques Required for Creating Content
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Basics of SEO
The basics of SEO in plain, easy to understand writing.
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How can this SEO Newsletter be better?

What do you like or dislike about this issue?
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SEO is only a means to an end. For many, that end is getting more customers. So how do you get into your customer's head? That's the question posed by this week's thread, and it's inspired a lively conversation. Be sure to stop by the thread and join in!

Aliens - Get in Their Heads

Does anyone please have some tips for writing so as to psychologically get in to the head of the customer? I mean really connecting with them. Any tips will be much appreciated.

Find out what they want to know. A simple question or short survey could help. Gives you ideas on what to write about, stuff that your customers would actually want to know, not just what you think they want to know.

Focus on the benefits of your product/ service and how it stands out from your competitors.

You also need to mention the features but IMHO people don't care much about features as they do about benefits.

Provide a solution to their woes and see them turning into customers.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

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Google Asks Questions for Latest Experiment

Google and I have something in common: we're both interested in health. Google does a lot more about it than I can, however. While I'm busy reading up on the latest information about diet, exercise, and medical breakthroughs, Google spots trends that let them predict where the next flu outbreaks will occur, thus giving physicians and public health officials precious time to prepare. And while I can't ask other people tons of nosy medical questions, Google can, thanks to the anonymity of search.

Google's questions won't really be that nosy, and they won't be asking everyone just a very small percentage of those performing health-related searches. So if, for example, I've just watched an episode of the Discovery Channel's Mystery Diagnosis and decided to get more information about a particular disease, Google might put a one-question survey at the bottom of the results that asks me if I'm searching because me or someone I know has the disease. It could even be triggered by a search for something as common as headache or ibuprofen.

In Google's blog, medical doctor Roni Zeiger, product manager and software engineer Jeremy Ginsberg emphasized that this is a temporary change. Google runs lots of experiments all over the world in an effort to improve their product. This particular experiment is aimed at finding out how Google users search the Internet when they or someone they know is feeling sick. The information learned from this experiment which, Google emphasized, will be kept anonymous could help the company improve projects like Google Flu Trends.

It could have a wider effect, too. For example, someone doing a search on a health-related factor because they or someone they know is sick might want to learn about potential treatments and where they can get help. Someone who is merely doing research, as in the above Mystery Diagnosis example, might be more interested in the causes of the disease (if known), how common it is, and what the risk factors are. With this information, Google could improve the results it returns for these kinds of searches.

Google emphasized that data collected from the survey will not be used for advertising. Rather, Google says it will use the data to help it improve health-related search results and refine products like Google Flu Trends. That's reassuring, assuming it follows through; the idea of advertisers getting their hands on that potential gold mine of information, however well-disguised for anonymity, leaves me feeling a little queasy. Then again, given the robust shape of Google's bottom line, it can afford to do something for the health of it.