relevant

When laying out your next email ad campaign, ask yourself if you’re putting the close up front where the opening is for the hard sell, or if you’re educating the customer toward an obvious purchase. It makes a difference. I have numbers.

As we mentioned Friday, Live Search is very proud of itself for finally making its results relevant. Unfortunately, I think their relevance push was obviously too little, too late.

Microsoft has issued a major update to Live Search, and the Live Search Team claims that, compared to the old version, the new one is “relevant, faster and easier to use.”  Fair enough, but the question remains: is it more relevant, faster, and easier to use than Google?  The answer: no.

Late last week MyBlogLog updated their sign in process to require you to use your Yahoo ID when logging into the system. What surprised me most about the change was how it seemingly went unnoticed or unreported in the SEO community. I’m curious if you still use MyBlogLog and how relevant you think it is as a social site?

I have seen two great posts about link building in the past few days. One of these is by Jim Boykin on the limitations of link bait, and the other is by Eric Ward at the Search Engine Land blog about the "Circle of Trust".

A funny thing happened on the way to writing this examination of the Yahoo! trademark policy.

Search engines actively and regularly seek new content. As more and more search engine algorithms evolve into complex, human-centric logics, they seek content that is relevant to the search conducted by the surfer. They also want to present freshly updated content to their users. Google sends out its 'freshbot' spider to gather and index new material from all the sites which offer it.

Jeremy Zawodny's post about the importance of anchor text, got me to thinking. Mainly, about what other time-wasting games I could play with major search engines.