Behind the Form - Google, The Deep-Web Crawl, and Impact on Search Engine Visibility

By Jeremy Shaffer

Crazy Things That Really Rich Companies Do

Kind of like that weird guy at the party with an acoustic guitar and the Pink Floyd shirt, Google is getting DEEP. Some would say...uncomfortably deep. After an already busy year, wherein Google released an open source mobile OS and a browser that's rapidly gaining market share, they recently announced that they had mapped the sea floor, including the Mariana Trench. And hey, why not found a school featuring some of the greatest scientific minds out there and see what happens?

So Google's been more visible than ever lately, and there's no doubt that this'll continue as they get their hands into more and more projects - but let's drop down a few floors and look at something that should dramatically affect the way Google's indexing programs ("spiders" or "crawlers") collect data, analyze websites and present the results.As much work as the BEM Interactive search engine marketing team puts into making sites appeal to spiders (and there's a lot we can do to make those spiders love it), the spider programs themselves are pretty straight-forward: hit a site's page index, check out the structure and content, and compare that to what Google has determined to be "relevant" or "popular."

But because of the way these programs are written, there are certain areas that they simply can't reach...namely pages that require human information, input, or action. As a basic example, there's usually a confirmation page after a user submits a "Contact Us" or "Newsletter Sign-up" form - this could contain a promotional code or some other kind of unique data.This dynamically generated content (this could also be a search results page, calculations or conversions, even the results of a symptom tool on a medical site) simply doesn't exist until the user creates it! Depending on the form you filled out, the resulting page is yours and yours alone - so try to ignore that tingle of omnipotence next time you Google something.

But search engine spiders can't understand what the form is asking for or the info being delivered to the user - and even if they could, how would they figure out what to insert in order to generate any relevant content? Drop-down boxes, category selection, zip code input - any of these forms can prevent data from being indexed. Collectively, this blocked data is referred to as the "Deep Web." By some estimates, the Deep Web contains an astounding amount of data - several orders of magnitude more than what's currently searchable. Since they chiefly rely on site maps and hyperlinks, search engines crawlers just can't find a way to access the information.

So can Google really expect to find, log and interpret this data? Well, between mapping the ocean and opening a school that will probably discover the meaning of life before lunch, Google did just that. Working with scientists from Cornell and UCSD, Google researchers (whom I can only hope will not become supervillians at some point) have devised a method for their spiders to complete and submit HTML forms populated with intelligent content. The resulting pages are then indexed and treated as regular indexed data and displayed in search results - in fact, at this moment, content gathered from behind an HTML form is displayed on the first page of Google search queries 1000 times every a second. The methods the bots are using are pretty cool, but I'm Nerd McNerdleson about that kind of thing. So we won't dive in to the technical stuff here, but check out the article if you're into it.

That's cool...NERD. But what does it mean?

Everyone knows Google loves relevance - their entire business model is built upon it. This technology is about pulling exactly what the user is searching for and immediately providing it without even requiring them to visit any page outside of the Google results page! Spooky.

Say that you're feeling under the weather. Rather than type in "symptom checker" and find a WebMD-type page, you type "coughing, runny nose, strange bubonic plague-like swelling" directly into the search engine. Google - who has already had their spiders hit every medical symptom form out there, query them in endless varieties and combinations, and determine the relevance & popularity of the results - immediately comes back with "You've got the Black Death" and you're set (or...maybe not).

From a retailing standpoint, many sites have functions to generate product lists based on user input. As it stands now, a shopper looking for a red, American-made minivan with under 30K miles would find the appropriate website, input his or her criteria, whereupon the website would query the database and return the results. If Google continues to move forward with their deep web crawls, this information could be displayed directly through their outlet of choice without the user ever accessing any site other than Google (if the user makes a purchase, does Google get a cut? Hmm...)

Obviously, this is a massive step forward in search technology and, in an industry that seems to change every hour, represents a new method of obtaining and presenting information. As web marketers, this is another variable, another challenge to consider in our work - how can we optimize pages that can be generated in a seemingly limitless number of ways? With search engines becoming increasingly more powerful and their data mining capabilities getting deeper, will there come a time when all data is presented through one aggregate portal? This may be years down the line, but the technology and the foundations are here now; forward-thinking businesses and web marketers need to be there as well.

Jeremy Shaffer, Web Marketing Specialist
BEM Interactive - Providing full-scope services in Website Design / Development and Web Marketing / SEO

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jeremy_Shaffer

Email Autoresponder Service Strategies - How to Choose the Autoresponder That Best Meets Your Needs

By Elisabeth Kuhn

Do you really need an autoresponder? You do. An email autoresponder service that helps you build and automate your mailing list will be at the heart of your online business. The question is, which one should you choose?

First, you need to decide between your two major options:

Shopping Cart System versus Straight Autoresponder

If you have any plans at all to sell digital products now or in the future, you may want to get an integrated shopping cart system that includes an autoresponder, such as 1shoppingcart, that you can upgrade to provide space for all of your products and hook them up to a payment and delivery system. You can even set up an affiliate system with it eventually (for an upgrade).

Almost anyone can benefit from such a shopping cart system - even if you only need the basic version, you can just stick with that and that'll be a fairly inexpensive solution for you. You get up to 10,000 contacts before they charge you more than their basic fee. That's a lot of customers! And no extra charges for numbers of different mailing lists -- or numbers of mailings.

If you have an offline business, on the other hand, and you don't believe you will ever want to sell digital products, there is another choice, and as an autoresponder it's even more user friendly than the shopping cart: Aweber, a company that provides outstanding autoresponders all by themselves.

However, depending on your budget, you might want to know that Aweber may be less expensive initially but it also may be best if you don't expect your list to grow very big because they start charging quite a bit more fairly quickly, and they also count names more than once if they're on multiple lists. With Aweber, if one name is on five lists, it will count as five names towards your maximum for any given level. With 1shoppingcart, you can have the same name on 10 different lists, and it will still just count as one name.

Other autoresponder options

There are other autoresponder service options, including Getresponse and iContact. Here are a couple of questions you should ask if you consider them:

Will you be able to have people sign up for different mailing lists, for example if they purchase multiple products that each come with their separate follow-up system? That could be an issue with Getresponse, which works great for capturing leads (and is quite inexpensive) but may not be the best option if you want the option of having the same person on multiple lists. It also has less flexibility than either of the above options.

Do they charge extra if you send out a lot of big mailings? This can be an issue with iContact, which gets much more expensive very quickly as your contact list grows and you send out bigger mailings.

And last but not least -- can you track open rates, and if so, how difficult is it? The easier it is to track, the better you're able to adjust your email marketing campaigns for best effects.

Either way, if you're not sure which one to choose, you should give several of the options a whirl to see which one you like best. The one thing to remember is this: You must have an autoresponder, and preferably a reputable one.

Because if you don't and attempt to send those emails from your own server, you're not only making lots of needless work for yourself, but you're also courting big trouble. A few spam complaints, and you're out of business. Professional autoresponder services basically force you to set things up correctly, so you're at much less risk.

Last but not least, there's the deliverability issue: All the reputable autoresponder services have an excellent deliverability record. And in the age of spam filters, that's a key asset. After all, what good is the best email campaign when nobody sees it!

Ready to try out an autoresponder? Here's a 30-day FREE trial for the best integrated shopping cart system to get you started And for more great tips, tricks, and how-to advice, check out Elisabeth Kuhn's FREE e-courseInternet Marketing Step-by-Step with lots of info on affiliate marketing, article marketing, and more on Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Elisabeth_Kuhn