Welcome to Natural Search Blog
Natural Search Blog provides articles on search engine optimization including keyword reasearch, on-page factors, link-building, social media optimization, local search optimization, image search optimization, and mobile SEO.
In addition to natural search optimization topics, we also cover internet marketing, ecommerce, web design, usability, and technology.
Recent Entries
Google Book Search: Not a Threat to Publishing
It’s not surprising that large chunks of the book publishing industry have gotten up in arms ever since Google announced its intentions to scan the world’s books and make them available online for free. After all, the publishing industry is not really known for adopting modern practices all that quickly. Book publishing is a grand old industry, and top publishing houses seem more invested in preserving the status quo than in adapting for the changing world.
But, when the publishing industry got up in arms against Google’s plans to facilitate the searching of books, their knee-jerk reaction against the new paradigm caused them to miss the fact that Google’s basic proposal really isn’t all that revolutionary. There’s another institution that has taken published books and made them available to the public. For Free. For thousands of years. Libraries!
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/08/2006
Permalink | | 
Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Google Book Search: Not a Threat to Publishing | Comments RSS
Filed under: General, Google, Searching Amazon.com, book-search, Google-Book-Search, Publishing-Industry
Using Linkbaiting & Social Engineering to Get Tops on Digg
Seoblackhat posted a great article on Ten Steps to Guarantee You Make The Digg Front Page.
I like his tips particularly because he cites some methods that use social engineering or linkbait to gain Digg votes, and he also suggests using headlines which are more attractive to the big Digg demographics.
I’m calling some of Seoblackhat’s tips “social engineering” because he seems to’ve studied Digg users’ behavior, and quantified the sorts of titles and themes that would result in Digg users voting for an article.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/04/2006
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Using Linkbaiting & Social Engineering to Get Tops on Digg | Comments RSS
Filed under: Link Building, Social Media Optimization digg, linkbaiting, social-engineering
Hey Digg! Fix your domain name for better SEO traffic!
Hey, Digg.com team! Are you aware that your domain names aren’t properly canonized? You may be losing out on good ranking value in Google and Yahoo because of this!
Even if you’re not part of the Digg technical team, this same sort of scenario could be affecting your site’s rankings. This aspect of SEO is pretty simple to address, so don’t ignore it and miss out on PageRank that should be yours. Read on for a simple explanation.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/04/2006
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Hey Digg! Fix your domain name for better SEO traffic! | Comments RSS
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social Media Optimization, URLs digg, Google, PageRank, SEO, url-canonization, Yahoo
Dr. Paul W.K. Rothemund and Dr. Eric Winfree awarded the Feynman Prize at nanoTX Conference
Dr. Paul W.K. Rothemund and Dr. Eric Winfree were awarded the 2006 Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes at the nanoTX Conference last week, at a special awards reception. (I earlier blogged about H. Ross Perot’s keynote address at this conference.)
Rothemund was on-hand to receive the award, and I was fortunate to be able to attend his presentation on his and Winfree’s research. Rothemund delivered first a presentation on his work, and then he delivered a presentation on behalf of Winfree who could not attend.
Rothemund’s work is fantastic — he works upon Algorithmic Self-Assembly. He’s been able to program long strands of viral DNA such than when mixed in a suspension with other short DNA snippets (and heated slightly), the snippets or “staples” will bind to the long strand in particular order, causing it to fold back upon itself to form precise shapes. Rothemund has nicknamed what he does as “DNA Origami”, although the key concept is the ability to program the DNA to order itself into near two-dimensional, or even three-dimensional shapes. As proof of concept, Rothemund has programmed DNA to fold itself into words, stars, smiley faces, and other shapes.
Smiley composed of one long DNA strand
The staple snippets of DNA are not shown in this representation.
(Illustration copyright 2006 by Chris Silver Smith.)
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/02/2006
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Dr. Paul W.K. Rothemund and Dr. Eric Winfree awarded the Feynman Prize at nanoTX Conference | Comments RSS
Filed under: Futurism, General, technology Algorithms, artificial-intelligence, DNA, future, Futurism, nano, nanotech
Is Web 2.0 Bogus as a Business Model?
For all of us who survived the exuberance of the dot-bombs era, a little blog entry by my friend, Randy Weber, entitled “Business Development 2.0 is BS 1.0” could serve as a nice dose of logic amid all the hype going on.
In his post, he lists out some salient points on why some of the Web 2.0 companies’ business plans are woefully lacking. It makes some sense. After all, if you’re sharing your core content and intellectual property (in the form of free apps), anyone can replicate your site, and they might just do it better than you, and you won’t see any of the money they’re making!
Web 2.0 maybe doesn’t have a simple definition beyond “I know it when I experience it”, but at base it seems to be founded on user-generated content and syndication of that content along with application services. So, businesses based on Web 2.0 would seem to be counter-intuitive to the normal mechanics of classic biz, and those businesses founded on it might have a lot more risk associated with them.
I think there are just a few caveats to Randy’s post, though. Read on and I’ll explain.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/30/2006
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Is Web 2.0 Bogus as a Business Model? | Comments RSS
Filed under: General AdSense, del.ici.us, flickr, Google, konfabulator, thin-affiliates, Web-2.0, Yahoo
Tips for Local Search Engine Optimization for Your Site
Increasingly, businesses are becoming aware of Local Search, and how optimizing for this channel is vital for those that have local outlets. Each of the main search engines has focused effort on their local search tools as the best strategy for continuing growth in online advertising, and the subject has become sufficiently important enough to merit a special Search Engine Strategies Conference devoted to the subject tomorrow in Denver. The importance of Local Search is further underscored by stats issued in a press release today by comScore, showing that Local Search continues to gain in marketshare.
So, how exactly could one optimize towards Local Search?
Read on and I’ll outline a few key tips.
(more…)
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/28/2006
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Tips for Local Search Engine Optimization for Your Site | Comments RSS
Filed under: HTML Optimization, Local Search Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Local Search, local-search-engine-optimization, local-SEO, microformats, Online-Yellow-Pages, SEO
Governor Rick Perry & H. Ross Perot open Nanotech Conference, nanoTX ’06
Yesterday morning, Governor Rick Perry and H. Ross Perot each gave opening remarks at the nanoTX nanotechnology conference here in Dallas.
Kelly Kordzik (President of the board of the Texas Nanotechnology Initiative organization), and Rich Templeton (CEO of Texas Instruments) each gave some introductory remarks. Templeton’s talk was interesting, touching on work done by TI, and on how Nanotech is still in its infancy and very much dependent upon government investment/support. Governor Rick Perry spoke for a short while, mainly trying to hype up his support of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund which has enabled a lot of research in the field of nanotech, enabling Texas to be on the leading end of the work, worldwide.
Read on for more details…
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/28/2006
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Governor Rick Perry & H. Ross Perot open Nanotech Conference, nanoTX ’06 | Comments RSS
Filed under: Futurism, General, technology future, Futurism, nanotech
Using Flickr for Search Engine Optimization
I’ve previously blogged about optimization for Image Search. But, images can also be used for optimization for regular web search as well. Where online promotion is concerned, it appears to be an area for advantage which remains largely untapped. Many pros focus most of their optimization efforts towards the more popular web search results, and don’t realize that optimizing for image search can translate to good overall SEO.
Flickr is one of the most popular image sharing sites in the world, with loads of features that also make it qualify as a social networking site. Flickr’s popularity, structure and features also make it an ideal vehicle for search engine optimization. So, how can image search optimization be done through Flickr? Read on, and I’ll outline some key steps to take. (more…)
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/24/2006
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Using Flickr for Search Engine Optimization | Comments RSS
Filed under: Image Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO flickr, Image-Search-Optimization, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Putting Keywords in Your URLs
Recently Matt Cutts blogged that:
doing the query [site:windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com] returns some urls like windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com /Blog/cns!D85741BB5E0BE8AA!174.entry . In general, urls like that sometimes look like session IDs to search engines. Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page.
He then clarified his statement above, in the comments of that post:
Tim, including the keyword in the url just gives another chance for that keyword to match the user’s query in some way. That’s the way I’d put it.
What does this mean? It means that from Google’s perspective, keywords in your URLs are a useful thing to have. It’s another “signal” and can provide ranking benefits.
How should you separate these keywords? Not with underscores, that’s for sure. Matt Cutts has previously gone on the record to say that Google does not treat underscores as word separators. Use hyphens instead. Or plus signs would be okay too.
Also, I’d avoid too many hyphens in the URL, as that can look spammy. Try to keep it to three or fewer. Unless your site is powered by WordPress, in which case Google probably makes an exception for that, given how popular it is and how many legitimate bloggers have loads of hyphens in their permalink URLs. By the way, you can trim those down using the Slug Trimmer plugin for WordPress.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by stephan of stephan on 09/20/2006
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Putting Keywords in Your URLs | Comments RSS
Filed under: Google, URLs keywords, SEO, URLs
To Use Sitemaps, or Not To Use Sitemaps, That’s the Question
It was really great when Google launched its Sitemaps (recently renamed to Webmaster Tools, as part of their Webmaster Central utilities) – when that happened it was a really great indication of a new time where technicians who wished to help make their pages findable would not automatically be considered “evil” and the SEs might provide tools to help technicians disclose their pages directly. Yahoo soon followed with their own tools, named Yahoo! Site Explorer, and surely MSN will bow to peer pressure with their own submission system and tools.
Initially, I thought that there wasn’t significant advantage to me for using these systems, because I’d already developed good methods for providing our page links to the search engines through the natural linking found in our site navigation systems.
Why should I expend yet more time and resources to dynamically produce the link files?
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/19/2006
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on To Use Sitemaps, or Not To Use Sitemaps, That’s the Question | Comments RSS
Filed under: General, Google, Site Structure, Yahoo Google-Sitemaps, google-webmaster-tools, Sitemaps, URL-submission, yahoo-site-explorer
