(Seo marketing) The Encyclopedia Britannica 2009
No commentsBy sumit
The Encyclopedia Britannica 2009 (established in 1768), both in its Ultimate (now also called “Student and Home”) and Deluxe versions, builds on the success of its completely revamped previous editions in 2006-8. The rate of innovation in the last three versions was impressive and welcome. It continues apace in this rendition with Britannica Biographies (Great Minds and Leaders), Classical Music (500 audio files arranged by composer), and a great Workspace for Project Management (a kind of friendly digital den). Generous 6-12 months of free access to the myriad riches of the Britannica Online complete the package.
The Britannica comes bundled with an atlas (close to 1800 maps linked to articles and 287 World Data Profiles of individual countries and territories); the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus, augmented by a Spanish-English translation dictionary; classic articles from previous editions; eleven yearbooks; an Interactive Timeline with 4000+ indexed timeline entries; a Research Organizer; and a Knowledge Navigator (called The Brain or BrainStormer). All told, it offers a directory of more than 166,000 reviewed and vetted links to online content.
In its new form, the Britannica is as user-friendly as the Encarta. With a new A to Z Quick Search feature, monthly updates and the aforementioned 6-12 months of free access to its impressive powerhouse online Web site, it is bound to give the former tough competition.
The Britannica’s newest interface is even more intuitive and uncluttered than previously and is great fun to use. It offers morsels of knowledge, some of it date-specific, appetizingly presented through a ticker tape of visuals that leisurely scrolls across the bottom of the screen plus highly edifying interactive tours of articles and attendant media.
When you enter even the first few letters of a term in the search box, it offers various options and is persistent: no need to click on the toolbar’s “search” button every time you want to find something in this vast storehouse of knowledge. Moreover, the user can save search results onto handy “Virtual Notecards”. Whole articles can be copied onto the seemingly inexhaustible Workspace.
The new Britannica’s display is tab-based, avoiding the erstwhile confusing proliferation of windows with every move. Most importantly, articles appear in full, not in sections. This major improvement facilitates the finding of relevant keywords in and the printing of entire texts. These are only a few of the numerous alterations and enhancements.
Perhaps the most refreshing change is the Britannica’s Update Center. Dozens of monthly updates and new, timely articles are made available online (subject to free registration). A special button alerts the user when an entry in the base product has been updated.
Regrettably, unlike in the Encarta, the updates cannot be downloaded to the user’s computer or otherwise incorporated into the vast encyclopedia. Moreover, the product does not alert its user to the existence of completely new articles, only to updated ones. It takes a manual scan of the monthly lists to reveal newly added content.
Speaking of updates, one must not forget to dwell on the Britannica’s unequalled yearbooks. Each annual volume contains the year in events, scientific developments, and everything you wanted to know about the latest in any and every conceivable field of human endeavor or nature. About 10,500 articles culled from the last 11 editions buttress and update the Encyclopedia’s anyhow impressive offerings.
The Britannica provides considerably more text than any other extant encyclopedia, print or digital. But it has noticeably enhanced its non-textual content over the years (the 1994-7 editions had nothing or very little but words, words, and more words): it now boasts in excess of 22-30,000 images and illustrations (depending on the version) and 900 video and audio clips. This is not to mention the Britannica Classics: articles from Britannica’s most famous contributors-from Sigmund Freud to Harry Houdini, Marie Curie to Orville Wright.
The Britannica fully supports serious research. It is a sober assemblage of first-rate essays, up to date bibliographies, and relevant multimedia. It is a desktop university library: thorough, well-researched, comprehensive, trustworthy.
The Britannica’s 84-103,000 articles (depending on the version) are long and thorough, supported by impressive bibliographies, and written by the best scholars in their respective fields. The company’s Editorial Board of Advisors reads like the who’s who of the global intellectual and scientific community.
The Britannica is an embarrassment of riches. Users often find the wealth and breadth of information daunting and data mining is fast becoming an art form. This is why the Britannica incorporated the BrainStormer to cope with this predicament. But an informal poll I conducted online shows that few know how to deploy it effectively.
The Britannica also sports Student and Elementary versions of its venerable flagship product, replete with a Homework Helpdesk and interactive tutorials, but it is far better geared to tackle the information needs of adults and, even more so, professionals. It provides unequalled coverage of its topics. Ironically, this is precisely why the market positioning of the Britannica’s Elementary and Student Encyclopedias is problematic: with Wikipedia and even the Encarta around, the Britannica’s brand is distinctly adult and scholarly.
Still, the 2009 editions of both the Student and Elementary encyclopedias improve on the past in terms of both coverage and facilities: the Homework Helpdesk is a collection of useful homework resources including a video subject browse, online learning games and activities, online subject spotlights, and how-to documents on topics such as writing a book review. There are also Learning Games and Activities: hundreds of fun and interactive games and activities to help students with subjects like Math, Science, and Social Studies.
The current edition is fully integrated with the Internet. Apart from the updates, it offers additional and timely content and revisions on a dedicated Web site. The digital product includes a staggering number of links (165,808!) to third party content and articles on the Web. The GeoAnalyzer, which compares national statistical data and generates charts and graphs, is now Web-based and greatly enhanced.
The Britannica would do well to offer a browser add-on search bar and to integrate with desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. Currently it offers search results through Google but this requires the user to install add-ons or plug-ins and to go through a convoluted rite of passage. A seamless experience is in the cards. Users must and will be able to ferret content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface.
Some minor gripes:
The atlas, dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in the Britannica are still surprisingly outdated. Why not use a more current - and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)?
Despite considerable improvement over the previous edition, the Britannica still consumes (not to say hogs) computer resource far in excess of the official specifications. This makes it less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. If you own a machine with anything earlier than Pentium 3 and less than 4 Gb of really free space - forget it!
The Britannica uses a new graphic and text renderer. On some systems, the user needs to modify his or her desktop settings to get rid of jagged fonts and blurry photos. The software also seriously conflicts with security applications (especially anti-virus and firewall products). This edition, though, is finally compatible with the latest QuickTime.
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Marketing Your Business Online - The Power of Keywords
By Nazir22
One of the aspects of marketing your online business which you will need to spend a good deal of time getting right is your choice of keywords. Without doubt one of the most crucial aspects of internet marketing is getting the keywords and key phrases chosen wisely and correctly, as this simple choice can underpin a hugely successful campaign and launch you high into the search results, or can bury your website where no one will find it.
Article Body:
One of the aspects of marketing your online business which you will need to spend a good deal of time getting right is your choice of keywords. Without doubt one of the most crucial aspects of internet marketing is getting the keywords and key phrases chosen wisely and correctly, as this simple choice can underpin a hugely successful campaign and launch you high into the search results, or can bury your website where no one will find it.
Why are keywords so important? This really is the major difference between marketing in the real world and marketing on the Web since there is a big difference in the way that customers, or potential customers, are likely to find you. In the High Street you rely on people walking past your shop window, and you will try to make sure that your shop window display looks attractive and inviting.
Many online businesses take this real world concept and try to apply it to the digital world, thinking that if they spend a good deal of time and money making a website look good then, just as with an attractive shop front, people will visit and sales will rise.
Clearly, this is a misguided notion and although it is important to make sure that your website is attractive and well designed so that people who visit will wish to stay, you cannot rely on people stumbling across your website by accident. The only real way of making sure that people find your website is to make sure that your site is in tune with the search engines.
With so many millions of websites on the internet, and anything from several dozen to several hundred thousand competing websites within your own business’ category, using search engines is the single most common way in which people find what they’re looking for online. However, people are unlikely to type in your business name. What people will type in are keywords, and it is understanding these key words which will help match you with what your customers are looking for.
However, don’t make the mistake of assuming that by cramming as many combinations of the most common keywords as possible into your website that this will help to boost your profile and convince the search engines that your website is the most relevant website within its category. There’s a great deal more to keyword marketing than that. The more you know about your potential customers and what they are looking for, the more you’ll be able to market your website and get results.
There are a number of tools available online, some free and some which charge a fee, which can be used to identify the patterns and trends in people’s searching. Knowing the keywords which people enter, knowing the combinations and popular choices can reveal a good deal. However, even this isn’t enough for you to consider your keyword marketing is complete.
Because although you may have identified the most popular keyword combinations being entered, your competitors may very well have done the same thing. If you’re just starting out with your online business promotion you can be fairly certain that there are many successful businesses online within your category, and which are already cashing in on the most common keyword searches.
Trying to compete with established businesses for keywords can be successful, but is a lot harder and will take more time. Considering the fact that billions are spent online every single month, there’s really no need to limit yourself to the top few keyword searches within your field of business. If 100,000 searches are carried out each day for the main keywords, and further down the list only 1,000 searches are carried out for relatively less popular keyword combinations, it’s easy to assume that the first option is the one to use in your marketing campaign.
However, you would be wrong. Because almost certainly you’ll find that there are a massive number of businesses already competing for the first choice, whereas relatively few might be paying much attention to the less popular combination. For this reason, choosing this second keyword search might be in your best interests. By using these keywords in your marketing, promotion, web content and external content, you can push your website much further up the search results.
Imagine if your website business was the first result shown for the second choice of keywords. That would mean that the vast majority of those 1,000 visitors each day will be very likely to visit your website. 98% of people don’t look past the first few searches, and so you stand a much better chance of being seen if you’re at the top. Marketing your business within the niche keywords and key phrases market can prove far more successful than trying to wrestle into the more popular areas.
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Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
