ChaCha's Mobile Text Search Service

ChaCha has been and continues to be the fastest growing text search/answer service around. The way ChaCha works is you send a question of any kind to 242242 and you receive an answer to your question via your cell phone usually within minutes. ChaCha is a human powered search engine so all of your questions are answered by a live person known as a ChaCha guide.

Mobile search is a segment that has solid growth, and will continue to grow for some time. To date ChaCha has answered over has answered over 300 million questions mostly from teens and young adults.  ChaCha reaches over 14 million users each month. ChaCha experienced a 191% growth rate in 2009.

ChaCha is headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis. Founded in 2006 by serial entrepreneurs Scott A. Jones and Brad Bostic, ChaCha launched its mobile answers service in January 2008 with a major promotion at the Sundance Film Festival.

Wondering where the quirky name came from? “ChaCha” was selected as the name of the company for three reasons: 1. “Cha” means “search” in Chinese. 2. Cha Cha is also a fast-paced ballroom dance, and our Guides can be thought of as dance partners who will lead you to the best answers quickly and smoothly. 3. ChaCha just sounds cool and is a lot of fun to say.

How Long Should SEO Rankings Results take to be indexed by the Search Engines?

This question is one of the most commonly asked questions by our clients. We’re going to assume that your domain name has been around for at least a couple of years to answer this question.  That way the domain name, sandbox age issues won’t come into play.  Most search engines penalize you for being new and they want to see websites that have been around for a while in order to compete for the more sought after search terms.

If you have a website that is changed on a regular basis, two to five times per week then odds are that the search engine bots are crawling your website on a regular basis due to your website having fresh content. Fresh content is good food for the search engines. If you fall into this category then you will notice your changes are indexed in a matter of hours or days.

For website changes that are less frequent then you may only see the search engine bots on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. If you’re not happy with that time frame then you should consider keeping your site fresher by making updates regularly.

Tips on Getting Higher Rankings on Google

So you have followed the Google webmaster guidelines and now you want to take your website to the next level. Below are some additional ideas to help get higher rankings.

Look at your industry and come up with what you believe to be the top keywords for your industry. Come up with anywhere from 5 to 10 keyphrases. Go to Google, Yahoo or Bing and search for these keyphrases and track the top results. These are your competitors.

 Look at the PR (pagerank) of your competition and track who links to your top competitors and track their PR value. The higher the PR value the more popular a site is suppose to be. See how that adds up with your competition.

Look at the anchor text of the people linking to your competition. Do they use the popular keyphrases to link to them? Research how your website compares with them and you want to have more anchor text links with your keyphrases then they do.

Do as much research on inbound links as you can and focus on building inbound links into ALL of your web pages using viable anchor text.

Long Tail Searches Increased in 2009

Long tail keywords are usually three to six keyword phrases that are specific to their respective fields. For an example we are a “Los Angeles Web Design Company” so these five words used in a search would be considered long tail keywords. Long tails keywords also have a greater conversion rate because in most cases they are the most descriptive. If I use more words to describe what I am looking for then the chances are greater that my search will be more accurate.

Latest query results from Nielsen Online, Hitwise and comScore reported an increase in searchers using long tail keywords over previous years. Each year long tail keywords are getting longer. Shorter one or two word searches are becoming less frequently used. Three to six word phrase searches are increasing.

Words/Query 2009    2008    2007
1 word         20.4%  21.1%  24.5%
2 words       23.6%  24.9%  25.7%
3 words       21.8%  21.9%  20.7%
4 words       14.9%  14.5%  13.3%
5 words        8.7%   8.2%     7.5%

Four and five word queries have continued the increase since 2007

Google’s Human Reviewers and how they Judge your Websites

Often times it’s either overlooked or forgotten that Google also uses human reviewers along with having their results calculated by their algorithm.  The reviewer’s job is to look at sites that represent what Google users are searching for. By using a “real” search query they can keep the index fresher. It is estimated by Google that they have around 10,000 reviewers.  The reviewers also go and look at reported spam sites and investigate whether they are spammy or not.

As Google has always maintained their index is in constant flux, meaning it is always changing. Google constantly updates its algorithm.

If you have a website you should check your rankings at least once a week. Don’t assume that your rankings will remain the same. As previously stated the index is in constant flux. Since the web is in constant change so will your rankings be.

As always paying attention to good document structure, good content and good inbound links will you maintain your rankings.

Image Optimization with the Google & Bing Index

You can increase your website traffic by optimizing your website images so they come up in Google’s and Bing’s image searches. Both of these indexes have indexed billions of web images. For each search these indexes display image results both on the natural search results and the image search results.

For example if you do a search for “panda bears” on either search engine you will notice that they show the popular results of the top images. These images are linked to their corresponding websites, and generate additional website traffic. So how do you get listing in the top of the image search results? There are some general rules that you need to follow to optimize your chances. Start by naming you image using the keywords that best describe it. So in the case of the panda bear I would call it panda-bear.jpg. I separated the image name with a hyphen. Next I want to optimize my html image code to maximize my chances of being one of the top images and you can do that by using your code in the following way: <img src=" panda-bear.jpg " alt="Panda Bear" title=" Panda Bear " width="480" height="480">.  Notice that both the alt text and the title text appear right next to the image name. This will help in the image optimization.  Lastly always include the image width and height attributes and your surrounding web page text should be optimized for your subject which in this case is Panda Bears.

I’m not positive that it makes a difference but it seems that if an image is larger that it seems to do better in the image search results. Experiment with this and tell us your findings.

Real-Time Search Revisited

Back in early January we told you about Google's real-time search platform.

Now that we have had some time pass by with Google and Bings announced partnerships with Twitter we wanted to revisit real-time search and take a look at how things were progressing. Both Google and Bing are showing tweets along with their natural search results. Google shows Twitter results based on query volume. When Google's search frequency is attained then their algorithm shows real-time results.

Google doesn't divulge their algorithm for their real-time search results but they look at things like, how many followers a user has, The more they have the more they are trusted. If you are a trusted user then you are more likely to have your results shown in real-time search results. Below is an example of a search done on Google for "Drew Bees".



Here are some tips on getting into the real-time search results:

• Use recent events or happenings in your tweets so you are fresh and in the moment
• Be involved in your communities and engage in conversations
• Be involved on a daily basis
• Your headlines should be filled with keywords
  

Real-time search application