Website owners are often looking for new ways to see how search engines crawl and index their site.  Just last week Live Search announced the launch of Live Search Webmaster Center, bringing it out of beta. 
 
This recent update, which many were delighted to hear, enables webmasters to see even more about how Live Search is viewing their site and probably the most notable feature is the availability of backlink data. Advanced queries such as link:, linkdomain: and inurl: were available for a limited period of time by Live Search, but were blocked in early 2007 (only a few months later) due to “mass automated usage for data mining”.  This caused disappointment among many webmasters and site owners, as they were no longer able to see their link data in Live Search. 

Knowing who is linking to your site can be important for numerous reasons. Each page that links to a page on your site is suggesting to the search engines that your page is popular or important enough to reference. The popularity or importance of a web page is a factor in determining its placement in the search results. It is essential to remember that while having many links is important, the value or quality of those links is just as important. The value of a backlink is determined by the value of the page offering the link. Therefore, if a page that is considered authoritative or important links to a page on your site, some of that weight or value is then passed along to your page.  Having backlink data also helps to identify your audience and who may be talking about your products or services. Of course the more links directed to your site, the more traffic you will likely see as well, making and managing your inbound links important for your bottom line.

Google and Yahoo! both provide data about a site’s backlinks as well as the ability to download this information, but a unique feature to Webmaster Center is a tool enabling you to filter this data. This filtering makes it easier to view specific results on certain areas of the site. The Page Score column, unique to Webmaster Center will also definitely be recognized. This Page Score is basically an indication of how Live Search perceives the URL offering the link to your site.
 
With announcements such as these, we are able to see that Live Search recognizes the importance of upholding a good relationship with site owners and is making obvious efforts to improve the information that they provide.  I look forward to seeing new updates and announcements in the future.   Also—take a look at the new look of Live Search.

In an ideal world, personalized search would be the rule and the only button that anybody would need on Google’s home page would be this one:

Any time you entered a search term (if that was even necessary in the ideal world); Google would magically read your mind and produce the exact result you want. Sadly, this world is far in the future and even if it were possible now, how often do we ourselves really know what we want? Personalized search results may be the answer to a better search experience. 

Search engine efforts to personalize search have been fraught with difficulties. Of course, as just noted, it’s very difficult to guess what someone wants. To try to improve their guesses, Google has been collecting information about users’ search histories and when they input a search query, they rank those queries based on the past behavior of the searcher. They do this by tracking your Web History when you sign in for their services. However, it’s fairly easy to disable this – just sign out - and this has always frustrated Google’s efforts to consistently collect this valuable information. A fairly reliable and robust set of data from a variety of searches would be necessary to make really informed guesses about what a user wants. Furthermore, Google (along with other search engines) has been under fire from Privacy advocates for using this data to tailor their advertising to user preferences.

Now, Google and the other search engines appear to be taking a new tack in their efforts to further personalize search and encourage us to let them keep our data. Recently, Google has been adding a link in the top right corner of a personalized search result:

By adding a warning to the personalized search results, Google lets users know that their results are filtered and gives them the opportunity to see the results without personalization by clicking on the More details link.

Google’s announcement also made it clear that they do not restrict search personalization to users that have volunteered their information by signing in for the service. They are using cookies to track a user’s behavior in addition to the IP address of the user. While this may be good news for users, it does make things a little tougher for search engine optimization because search engine rankings are obviously much more relative than we thought. Ranking number one without personalization does not necessarily mean ranking number one with it. What does this mean for search engine optimization? While we cannot control what results will appear in any one personalized result, we do have some measure of control over whether or not a user will click on the result if offered it. By creating good title tags that closely match the intended search query and entice the user to click through to the page with matching description tag text that further convinces them that your page is what they are looking for, you can increase the chances that your pages appear in any one user’s web history and therefore increase the chances that your pages continue to appear in their search results.

By giving users the ability to peer inside the search engine and get a glimpse of where the result comes from, Google also opens up opportunities for website owners to further enhance the personalized search results for their more dedicated followers. If more searchers are willing to opt for personalization services, it will become more important to take advantage of opportunities like Subscribed Links or Yahoo’s Search Monkey to make your links even more attractive to those users. This week, Yahoo added the enhanced results for Yelp, LinkedIn and Yahoo local search to their default search results:

Ultimately, what will get visitors to your site is proper promotion whether through search engines or other methods, including increasingly popular social media sites like http://www.facebook.com/ and making sure that you have good quality and relevant content for your visitors when they get there. Personalized search is here and the only thing to do is get ready.

Imagine for a minute that you’re watching your favorite band in concert and everyone is playing their instrument as loud as possible and in a random manner. The result would be a noise that is almost intolerable. The same goes for design and usability.

A well structured and organized website with good eye flow is essential to getting your message across to the user as quickly as possible. You must have a hierarchy of importance with content, photography and graphics. This relevancy is also a key ingredient to Search Engine Optimization.

Over this 3 part series we will focus on Emphasis in Design using content, photography and graphic elements.

Let’s get started by covering a few text formats to be aware of when designing your web page.

Headline
(Known as an “H1” in html. H1’s are highly important in SEO)
Ask yourself this question: What is my main message? What do I want someone to read if they are only on my site for a few seconds? This is where you place all of your emphasis. Emphasizing a headline doesn’t necessarily mean making it big, bold and bright yellow. That would be the equivalent of someone shouting in your ear. It’s not very pleasing and can be quite an eyesore. A better way to grab someone’s attention is to use a more elegant font with a lot of white space. Ever heard of the saying, “Less is more”?

Subhead
(Known as an “H2” in html. Also very important in SEO. It is possible to have H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. Keep in mind that the relevance is reduced by the higher number.)
The subhead is the supporting message to the headline. It gives a little more information in regard to the main message and entices the reader to continue on.

Body copy
This is where you provide complete information about what you want to communicate. It is subordinate to the headline and subhead and should reflect that.
This is a simple concept but often abandoned. I’ve seen companies, even Fortune 500 companies, miss the mark on this. Design is a “give and take” and sometimes you have to give a little to make your content interesting enough to look at.

Lets take a look at some examples:

Here is a prime example of how NOT to layout information. Everything has the same emphasis and wants all the attention.

This is a Headline
This is a Subhead
This is Body Copy

This Example is a little better but still confusing as to what gets the attention.

THIS IS A HEADLINE
This is a Subhead
This is Body Copy

In this last example, we can clearly see what content is relevant and important.

This is a Headline
This is a Subhead

This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy. This is body copy.
This format is exactly how search engines read your content. Now you can see how important it is to have correct emphasis on a web page. Not only will your users thank you, but the search engines will love you!