Digital Media Buzz > Contextual Search Tools Improve SEO

Contextual Search Tools Improve SEO

Posted: November 04, 2009

Image courtesy of Asterpix

By Barbara Gengler

Search engine optimization algorithms and policies continue to be in a constant flux as new software and tools emerge every day. Entering this foray is a company called Asterpix, which focuses on the search and discovery of all content.

Asterpix offers a product called SearchLight, which uses content analysis algorithms to help users discover new content and displays contextual search terms to increase pageviews and revenue.

SearchLight was launched this October, following a couple of months of beta. The content discovery tool offer allows publishers to help users discover more content on the publisher’s site and helps the publisher participate more in the search economics.Nat Kausik, chief executive at Asterpix, says the focus of SearchLight is to help users discover new content. “The typical user does a search on a search engine and goes to an online publisher, maybe reads a page, maybe another one and then goes right back to the search engine to search the Web again,” he says. “What we do is we try to anticipate what the user’s next search is going to be and we suggest related searches if you will for each page. And that search searches the publishers site for the content based on what the user clicks on.”

One customer, ConsumerAffairs.com, which is a consumer advocacy site that tries to fetter out frauds and scams, has been using the service for several months. James Hood, ConsumerAffairs.com, president & editor in chief, explained his website decided to give search engine optimization a try to help readers find content on their website. “Our site has grown so much, it’s a little over 11 years, and there’s more content there than most people discover when they come to do research on an issue,” Hood says. “So using the content cloud that Asterpix provides we thought would be helpful in that way. And it actually turned out to produce quite a bit of revenue.”

According to Hood, it was kind of a secondary consideration as the site previously did not have ad-supported search. “We just got around to that when we added Asterpix around the same time and the combination of the two produced about a 15- to 20-percent bump in revenue,” he says.

Asterpix has developed patent-pending technology in-house, called PhraseMatch, which semantically analyzes the page to display contextually relevant search phrases next to publisher content.

The New York Times does the analyzing by hand, through its editorial department. “Although it is editorially pleasing if you are reading an article about the Pope and the Church, you are unlikely to search for the Roman Catholic Church or Christianity. And if you click on one of those it goes to their search page.”Kausik points out this is not an Asterpix product, “this is the home-brewed product of the New York Times who has also realized the premise that I just mentioned.” (The New York Times was contacted for this article but did not respond.)

Kausik says he is not aware of other companies offering a similar product, but “that doesn’t mean there won’t be anyone doing it in the immediate future.”

Separately, recently released data from comScore points out little change for the top five search engines in September as Google retains its massive market position with 64.9 percent, followed by Yahoo with 18.8 percent and Microsoft sites grabbing 9.4 percent market share. Ask Network captured 3.9 percent and AOL LLC Network rounded out the top five with 3.0 percent.

SEO Tips from experts: