Rich snippets help you to improve the look of your website on Google’s search results pages. Pages that use rich snippets usually get more clicks than web pages that are displayed without them. How can you make sure that Google displays your website with additional information?
In response to my original column on disintermediation, Joel Snyder worried about the impact on customer service: The worst casualty is relationships and people skills. As consumers circumvent middlemen, they become harder to deal with. As merchants become more automated, customer service people have less power and less skills (and lower pay).
On Monday, one of the by-products of disintermediation hit me with the force of a…well…a hurricane, to be exact. We are more connected globally than ever before.
This Monday and Tuesday, three different online services I use went down because of Sandy. They all had data centers on the east coast.
Disintermediation means centralization, which means that we will have more contact with people and businesses that spread across the globe.
For the past several columns, I’ve been talking about disintermediation. My hypothesis is that technology is driving a general disintermediation of the marketplace (well, it’s not really my hypothesis -- it’s a pretty commonly held view) and is eliminating a vast “middle” infrastructure that has accounted for much of the economic activity of the past several decades. It’s a massive shift (read “disruption”) in the market that will play out over the next several years.
In my three previouscolumns on disintermediation, I made a rather large assumption: that the market will continue to see a balancing of information available both to buyers and sellers. As this information becomes more available, the need for the “middle” will decrease.
One of the most scrutinized positions within any corporate environment belongs to the IT professionals. On paper, Information Technologists are always a loss. Not because they actually are, but because they are identified with operational expenses, and not connected to revenue. Without them, no business in this age of technology could run, but IT always find themselves having to build a case for their value. The bottom line is, without question, they are the unsung heroes of the standard corporate environment.
People don’t trust search ads. At least, 64% of people don’t trust search ads.
Apparently, search is not unique. According to the same research, nobody trusts ads of any kind. That’s not really surprising, given that it’s advertising. Its entire purpose is to make us suddenly want crap we don’t need. Small wonder we don’t trust it.
But you know what we do trust? The opinions of our friends.
That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. - Garrison Keillor
How good are you? How intelligent, how talented, how kind, how patient? You can give me your opinion, but just like the citizens of Lake Wobegon, you’ll be making those judgments in a vacuum unless you compare yourself to others. Hence the importance of benchmarking.
SEO (search engine optimization) is an investment that no business can ignore. If you use search engine optimization correctly, you can make sure that your business gets high rankings on search engines, attracts the right customers and makes more money.
On Monday of this week, fellow Search Insider Ryan DeShazer bravely threw his hat back in the ring regarding this question: Is Google better or worse off because of SEO?
DeShazer confessed to being vilified after a previous column indicated that Google owed us something. I admit I have a column penned but never submitted that Ryan could have added to the “vilify” side of that particular tally. But in his Monday column, Ryan touches on a very relevant point, “What is the thin line between White Hat and Black Hat SEO?” For as long as I’ve been in this industry (which is pushing 17 years now) I’ve heard that same debate. I’ve been at conference sessions where white hats and black hats went head to head on the question. It’s one of those discussions that most sane people in the world could care less about, but we in the search biz can’t seem to let it go.