Cater to Intent-Based Search

Google recently announced 2 new improvements to Google Search. The first is an expanded list of related searches, and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions.

The company says it’s deploying a new technology that better understands associations and concepts related to searches. Google explains:

…one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

Google says it’s able to target more queries, more languages, and make suggestions more relevant to what users are looking for. We’ve heard Google talk about wanting to get better with intent-based search, and it looks like they’re now doing something about it.

“Additionally, we’re now offering refinements for longer queries — something that’s usually a challenging task,” says a post on the Official Google Blog. The feature is available in 37 languages all around the world.”

As for the longer snippets, users will see them when they search for longer queries (which users are using more of these days). They will display more text to show more of the keywords used in the query and how they are used on the page.

These changes may not be the final word in intent-based search. The “java” example discussed by Bruce Clay late last year isn’t addressed very well here. The related searches suggested when I search for that keyword do not include coffee or country related items. Still, the features are an indication that Google is indeed looking in this direction.

The longer snippets feature is not exactly delivering more relevant results than before, but it could go a long way toward helping users determine if results in fact are relevant by giving them more info to reach a conclusion.

According to Tony Murphy,

Search engine robots want your WordPress blog content. They are programmed to crawl your site, look at everything and report back to the Master Indexer with their findings. The Master Indexer then makes sure that your content can be found. However there are some things that robots in their relentless content crunching march should not have access to. For example the indexing of duplicate content on your blog can lead to the dilution of your blogs authority.

As you know, every category you assign your blog post to, counts as a separate page, as far as the robots are concerned. If you assign a post to more than one category, then the robots think you’ve got that many pages that say the same thing. The first one it finds will be given more weight than the others, and that’s about as far as it goes for being “penalized.” When your blog is fairly new, this really isn’t as big a problem as it will be when it gets a little older and bigger. Duplicate content pages just tend to slow things down, as far as your page ranking goes.

By blocking certain pages, categories and even directories, if the robots never see the duplicate content, you won’t be “penalized.” Any other sites out their that have your content is a different story, of course. This advice only concerns your own website, where your articles should be posted first, prior to sending out to article directories and other places. Remember, the first instance of a page that the robots find will be given the most weight. I have said all along, post your articles to your own site first, wait until the spiders have indexed your page, then submit it to other sites.

To create a robots.txt file, all you need is a text editor (like Notepad). Open up a new page, copy and paste the code below and save the file as robots.txt. Then upload the file to the root directory of your website (the root directory is the public_html directory, where www.your_website.com resides.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Allow: /wp-content/uploads

Let’s look at each of those lines.

• User-agent is the robot/spider. The “*” means “any” spider from any search engine. You can specify particular search engines, but, for this purpose, you will want to tell ALL spider/robots to do the same thing.
• Disallow: – Tells the robot/spider where it is NOT allowed to go.
• /wp-admin, /wp-includes, /wp-content/plugins, /wp-content/cache, /wp-content/themes – these are directories that the robot/spider is not allowed to visit. While some of these have nothing to do with the duplicate content issue, nevertheless, they are some places that the robots/spiders just don’t need to go. No one needs to know what plugins you are using, for instance.
• Allow: /wp-content/uploads – this command line will allow the robots to spider and index your uploads directory. IF there is something in there you do not want indexed (download pages, for instance), change Allow to Disallow.

As for individual pages, you can include a meta tag writeen specifically for the robots to find and pay attention to. These are your options:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
    This tells the robots not to index the particular page it finds this instruction on and to not follow any links leading away from the page.
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”>
    This tells the robots not to index the page, but to go ahead and follow the links out of the page.
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
    This tells the robots to index the page, but NOT to follow links out of the page.
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, FOLLOW”>
    And lastly, this tells the robots to both index the page AND follow links out of it.

You see, the issue of duplicate content is NOT about how many websites out there have the same content. No, no,no! It’s about duplicate content on pages within the same website! And if you blog, and categorize your posts to more than one category, then you are creating duplicate pages (the single post pages) and Google will penalize you for that.

It’s still a good idea to post an article to your website before you send it out to the article directories, but that’s not as big an issue–and this is according to Google!

It is vital to the life of your business that you find all the avenues you can to market your business and get it in front of as may people as you can.

One very effective way to go about this is through Internet Article Marketing. And not only is this method effective, it’s FREE. That’s always a huge plus!

Have you jotted down a business outline? How do you plan to promote your business? It doesn’t really have to be a big time venture that would eat up most of your budget. You need to be practical. Times are hard and not everybody can afford the likes of a broadcast ads.

There are, basically, two choices when it comes to affordable advertising. You can either use print medium or you take advantage of the Internet age. The cheaper means, when it comes to print ads, are the direct mailing pieces like postcards, catalogs, brochures and fliers. The idea here is to find the right printing company to process your materials.

But the second route will be much cheaper–actually FREE. The advantage of this is that many people are browsing the web and you can tap all those people to become your potential clients.

This is how most business owners do it these days. They create good content, establish themselves as experts in their chosen categories and invite people to click on their links leading them to their web sites.

So, how do you do this? First, you must narrow your focus. Do not try to be everything to everybody. That’s impossible. Choose a category of your business and start writing about it. In this way, you laser-target the specific group of people who are actually looking for that topic. These are the people who will keep coming back to you, once you get their attention. And you get their attention by being informative. They need, want and actively look for information they are interested in.

Articles don’t have to be long novels. Typically, 300 to 700 words is quite sufficient to be informative and pique the interest of your readers. And be sure to use appropriate keywords in your article, but DON’T overdo it. Be informative. Be educational.

Your author’s bio is a small space allotted for you to tell people who you are. It is also where you may place links to further your readers education. By linking your URL, this puts your website right in front of them.

Where to post these articles? First, post your article on your own site. Allow it to be spidered by the robots. If you are new to all of this, spidering means the search engines send out search programs, called spiders (since we live and work on the “web”), to index every single web page that exists out there. For more information on that, do a search on SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

By posting the article on your site first, and allowing it to become spidered, you eliminate the risk of having “duplicate content”, which the search engines hate. The earliest version found by the spiders is the one that is accepted. All other duplications MAY not be indexed (I stress it is possible, not definite).

Next, post the article to as many Article Directories as you can find and feel comfortable with. Try to find directories, first, that are targeted toward your niche. Then you can spread out to the more general directories. Of course, this is where we cordially invite you to become an author at our sister site, QualityArticles.com, but, to be fair, the headliner of all general directories is ezinearticles.com

Finally, wash, rinse and repeat. Keep writing and posting. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the amount of traffic you start receiving once the spiders find your articles. By placing effective keywords, you’ll also be pleased to find your articles in the top ten on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), which is always a good thing!