As my final post for April 2006 (it’s April 30th after all) there’s yet another gem from Microsoft called the Content Categorization Engine.

Looking at one of my clients’ site I can now see what catagories Microsoft thinks it’s in based on all it’s semantic analysis:

This information is useful in both search term matching AND search term advertising – but how to best use that information is going to vary somewhat.  

When we look at the leading competition, coolhouseplans.com – the catagorization is different

URL  Go    See Categories

Categories                                Confidence     Work & Money\Companies 0.914 Personal\Home 0.032 Shopping\Buying Guides 0.016 Work & Money\Industries 0.007 Work & Money\Personal Finance 0.004 Lifestyle\Hobbies 0.001 Library\Humanities 0.001 Work & Money\Business 0.001 Library\Society 0.001 Lifestyle\Gardening 0.001

I don’t know if that has anything to do with why the site tends to rank highly or not – and maybe I’m not the best judge of how to apply that information but I’m pointing to the tools are available to start using and testing and thinking.

Think about new ways to use these tools, new ways to compare sites and see if the search engines actually use any of these as ranking factors.

Another Microsoft innovation – the Keyword Catagorization Engine!

Keyword  Go    See Categories

Categories                                Confidence     Personal\Home 0.50 Shopping\Buying Guides 0.316 Work & Money\Companies 0.102 Work & Money\Industries 0.051 Lifestyle\Pets & Animals 0.010 Lifestyle\Hobbies 0.010 Library\Humanities 0.010

The strongest catagory for house plans (and place to advertise!!!!!!!) is in the Shopping and Buying Guides.

But if we take a particular style of plan, like craftsman house plans

Keyword  Go    See Categories

Categories                                Confidence     Personal\Home 0.683 Work & Money\Companies 0.224 Shopping\Buying Guides 0.051 Work & Money\Industries 0.040

You’d go after Personal and Home catagories, not shopping guides.   On the other hand, if you want to go after "Ranch House Plans" your back in the Shopping Guides more

I may need help in talking with my architect clients to understand how to use this information.

Microsoft’s Search Funnel Demo is a truly interesting concept for anyone interested in how people search.  I did a output Search Funnel on the word "house" and look what it showed!

You can see the progression of queries that start with "house" and end with "realestate", "houseforsale" and "house tv show".

There’s additional information that explains the chart when you hover over each box above (not shown in my graphic representation). 

You can reverse the funnel and get the words that most commonly end with a search on "home"

It’s going to take me a little time to digest these new demos and what they can do for your search term reseach and copywriting effectiveness.  I think the main issue now is most terms you’d use for targeting are not yet part of this demo, so it’s really more for concept analysis at this point.

But this is where search is going in the future – this is the beginning of the second wave of search tools (away from WordTracker and tools like that which were useful 5 years ago but need to notch it up because Seach is becoming much more sophisticated and mainstream).