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Outsourcing clients have to think more smartly and strategically about creating an experience than can drive new growth, deliver business value to the top-line, and not just take out short-term costs from the bottom. If clients can engage outsourcing to become more competitive, it creates an entirely different paradigm than simply “shipping jobs offshore”.

Carl Icahn says he likes Jerry Yang and notes the former Yahoo CEO is a “charismatic guy,” but Yahoo needs to do a Microsoft search deal since the company can’t afford to fight Google.
Icahn’s remarks, made in an interview with Barron’s (subscription required) a few days after he added to his Yahoo stake, doesn’t reveal […]

by Manoj Jasra

One of the most interesting sessions at this upcoming Search Engine Strategies in Chicago is going to be Universal & Blended Search. Dr. Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search is one of the top experts in the world on this subject and is also a panelist at this session in SES Chicago. Last week I had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Cornett to get his insight on blended search and to get a better understanding of Yahoo’s future in this area.

[Manoj]: As with textual search, Universal search will continue to improve amongst the search engines. Are there specific things Yahoo wants to address in regards to the user experience with its search offering?

[Larry Cornett]: Yahoo! is committed to providing the best search experience to our users. We are constantly looking at new ways of incorporating different types of content into our search results. A great example is Yahoo! SearchMonkey, which lets any publisher enhance their search results. This technology can be implemented by multimedia publishers who wish to have specifically stylized search results, which showcase the Yahoo! Search engine results page.

In addition to SearchMonkey, Yahoo! Search has also introduced multimedia integration including video, audio and photos (see below) directly into the search results, allowing consumers to get their answer — whether it’s a Web link, photo, video or music clip — without leaving the page.

[Manoj]: Do users interact with one type of blended search element (i.e: images or video or text or news) better than others, if so why?

[Larry Cornett]: We have already seen good user interaction with our SearchMonkey enhanced listings. Our tests uncovered that users found this blending of structured data to be useful. In fact, in some cases, we saw a lift in click-through rate of as high as 15 percent. We believe that this enriched search experience helps users get directly to the answer they’re seeking.

[Manoj]: What did you think of Ask.com’s search interface before they changed it back to more of a common search results pages. We thought the uniqueness might help attract more searches.

[Larry Cornett]: I don’t want to comment specifically on what our competitors are doing, but what I will say is that we are entering a period of massive change to enable search engines to handle more complex content on the Web as content continues to grow, change, diversify and fragment. At the same time, users are performing increasingly sophisticated and open-ended tasks online, connecting broadly to content and services across the Web. Given these changes, all search engines are becoming more sophisticated and the simple search result page of ten blue text links is evolving to help address these complex tasks. At Yahoo! our aim is to define the intent of the consumer when they are in search.

From a SERP interface perspective we are doing this through Yahoo! SearchMonkey, as I described earlier, which lets publishers creates more useful and visually appealing Yahoo! Search results which will drive more relevant traffic to their sites. For a user’s perspective instead of just seeing a Wikipedia link and a snippet, you could call back to Wikipedia and show a photo, get more context about the article, maybe even present some of the external links or the edit history, whatever the publisher wants to do to enhance the result. A Yahoo! Local business listing could put structured information about itself as part of the result, like a photo of the store front and its main line number. Yahoo! SearchMonkey empowers publishers to customize the search experience to help user find what they want easily and the increased relevance of the result can drive traffic to publishers sites.

In addition Yahoo! is differentiating our search experience by providing a safe search experience for our users with SearchScan. The SearchScan feature from Yahoo! Search provides a seamless way for users to search the web with confidence by reducing the risk of visiting dangerous sites on the Web with no download or fee required. It works by filtering out or alerts users to sites with possible spyware downloads, hacking risks, or sites that generate email spam.

[Manoj]: According to comScore, Google has continued to get stronger in search market share in the last year. What do the other engines have to do in order to maintain and grow their own markets?

[Larry Cornett]: Yahoo! is committed to providing an open, relevant search experience that understands the users’ intent. That said, we have recently launched a service called Yahoo! Search BOSS - an open Web services platform that offers developers and companies the chance to create and launch Web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure, technology and index that powers Yahoo! Search. BOSS fosters search innovation by enabling developers and companies to disrupt the search landscape by building their own world-class search experiences.

Yahoo! is looking to fragment the search market, create an equal opportunity for all players, and expand the Y! Search advertising network through unprecedented access to our search infrastructure. By creating this new ecosystem for search, we may see changes in our market share, but largely at our competitors’ expense.

With BOSS, you can build your own search engine - one that recognizes the difference between blogs, user reviews, news and shopping sites, and clusters results accordingly. Developers and companies can use BOSS to create a more social search engine, in which rankings are determined by a users’ social graph and combined with newsfeed results, or conduct a visual search to present thumbnails of the Web pages instead of links, making it more user-friendly for non-savvy searchers. Essentially, BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences for companies big and small.

[Manoj]: How is the search experience at Yahoo different than Google?

[Larry Cornett]: Yahoo! has spent a lot of time and research creating a new search experience for our users. One of the things we know from our research is that our users struggle when they are searching on an unfamiliar topic. They often don’t even know how to start their search. So in October 2007, we launched a significant new feature roll-out, which includes Yahoo! Search Assist and enhanced Yahoo! Shortcuts.

Search Assist (see below) essentially helps users overcome one of their key pain points, which is how to craft an effective query. As they begin to type their query or their keyword into the box, it suggests other keywords that might be related to what they’re typing. It also provides them the correct spelling of those keywords. And after they’ve conducted their initial search, Search Assist actually suggests related concepts based on their query to help them follow the right path to get the job done.

We know from our research that another pain point for users is that search engines often don’t provide the ultimate answer. They only help them down the path of finding the answer. And what we want to do at Yahoo! is actually start to begin to deliver what they really need within the search experience. So we’re not just focused on the process of searching but really on the act of finding. And to that end, we have also introduced enhanced Yahoo! Shortcuts (see below) that actually deliver the most relevant information that our users are seeking for particular types of searches.

So for example, if you type in the name of a movie at the very top of the search results page you get a link to a video trailer. You get local show times in your area, a link to a deeper description of that movie as well as reviews from critics and other Yahoo! users, right there at the top of the search results page. We’re trying to deliver the most relevant information to our users immediately following their search to help make their job easier.

We know that this is resonating with users, as Yahoo! was voted No. 1 in Search Assistance & Suggestions, according to a Dec. 2007 Keynote Systems study, “Keynote Customer Experience Rankings: Search”.

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Carl Icahn added to his stake in Yahoo just before Thanksgiving and bought more than 6.77 million shares. Naturally, folks need to find the meaning in Icahn’s move.

Kara Swisher notes that Icahn may have upped his investment because Jerry Yang’s replacement is about to be named sooner than later. Kara floats a few more names […]

Just this week, I was applauding Twitter for rejecting an offer from Facebook. One reason I noted was that Twitter’s SMS text feature makes alerts from twittering (tweeting?) news outlets such as ZDNet even more valuable. Now, that feature seems headed for the history books as wireless carriers impose fee hikes on sites like Twitter […]

by Stoney deGeyter

Yesterday we looked at five decision making strategies and applied them to SEO. Today we’ll conclude with an additional five ways to help you make better SEO and business success decisions.

Take time to get all the facts; conjecture leads to crisis.

There are two sets of facts that you need to have before moving forward with any type of SEO strategy or fix. The first is understanding what the problems with the site are, and the second is knowing what can or cannot be done to fix them.

When putting together your options for moving forward, understanding these facts will help you sort out which options are viable and which are not. Moving forward without being fully aware of all the facts leads to poor decisions based off of an incomplete or poorly considered set of options.

Once you know the problem and have a set of options to work from, you then need to be sure to fully understand the potential implementation of each of these options. Some options are simply not as workable on some sites as on others. Knowing what you’re working with and how each option may play out within the confines of your site matters a great deal.

Consider the consequences of each action.

As an SEO we have to be fully aware that every change to a site could have potentially negative consequences. Granted most strategies have been proven to produce a positive impact on websites, but this isn’t true 100% of the time. Some changes will have a positive long-term impact but have a severely negative short-term effect.

Before moving forward with any change to a site you have to consider both the long- and short- term consequences. Any short-term negatives have to be weighed against the overall long-term gains. In many cases the overall gain isn’t worth the losses that’ll happen in between. A good example of this is changing URL structure just to get keywords in the URLs. The gain will be minimal while the temporary loss in rankings can be significant.

Make sure your expectations don’t exceed your potential and your resources.

One of the hardest thing to do in SEO is to manage expectations properly. An SEO selling their services will often promise miracles to get the sale but then tell the client not to expect miracles at all. SEO is never a magic solution and often times what we think will be an easy job turns out to be anything but. It’s like peeling back the layers of an onions. You get one problem solved and that uncovers several more problems.

One of the primary issues with keeping expectations in balance is ensuring that client knows what they can expect for the investment they have made. Sometimes you promise little but the client expects a great deal, even though they are paying for very little. It’s important that the client knows what they’ll be getting for the service they have paid for and understand that sometimes you have to pay more to get more.

Time is your most limited and valuable resource. Don’t wast it.

My personal philosophy on time is don’t do yourself what you can pay someone else to do for you. Especially if you know they can do it more quickly and efficiently.

As they say, time is money.

Every small business owner has this dilemma. How much should they do themselves versus how much can they afford to hire someone to do for them. When it comes to SEO, the business owner must decide how much of their own time can be dedicated to doing the detailed work, or if their time is better spent elsewhere, like running the business.

SEO isn’t difficult but it does require knowledge. Most of that knowledge is available for free, but that doesn’t take into consideration the cost of your time to learn it, implement it and then to ensure each strategy is performing effectively.

On the SEO side, the client is paying for results. There are a lot of things we can spend our time doing for a client, but first and foremost our time must be spent where it will provide the greatest return. This is especially true when budgets are limited. We must put often balance between doing what’s important and doing what’s urgent. And sometimes we can’t do both.

One note to business owners who hire SEOs to do a job for them. Realize that any time they spend taking your calls and answering emails is time away from the work they could be spending on your account. That’s not to suggest that your time isn’t wisely invested in getting updates, however having to constantly be reassured means that the SEO is spending that time talking rather than doing.

Allow yourself a 10% risk of being wrong, a 50% likelihood of something going wrong, and a 100% commitment to survive it all.

There are many precautions that we must take in life but hope that they won’t be unnecessary. Just like insurance, we need to have it but hope to never have to use it. When moving forward with your SEO campaign there are are certain mental precautions that we must understand in order to be prepared for, however unlikely they may be.

The first is that you may be wrong. Shocker! Whether you’re wrong about implementing this strategy over that strategy, or choosing one path over another, you have to be content with knowing that at some point or another you’ll make a bad decision. Nobody is 100% perfect 100% of the time. Some SEO strategies are implemented based on past performance from other sites, but there is no guarantee that the same strategy will work for this site. Be prepared to be wrong.

You must also be aware that doing all the right things correctly, something may still go seriously and unexpectedly wrong. There is no clear path into the future and only hind site is 20/20. Be prepared for disasters but hope they never come.

Finally, no matter what, you must be committed to overcoming all obstacles and generating your own success. Life throws curve balls and SEO is not an exact enough science to be smooth sailing all the way. So whatever happens, being prepared for the possible but accepting only victory is the only sure way to success.

Success is a path that must be paved by each person making wise decisions. Search engine optimization isn’t an instant path to victory. There are still dozens of daily decisions that have to be carefully considered and thoroughly before action is taken. But once you have a history of making good SEO decisions, success becomes much easier.

Every day new habits are developed that help us better understand and implement the myriads of SEO strategies that we are presented with. With each successful decision, the next becomes easier and our rate of implementing a successful SEO campaign increases. Just as in all aspects of life, making solid SEO decisions leads us to a more assured victory online.

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In a blog post last month, I chimed in on how some tech companies - notably Dell and Cisco - were using video as a marketing tool to promote their technologies, not just their brand names. After all, if networking comes across as cool, then maybe you’ll buy a Cisco product, right?
If ever there was […]

Teri Takai, the State of California’s CIO, talks to CNET’s Dan Farber about overseeing an IT organization with more than 130 CIOs and 10,000 technology workers. She also discusses California’s e-government initiatives from going green to managing costs during tough economic times.
2 minute Video Shorts
Short on time? Check out our summary shorts of the interview

Managing […]