A vertical search engine for the SEO industry

Not nearly as exciting as the IM Broadcast announcement is the fact I WASN’T at the conference and had some time to kill on the weekend. Idle hands and cabin fever left me wanting for something to amuse myself. To that end I looked at the variety of Google Custom Search Engines that I’d been mucking with of late and thought, ‘what about a SEO vertical search?’

Over the next ½ dozen hours engines were born and a framework created into a nifty little research toy for all you search geeks on a quest for knowledge - Search SEO Pros

4 Search engines in 1

The basic concept is that there are four separate search engines for searching a variety of sources including;

1. Search top SEO writers
2. Search the Search Engine blogs
3. Search for SEO Video
4. Digging deeper – with new voices

Internet Marketing Videos

For those of you that didn’t catch it already, late last week there came a new addition to the marketing landscape in the form of IM Broadcast – Multimedia for Internet Marketers. Fellow trail riders (Spyder) Dave Snyder and Jordan Kasteler teamed up with Loren Baker on this little jem that yours truly has been playing with some over the last week.

Dave and co were nice enough to let me play along and the live broadcast Friday was just like being there… except it’s a tad colder up here boys…

Follow the Trail ;

User; theGypsy (of course)
MyVid Favs; Gypsy’s videos
My Group; SEO Geeks

So why not sign up and come hang out… conversations are slow at this point, hopefully that will pick up moving forward. Dubbed ‘the YouTube for Internet Marketers’ – looks like we can have a ton of fun and really… we needed something new right?

Here are some of the the answers Ol MC and the rest of the Google gang gave on some common questions during the webmaster chat session today. I went through the top 80 or so of the 350 questions and have listed those that seemed interesting;

Rankings

Q. "Since Google is against using ranking software (ie:WebCeO) to monitor SERP rankings, is there any plans on Google creating an approved, in-house rank check application that webmasters can use?"

Matt Cutts; It's something that we've talked about. My concern is that sometimes people get too worried with paying attention to their "trophy phrase" and want to rank for that even if that's not the best phrase for them, or concentrating on one phrase to the exclusion of all the other stuff they rank for isn't the best idea. I think paying attention to server logs or analytics data gets you a really nice array of keywords that are practical to work on. But this is feedback that we've heard, and personally I think it would be nice if we offered this for some reasonable size of keywords.

Q. "Of late, I have been experiencing sudden drop in rankings for my sites. One day it would be on #3 and the other day it would go back to #19 or #26. Any specific reason behind this.."

Kaspar aka Guglarz; Most likely, you have been accessing different Data Centers checking your rankings. As Google DC's are being updated continiously but not all simultaniously, slight variations in the SERP's are possible. If you still believe there was an issue with your sites rankings, I would suggest to drop the question, including the domain on the Google Webmaster Help Group: groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/

There is plenty of savvy webmasters eager to help, along with Google guides monitoring the community and joining the discussions occasionally :-)

Q. "Does Google plan to let us see rankings/positions of keywords in the webmaster tool?"

Susan Moskwa; We already do, for a limited number of keywords, in the "Top search queries" section of Webmaster Tools. While we generally don't comment on future features or plans, expanding this functionality is certainly an idea that's been suggested to us.

Matt Cutts; What Susan said, plus I personally think this would be cool to do.

Google suggest and search history lead the way

The fine folks at Google have released a video, (and blog post) on how they are integrating search into the G1 and Android phones. What does it mean for SEOs? Let's have a look...

One of the ways they are looking to make things easier is by leaning on the newly revamped Google suggestions. Another area they were highlighting is the ability to merely click the phone number within search results to automatically dial. Kind of handy….There is also shortcuts to tie in other services such as Gmail, Reader and so forth.

Given all of this I would imagine there is some personalization to be expected from mobile search as signals relating to geo-graphic and search history are sure to have a big role here. In the post they mention;

“There are two types of suggestions on the T-Mobile G1. Google web searches use Google Suggest technology to offer relevant, up-to-date suggestions. Other applications, like YouTube or Gmail, suggest queries you've previously made so that it's easier to find and share results that you've found before.”

They even talk about what it known as ‘application focus’ which essentially will look at other applications (notes, music, video players, instant messenger);

“Also, we've integrated search across the platform so that applications can even share search capabilities with each other.”

A Chrome connection?

It is highly likely that Google’s browser, Chrome, will be the browser on the system which can also supply a wide variety of behavioural and personalization data. We can also assume a greater reach for Google accounts, which as we know, has personalized search turned on by default.

Ultmately we can expect to see a high level of personalization involved not only in mobile search, but regular web based as well - tracked over both. It would be interesting to do some testing... we'll see what happens.

Anyway, here’s the links and a few videos;