A recent Google patent sheds new light on how Google categorizes pages. In the patent, Google provides the following example of the categorization process:
“Cleaning Supplies,” “Lawn Care,” “Maintenance,” and “Decorative,” represent subcategories and can also reflect specific items. [...]
“Brooms,” “Mops,” “Vacuum Cleaners,” “Rakes,” “Mowers,” “Flamingos,” “Gnomes,” reflect the specific items to which individual documents and potential search query terms are associated.
The category hierarchy could equally be defined as a list with each category including a full item description. For instance, “Flamingos” could be expressed as a list item, “Household>Lawn Care>Decorative>Flamingos.”
What does this mean for internet marketing companies? I agree for the most part with this article. With the new patent in mind, it would be highly recommended that SEOs pay closer attention to the keywords they use, especially paying attention to hierarchies and focusing not only on the target keyword phrases (“pink lawn flamingoes” for example) but also on the hierarchy of categories. In the example, an SEO may want to focus on the additional phrases of ‘household’, ‘lawn care’, and ‘decorative’.
This new patent forces SEOs to think on multiple levels when optimizing pages, so, in addition to including target keywords in the content of the page, they should take into account the big picture and really know their product in order to categorize it appropriately. As always, content is still an important factor of SEO, but it may be a good idea to consider categories in the META and title information as well.
Foursquare is one of numerous new applications available today for location-based customer experiences to occur and with the recent roll out of Facebook Places, some people have expressed concern for how this might affect Foursquare. Facebook’s Zuckerburg was genuinely humble about the fact that the local market is a “big space.”
