Posts by Bas van den Beld

Bas van den Beld is a speaker, trainer and online marketing strategist. Bas is the owner of Stateofsearch.com. -- You can hire Bas to speak, train or consult. -- More articles and bio from Bas van den Beld

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Looking at the why of the Semantic Web

The “Semantic Web”, a term much used, but not much understood. Why do we even bother using it in the first place? Because in the end, it does make sence. At least, the ‘why’ behind the Semantic Web makes sense. And maybe we won’t be using the term that much, Semantic Web is coming. Just look at the user intent many search engines are now trying to ‘grab’.

The documentary below (found through Mashable) gives a good insight in the idea behind the Semantic Web. This video was actually made by a student, Kate Ray, who interviewed several people to get an insight in the Semantic Web.

If you were just getting a sandwich for lunch, I’d suggest you start up this video while eating your sandwich!

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Li Evans at SES San Francisco (#sessf): her Wrap Up

Li Evans (@storyspinner) was one of the speakers at SES San Francisco. She reports from San Francisco exclusively for State of Search about her days at SES San Francisco.

In this video she wraps it up from the airport when she is heading home.

Bing Streetside Goes UK, Germany and France

I’ve reported on Bing Streetside before. In my view it could potentially even be a better product than Google’s Streetview. But like many of Bing’s products (and many other products too by the way) Streetside was only ‘really’ available in the US. Now it seems as if Microsoft finally found their way into Europe.

After the transition between Yahoo and Bing (also listen to our radioshow with Microsoft’s Cedric Chambaz about that) Bing now is starting to make Streetside available in parts of the United Kingdom, Germany and France. (more…)

Google (again) testing new interface look: less clutter (and try yourself)

Google is constantly looking for ways to improve their UI. In the past year the chances to the Google result pages (SERPS) have been immense. And it looks like we can be expecting some new changes soon. Again new tests have been found. This time its an ‘icon-less’ test.

In the test Google has gotten rid off all the icons on the result pages. Icons in the left sidebar and the +1 icon, the cached page link and the preview icon are all gone. That makes for a ‘cleaner’ result page. What is interesting is that you might be able to ‘opt-in’ on this test. (more…)

Li Evans interviews Avi Wilensky and Christian Georgeou at SES San Francisco

Li Evans , author of the book Social Media Marketing, spent this week at SES San Francisco 2011 and took her camera to get us all updated about the conference. Below you can find interviews she did with Avi Wilensky,co-founder of statdash.com and Christian Georgeou, marketing manager at SES.

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Thinks looking good for search marketers but: It’s all about the (mobile) dialogue

A research performed by the Dutch Dialogue Marketing Association shows that things are looking good for search marketers, much more money will be spent on search in 2010. The research shows its all about the dialogue, search and mobile.

The research is a quarterly questionnaire amongst the members of the DDMA. The results give us a nice insights in which direction the marketers believe the industry is going. We can learn and benefit from that. (more…)

Google: beauty or the beast?

Google has got many different faces. There are all the great services they offer, for free, on the one hand. And on the other hand there is the (indirect) price you pay for the services: information. The information-part is what rises questions about privacy-issues. The question is how much we really care about our privacy, but that’s for another time. For now, look at the video below and see how a feeling about Google can be expressed. But are they right or wrong…?

Jim Sterne on Social Media Metrics – London SES

This post was written by Thomas Schonenberger from Mediavision who was our guest at SES London last week.

Thursdays keynote at SES London was given by Jim Sterne, founder of the eMetrics marketing Optimisation Summit and current chairman of Web Analytics Association. Jim presented us some thoughts on what and why we should be measuring to gauge our effectiveness on Social Media. When we consider that everything we do these days involves other people and the community in some form or another, it is really important to consider the context in which we define “Social Media”. Essentially all channels are social media! Any platform that allows content to be easily distributed (not necessarily online) – this is how connected humans communicate with each other. It is going to be around for a while to come! Embrace it.

Jim opened with a bit of background on marketing, considering the good old days of trading: How many chickens for that sheep? We would negotiate till we had a deal – it was done face to face and one to one. That was till they invented a price tag! Then came factories and shipping. Now we do commerce with people we don’t know. So we need to make noise to sell product and we call that advertising. Repetition of your message builds trust and you create desire. In the hay day of advertising you needed a Logo, a slogan and a jingle and you were set! That was the only channel. Now with the interweb, it is about making noise – not just about how loud, but where to focus that and how best to tune it. (more…)

Why Dashes in Urls are better than Underscores

It’s one of the many rankingfactors within Google: your urls. One of the talks I have a lot is whether people should use dashes or underscores in their urls because many sites have underscores. The answer is dashes off course. But why? Matt Cutts explains it in this video. Over at Searchengineland Matt McGee extracts the differences in behavior when it comes to dashes and underscores between Google and Bing.

Hotel Stars Ratings: How Do They Work? [Infographic]

Last week we welcomed Wouter Blok of Easytobook to our radioshow. In that show we discussed, amongst others, reviews and ratings. Something which is becoming more important each day. But sometimes it is hard to get a grip on them. Luckily Wouter’s company made an infographic .

This one shows exactly how ratings in Hotel Stars work, not only handy to know when you book a room, but also to keep in mind that ratings, whether its about hotel stars or websites, are usually built up with a lot more consideration than you would guess. (more…)

Google Search Algorithm Updates 2002-2011 (infographic)

Google’s updates always make sure we have a lot to discuss, with the recent Panda update off course being one of the most discussed updates. But in fact we shouldn’t be surprised when Google does an update, they have done many in the past. This infographic shows several of them. (more…)