Internet Strategy Primer for Therapists, Counselors and Treatment Centers

Internet Strategy Primer for Therapists, Counselors and Treatment Centers – Jim Peake and Bernie Groshman

In these tough economic times, learning new skills and taking a step back to take a “personal” or “corporative” inventory will often reveal areas for major improvements and some glaring gaps in business practices. When it comes to marketing and business development, there is no better source than the Internet, especially for the counseling, therapy and treatment industries. With the Internet as the marketplace for new business through hundreds of millions of searches, a good website is not only needed, but it needs to be well optimized so it can be found when potential clients search for the services you offer. A website without optimization, no matter how good it looks, is no more useful than an expensive, glorified business card with no one to see it.

If you don’t have a web site it is strongly recommended that you invest in one, specifically built by someone who has experience building websites in your industry. A web designer and optimizer with knowledge of your specific industry can save you critical time and money. The authors of this article are two such people, and we’ll endeavor to share our knowledge and experience in this area so as to prevent costly and time consuming mistakes…

As a counselor, therapist or treatment center you are selling “people, expertise, relationships and experience.” People’s first introduction into who and what you are as a professional or treatment provider is through your website. It is human nature that individuals do business with people they know, like, and trust. In keeping with this reality, we want to allow the web site to convey the messages of personality, philosophy, experience, skills and specialties so that visitors can actually “get to know” you and your how you approach your profession when they browse through your website.

What we will cover in the article is how to prepare your web site and your business to take advantage of the massive search traffic for behavioral healthcare services on the Internet.

So how do therapists, counselors and treatment centers actually get clients? Some rely on the yellow pages to generate business and sometimes they come from other professionals. The fact is that in today’s world the Internet plays the biggest role of all in getting business into the healthcare field, period. So unless you have more business than you can handle (how many of us are in that situation?), it is imperative that you engage in Internet marketing. In today’s world, success in the behavioral healthcare field is intimately related to one’s ability to successfully market themselves on the Internet. If an individual searches the Internet for therapy or treatment, you need to be positioned in such a way that you get their business. Where else (besides the Internet) can you share ALL of your papers, articles, pictures and testimonials with the rest of the world for virtually the price of a cheap cup of coffee each day? The key is to share it in a way that it will be found when individuals in need of help search for the terms that are most relevant to the specific services you provide. Your practice or treatment center can literally be a walking, talking billboard of your expertise and services on the “Information Super Highway.”

The Internet does a great job at helping people with specific problems find the best people with the right solutions to meet their needs. For the purposes of this article, the preferred method of client acquisition (from the Internet) is to have your Internet leads come through your own web site first and not through a third party [web site]. (This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use directories or Internet Yellow Pages – in fact in many cases the exact opposite is true, but we’ll discuss that later in this article). Also, in many cases, referrals from the Internet will only come in through your web site AFTER they have qualified you based on the information they find on the Internet about you. For this reason it’s imperative that your website be in-depth and informative about who you are and what you have to offer, and it’s equally imperative that you have links from other relevant sites on the internet linking to your site…

Why links you ask? Well, would you trust a medical reference that didn’t cite its sources? In the same way, Search Engines don’t trust websites without supporting, relevant links. Links should be thought of as “votes” given by one website to another on the Internet… the more of them you have, the more intrinsic value your site has compared with all other sites on the internet in the eyes of Search Engines (Google in particular – this is the basis of the Google PageRank Algorithm as developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin during their studies at Stanford from 1995-97, and developed into a general rating system for websites on a scale from 0-10, known as the PageRank scale)… And the greater the relevance of the site that’s linking to you (in relation to the content of your own site), the more value you’ll get from each individual incoming link – in other words a “vote” from another treatment professional or treatment center is naturally more relevant and therefore more valuable than a vote from a car dealership…
Web site optimization (also known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO) can be divided into two main areas. First, you have “on site” optimization, meaning the content and HTML tags are accurate, in keeping with established standards, and maximized for relevance. Second is what’s called “off site” optimization, which entails link building and linking strategies (internal and external) to enable your well written, well optimized content to rank.

Onsite Optimization for Therapists, Counselors, and Treatment Centers

To achieve success in Internet marketing, you should take just as much pride in your website as in your profession, not only in the design and copy of the site, but also in your website optimization (SEO). (Which in turn results in attracting the right clientele)
Often times, but not always, people who are in need of therapy or treatment do a Google search on the services followed by the location, i.e. “drug treatment centers in Florida”. What typically come up are “local listings”, and often directory listings.

Directories are great, and in a perfect world I tell all my clients to get listed with as many directories as possible (track the ones that help you rank and drop the ones that don’t). The way I value directories is how many links they give me, period. I don’t value them based on the number of clicks they can or can’t send to my website… The clicks are for the most part superfluous – they’re not the real value of advertising on important industry directory sites. The real value is in the relevance these directories transmit to your website for terms for which you want to rank better. The more relevant links I have the better chance I have of being found in searches for the services I provide. More on that in a minute…

Where SEO enters the picture is if I’m a heroin addiction counselor in Marblehead, and I have my therapist web site properly “optimized with tags” (which I will get into in a second) and full of high quality heroin addiction content unique to my website, I stand a possible chance of ranking somewhere in the first 10 pages on Google’s search results for “heroin addiction counselor”, but even so, just being in the first 10 pages on Google isn’t good enough. Very few people look past the first page of search results, and virtually no one continues searching to the 10th page or beyond. To have success with Internet searches for key terms specific to your profession and services, you need to be on the first page, preferably above the fold (above the fold is everything visible on a computer screen without having to scroll down), so for most popular screen resolutions that means within the top 3-5 results.

So how do I ensure that my heroin addiction counselor in Marblehead web page gets to a top spot on Google’s search results? [See Part II about Off-Site Optimization]

Let’s assume you are the best heroin addiction counselor in Marblehead. We will assume you have at least 700 -1,000 words of content (fewer is not favorable for Google) talking about your experience providing heroin addiction treatment and heroin addiction counseling, your education, level of skill, and your approach to treating clients. The content is in place, but Google needs to know that this content is there on YOUR domain. The easiest way for Google to find and index your website is for you to “TELL” THEM IT’S THERE! How is this accomplished? You “tell” them by tagging the HTML code you used to build your web page accurately and informatively – you put your main key phrases in the page’s main tag, use XYZ tags to give alternative textual representations of all images on your site, tags for links, meta tags etc. etc. Or ask your web person to generate the proper Title Tags, Keyword Tags, Description Tags, Alt Tags, Image Tags, etc.

The big blue link you read on the Google search result is your TITLE TAG (as referenced above, the HTML syntax for which is ). The black text is often the description tag (or an excerpt thereof), or if a meta description is not present Google will grab content off your web page and use it as the search result description, which might not be what you would want as a description. (Google may pull text that isn’t very useful as a search result description). (Also, you don’t have a lot of room here to write a description so it should be concise and to the point – a good rule of thumb is to limit your meta description to 25 words or less). So if your site is JohnSmithCounseling.com and you’re really good at treatment for heroin addiction, the title tag might read something like Heroin Addiction Counselor | John Smith Counseling Marblehead (Title tags should be limited to 65 characters according to several SEO experts, but there is flexibility). Why would you write your title tag this way, instead of simply John Smith’s Counseling Services? Because unless people know of you by name in advance, they won’t be searching for “John Smith Counseling” – they are exponentially more likely to search for Heroin Addiction… or Counselor… or Counseling in Marblehead etc… With title tags, you always want to put your most important keyterms first.

For the meta description tag you have more space to work with, so you naturally want to offer more information than the title tag allows – but just as with the title tag, it should be relevant and keyword rich, and contain the same keyterms you used in the title tag. So continuing the example, the description might read, “John Smith Counseling of Marblehead is the leading authority on heroin addiction in the state of Massachusetts for the past 25 years.” You want to draw the Google searcher to click the link to your site… As long as the information on the landing page (the page that they go to when they click the link in the search results) is well written and informative, and answers the searcher’s questions. The combination of your content and good optimization (and links, we’ll go into that next) will make you rank well enough for your site to be found by searchers, and assuming they’re looking for counseling you stand a great chance of getting that client!

So now we have the easy part completed… Many SEO specialists, web developers, and consultants can provide this SEO service for you – it’s basic optimization 101. I personally prefer to teach clients and have them provide the direction to their development team. Once it’s learned, onsite SEO is fairly easy to execute (doing it well and ranking #1 for competitive terms however requires much more skill and experience).

Part II Offsite Optimization for Therapists, Counselors and Treatment Centers

In order to build your business online you need to get links, lots of links, as many relevant links from high value sites as possible. It is always a good idea to try to request links from hospitals, universities, doctors’ web sites, directories etc., and embed links to your website when commenting on other people’s blogs. These links are how people (and Google) find websites, and are a big factor in how Google ranks them as well. In fact, on today’s Internet, they’re the biggest factor, PERIOD.

Links are also the most efficacious advertising product available in the therapy and treatment industry to make your website rank – PERIOD. If you were a marriage counselor, I would search for a few marriage counseling web sites, directories and blogs to advertise on. Getting multiple relevant marriage counseling links to your marriage counseling site is of paramount importance for generating rankings and traffic, because they’re instantly recognized as high value links going to your web site by Google and Yahoo. If you’re a drug treatment center, search for Authority directory sites in the drug treatment industry on which to advertise, like Treatment-Centers.net and receive hundreds and even thousands of inbound (super-relevant) links showing up in the Google index in a very short period of time over 2-3 months.

One brief comment on Authority sites – you’re probably asking yourself what does this term “Authority site” really mean? Authority sites are category leaders, they’re sites in any given industry on the internet that are attributed greater value by search engines than all of the other sites in that field – they’re also the most relevant and have the most valuable links available on the entire internet for your specific business… Think about it, if your goal is to rank #1 for “drug interventionist in Massachusetts” the most relevant link on the entire Internet (and therefore the most effectual single link available anywhere in helping you rank) will be from the site that ranks #1 organically for “drug intervention.” How do you find Authority sites? Look for sites that you keep finding at the #1 spot, top 5 and top 10 results across a broad sampling of the biggest, broadest, and most generally relevant terms in your industry.

In order to get the links needed to rank for competitive terms, it takes time to research and find the best directories and professional websites from which to get links, legitimately (through link requests, exchanges and advertising contracts). You can also buy links from link brokers or you can pay people to write blog posts on other blogs and link back to you for the purpose of increasing your link value and PageRank (both of which are technically questionable by Google – Google strongly discourages the buying and selling of links for the purpose of increasing search rankings). When building links and considering a certain site for link acquisition, be thorough and ask questions, and always check the other site and see how many links they have coming in. Most importantly, in the case of directory sites, ask them how many links you’ll get by listing or advertising with them, and make sure you’re getting LIVE links from them. Some sites provide links through internal redirects, negating any value you would otherwise get from the link! (Examples of large resource/directory sites that use internal redirects for links are Soberrecovery.com and Sober.com – Examples of ones that provide LIVE LINKS include SAMHSA, NIDA, Treatment-Centers.net, AboutDrugRehab.com, Drug-Rehabs.com and Intervention-Referral.com) Links with internal redirects look the same as any other links, so always have someone who knows HTML look at the code of the links before you get them.

How many incoming links are necessary to rank well? There is no simple answer to this – you might rank in the top 10 for very targeted 4 and 5 word terms (and of course your own name or the name of your organization) with fewer than 100 incoming links… Ranking for more competitive, more general terms might require anywhere from 1000 to 100,000 incoming links. We also recommend having at least 50-100 web pages packed with well-written, unique, keyword rich content relevant to your practice or treatment program – the more pages of well optimized content the better. Search Engines (especially Google) love content. Give Google what Google wants, i.e. relevant links and rich content about your business and the terms for which people are searching.
Developing and optimizing a successful website for your business in the behavioral healthcare field is an ongoing process, and top-notch rankings aren’t garnered overnight. That said, if the advice in this article is followed closely and implemented diligently and consistently, results will ensue very rapidly, rankings will rise, and your website will begin to produce a steady flow of visitor traffic and phone calls into your business.

Authored By:
Bernie Grohsman is an 8 year Internet marketing veteran, and is considered by many the premier Search Engine Optimizer and Internet marketing expert in the Behavioral Healthcare field. His accomplishments include the design and/or optimization of some of the best-ranking and best-known sites in the behavioral health and addiction treatment field, he is the former Director of Internet Marketing for CRC Health Corporation, and is the Founder and owner of Treatment-Centers.net.

Jim Peake is a 15 year Internet marketing veteran with SpeechRep Consulting focused on treatment center marketing and Internet consulting. Jim is also a certified SEO consultant at Submit Express the 10 year old Search Engine Optimization company in Burbank, CA, and is a Technical Marketing consultant for Treatment-Centers.net and strategic consultant for Natural Language Processing Search Engine MyRoar, Inc.

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Is Twitter a Drug? Do I need an Intervention?

Is Twitter is a Drug? As a matter of fact there is a web site called Twitterholic. This is a post about Twitter Detox and Withdrawal Symptoms from a guy who was told by a former mentor I “gambled in business” too much, going for the brass ring.

Authors note: I wrote this post in early 2009. Since then my blog has gone down due to some hackers so I decided to re-build it, hence this post is a few months old and it is now Saturday may 30th, 2009.

I’m a guy who lives on the edge, but I won’t bore you with the details unless enough people ask. I’ve been through the parties, you name it I’ve done most of it. I’ve let go of the traditional substances for they didn’t offer me much other than a headache the next morning and a feeling of despair from the “big night out.” (Notice how little I incriminate myself here). So I found a new drug. And it is powerful. It’s called Twitter. Twitter is my drug of choice. It gives instant gratification any where any time and I don’t have to go to the bathroom to do it or hide it, because today it is still legal. I mean Twitter is a real dopamine rush.

Some have heard of it and some haven’t. Think computers and cell phones. Twitter is THE killer application for the cell phone bar none. At the end of the day it is like an instant messaging news service on steroids (sorry A-Rod, A-Roid, A-Fraud, I couldn’t resist). You get “tweets” on your desktop and your cell phone from your “followers.” It has grown into a massive community of millions. Twitter is making Reuters and AP wet their pants (The New York Times already took a big dump in theirs) with a real time news service broadcasting globally images and text of the plane in the Hudson River just one minute after the event. (Twitter is changing the world almost as fast as the New World Order and the Bilderberg Group. More on that in a minute. I just hope like hell Twitterville, Tweeple and the Twitterverse wake up and see the light and have a Twestival to stop the NWO and Bilderbergers). The way to stop this from happening is two fold reaching out to the Oathkeepers and dismantling the Federal Reserve. The US Congress has the power to do that. Our so called leadership is fleecing blind and we are a bunch of suckers for allowing it to happen before our eyes, take a look at this video to see where our country is going.

The next thing you know Matt Drudge has the Hudson River plane image on his home page and it is all over Facebook and Friendfeed in a matter of minutes all because the information came from Twitterers. So, let’s get relevant, you want to keep up with friends and find out if they want support at the big New Year’s Party so they don’t relapse, you can track them by Twitter and they you too. Not as dramatic as the Hudson River crash but interesting nonetheless.

On Wednesday Feb 18th 2009 I was experiencing some actual withdrawal symptoms because my 1,000 + friends on Twitter I couldn’t access and send out “tweets” to (tweets are 140 text characters that can also be sent by SMS on a mobile device). So my brain says this must be some sort of a technical problem and the tech’s at Twitter are probably working on it. But I was sending out some “controversial tweets” and my brain also aid was I being a little “too free” with my free press? Here were a couple of sample tweets:

JimPeake
1. We’ve been brainwashed. People have been told that they need to have income taxes. How did we fund gov’t in 1776 -1913? http://zi.ma/2a3a5e 11:47 PM Feb 18th from TweetDeck

2. “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Goethe http://zi.ma/2a3a5e 11:40 PM Feb 18th from TweetDeck

3. The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. Mark Twain #quotes #tcoc 11:23 PM Feb 18th from TweetDeck

4. Carnival Networking Party/Event Friday, February 20th 8:00 PM to… very late Zanzibar restaurant/lounge 645 9th Avenue at 45th St 10:08 PM Feb 18th from TweetDeck

5. “I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. ” Woodrow Wilson http://zi.ma/d2ac8b 9:46 PM Feb 18th from TweetDeck

6. no longer a government by conviction & the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion & duress of a small group of dominant men. 9:37 PM Feb 18th from TweetDeck

7. @gacconsultants @stevecase @karlrove @nancypelosi In a time of deceit telling the truth is revolutionary. George Orwell http://zi.ma/2a3a5e 9:28 PM Feb 18th from TweetDeck

8. @SteveCase this whole thing is by design Steve. http://zi.ma/9ff342 8:33 PM Feb 18th from TweetDeck in reply to SteveCase

So these little cryptic notes look innocuous right? Spend a little time on the links and see what they have to offer, you might be surprised. The old adage “question authority” is in play here. I’m extremely concerned for my now 9 year old son and the rest of the beautiful kids in this world that they will be inheriting a Prison Planet ruled by the Global Elite and the Jesuit Order.

To be honest I’m scared writing this blog post, but the last thing I want to do is look my kid in the eye 5 years from now and answer his question, “Daddy, so what did you do to while this was happening? Why didn’t you do something? I don’t like living this way under Marshall law.” I will speak out and not cave in like cockroach who scurries when light is shed on them.

So in sending out this information can make one paranoid, I am paranoid like a cocaine addict is with police. Getting my account suspended on Twitter concerned me that maybe the New World Order was a lot closer than I thought, or maybe I was just fucking going crazy. So I waited about 12 hours or so after I contacted customer service. I was without Twitter. I could not communicate with my community. I work from home so I have all of these “office buddies” who are online. We keep in touch face to face, online, Twitter, Facebook, Linked in, business, local Tweet Up’s etc. Some days my work and my community I work 20 hours per day, and sleep very little, this is a Twitter addict. When I have finished that last proposal or that report I go on Twitter and throw out my 2 cents on something.

Sometimes I go to DrudgeReport to find a thought provoking article to stir the sleeping masses on Twitter to see if someone is awake, often I find one or two. It usually works but the conversations are short lived to tell you the truth, as time goes on this might change. Many people couldn’t really give a shit except guys like @infowars @infowarsstories @gacconsultants (he got out of the U.S.A and moved to Costa Rica maybe because living in the USA has become so unbearable for some). More on GAC in a minute.

So it is Thursday morning, no Twitter. Thursday early afternoon, no Twitter. Paranoia kicks in big time. (But you thought that only happened to drug addicts’ right)? Wrong. I’m a Twitter addict. Finally, Thurs late afternoon I sent Twitter an e-mail customer support ticket I was issued by Twitter that did not work for me. I was not getting answers, I needed a Twitter Fix. I was Jonesing….and many of you readers know exactly what I’m talking about, I needed an answer as to why I was suspended! I needed to be back on Twitter, I needed to mainline some Twitter.

I re-read the terms and conditions, did I spam @stevecase? Did I upset @nancypelosi while she was vacationing at the Vatican getting her New World Order orders from the Pope Benedict? Did I offend @karlrove? He’s a pretty sensitive guy but he has a good rap. Did I send out too many Tweets too fast or accumulate too many followers too fast? I was worried it was the content. I got hammered recently when I sent this video out with David Icke in an email, he is a passionate “radical fellow” but he supports his argument well on the New World Order theory. Maybe I should have gone easier on my e-mail recipient and sent out Freedom Fighter Aaron Russo’s Freedom to Fascism video? Aaron recently died.

At this time in the process after I sent out the e-mail to Twitter I was shaking. I was shaking like an addict. For me it was similar to driving long distance for 20 hours (I did a lot of that in college) and drinking 7 cups of coffee on an empty stomach. The caffeine I had that day with the Twitter withdrawal I was a mess. I realized it when I was on the phone with my new and good friend Liz Strauss, (daughter of a saloon keeper and person who poured her first draft at 4 years old) we met on Twitter just a few months ago and she will tell that story in an upcoming blog post with www.1to1media.com. I realized I needed help. The help for me was not a Twitter Intervention but it was a conversation with Liz, it was food (something I forgot to do –eat) and it was fresh air. So I did all of those things. I felt better.

At 9:21 P.M. I was whole again, at least partially whole. Twitter sent me mail saying that my URL on my Internet consulting blog was the problem and it was some sort of a malware link. (Maybe my Twitter account was hacked and someone stuck in a malware link)? So Twitter removed it and I was back in business, or at least I thought so. It has still been sputtering and I have been having trouble adding followers. The reason we want more followers is that it helps build our community. (Except I was being followed by a FBI Twitterer and I chose to block them because of my paranoia and I know they have better ways to keep track of me). One of the things that the government will be doing anyway unless we put a stop to it is inserting RFID chips into us.

I might Tweet on something, New World Order, Yankees or anything and one Tweet can spark a great conversation as it did with Mark Harai @gacconsultants. Now here is a great guy. Never met him face to face yet but we have been Tweeting each other for a few weeks and we talked on the phone the other night and he and I are friends. I mean that with all sincerity, this is a true friendship in the making as my friendship is with Liz all cemented with the glue of Twitter. We are all around the same age and we have gravitated towards making the world better place each in our own small way.

So right now on Friday night as I write this I am getting so many followers I can’t keep up and follow them back. The system seems to hang on me and I don’t have the energy to submit it ticket, it is 12:43 AM. (The system is back to normal, Twitter does a great job maintaining a complex service that is in high demand).

When I interviewed Biz Stone with my partner Ronald Goedendorp we talked about how people have said that they would rather give up sex for two weeks or x period of time than lose Twitter. How many of you drug addicts have given up sex for drugs or alcohol? A few I bet. So this Twitter thing is here to stay and more and more people are weaving it into their daily lives like a drug or like air and water. When it becomes too much for some people do you think it will require a full on Twitter Treatment Center Rehab and Clinic for people to quit the addicting Twitter habit?

Hey, before I go how would you like a little education on the real under belly of the drug industry? How would you like to know who is pushing all these drugs here in the USA? What would you say if you knew these drug dealers by their first and last names and even knew the names of their children? How about, why are they pushing all of these drugs in the USA? Mike Ruppert, is a former South Central narcotics detective with the Los Angeles Police Department an LAPD cop, but Mike is a modern day hero speaking out on this issue. He starts out the meeting “Hi, my name is Mike and I’m an alcoholic.” Mike does not speculate, he delivers only the facts. What is at stake is our freedom and what is at stake is our future.

What can we do? Start by calling and writing your congressman and demand that the Federal Reserve be dismantled. Cut the head off of the snake. George Green explains in Project Camelot follow the money and we solve many of our problems or otherwise we will be in a prison planet or a dead planet.

Be well and take care of yourself, you deserve it. Come join me, I can be reached on Twitter at http://Twitter.com/JimPeake and http://twitter.com/impairment

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Seeking Rock Star NLP Search Engineer Immediately 05-05-09

Have a Passion for Natural Language Processing?  Want to help found an exciting Natural Language Search startup company?

Start up Natural Language Processing search engine company with world class accurarcy in the industry is seeking team player for equity based and co-founder leadership role in a pre-revenue opportunity currently raising an angel funding.  “A round” is in place and spoken for.

We are looking for a talented hacker to work with a fun team on cutting-edge NLP projects. You are an excellent coder, a creative problem solver, and are deeply interested in NLP. We are a dynamic team carving out a new niche in the enterprise search engine market.
Attributes sought: Great Java hacker, at least passingly familiar with Python. Facility with other languages is helpful. Familiarity with NLP technologies, e.g., WordNet, statistical parsers, or named entity recognizers. Contact Jim @ e-Mail is jimpeake08 @@gmail.com or phone is better at 781-631-9691. No Recruiters.

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NLP Natural Language Processing Semantic Search

Guest Blogger

Kate McDonough

CEO & Founder

What is Natural Language Processing and Question Answering Search?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the technology that evaluates the relationships of words such as actions, entities, or events, comprised within unstructured text, meaning sentences within paragraphs found in a variety of text based documents.  Question Answering Natural Language Processing Search is the Natural Language Processing technology that specifically solves the problem of finding answers to a question which can be asked by simply entering it into a search interface using natural human language, for example, “Who is Barack Obama?”

Unlike keyword search in Google or Yahoo for example, Natural Language Processing Question Answering Search specifically allows users to ask questions in their natural language and then retrieves the most relevant answers within seconds.  The standard search process requires the execution of multiple keyword combinations that then force the searcher to click on links only too frequently to find no answer and then they process of searching and liking continues until the user finds something or gives up.  With Natural Language Processing Search there is no extra work and no need to search multiple links, resulting in immense time savings.  Entering a question is simple for the user even though the technology behind the scenes is highly complex.

Why Natural Language Processing is a Critically Needed Technology

Anyone who has used a search engine to perform market, consulting, or financial research, can tell you the pain of spending hours looking for the answer to a seemingly simple question.  Add up all the questions a researcher must ask and the hours really rack up.

Just how big is the search problem?  According to International Data Group the average knowledge worker makes $60,000 per year out of which $14,000 is spent on search.  Knowledge workers spend 24% of their time on search.  Here is a quote from Network World, “A company that employs 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it, IDC research found last year.” Furthermore an Accenture study found that 50% of information retrieved in search by middle managers is useless.

In the document heavy financial services sector researchers are frequently forced to give up looking for answers, or cannot check the accuracy of answers with multiple sources because it would be time prohibitive.  Senior risk management is comprised of a firm’s most senior executives whose job is to evaluate if you are doing your job correctly to mitigate risk at the most upper levels of the firm.  Now imagine you are on the phone with your firm’s senior risk managers (your boss’s boss’s boss) and you are asked a question that you don’t know the answer to?  Imagine if you could type a short question into a search box and come up with an answer in time to provide an intelligent and correct response to the question?  That is the power of natural language processing, you type in a question in “natural language” and be provided with an instant result containing the answer that saves the day.

How Does Natural Language Processing Work

Natural Language Processing builds off of a statistical relationship tree that shows the difference between “My friend Blair the singer” and “Author Blair Singer.”  In Natural Language Processing Search case one, “My friend Blair the singer” here “Blair” and “singer” are one node or branch away in the statistical representation.  In case two “Blair Singer” here “Blair” and “Singer” are directly linked in the statistical representation.  With the new technology built around statistical representations, Natural Language Processing Search technology can now reach precision of up to 95% given a full index.  Precision is the measurement of how many top search results are relevant to the question.

Have you ever searched by entering two key words into a search box?  Of course you have.  You are trying to find information on two related variables.  Someone might ask, “How many hedge funds are there?”  Here the user is asking how many investment firms “exist” that are classified as a “hedge fund.”   Try any search engine and not one of the dozens of search engines, except MyRoar, can provide an answer without requiring further research.

With this question “How many hedge funds are there?” today’s search engines provide no answer whatsoever, even if you read through the pages of resulting links.  Here in lies the problem, if you ask “How many hedge funds are there” you are likely to find an article about Hedge Fund performance, Hedge Funds in the news, but not one answer will give you the actual number of Hedge Funds.  Regular search engines provides no technology that understands the difference  between “Hedge” the investment fund and “Hedge” the bushes and cannot relate the context to understand you mean “Number” as in number of funds versus “Number” the number of phone calls from telemarketers.

How Natural Language Processing is Different than Semantic Search

Frequently associated with Natural Language Processing Search is Semantic Search, a related but actually very different technology.  Semantic Search is designed to uncover meaning and can provide researchers with information extracted from unstructured text about sentiment, recording instances of “positive” and “negative” words and the frequency with which such sentiment surrounds a specific entity or event.  For example, in semantic search you can evaluate how many times Microsoft had positive mentions in a span of articles.  MyRoar has developed a Natural Language Processing Question Answering system that differs immensely from semantic search and other similar applications, because rather than looking for sentiment, we look for specific answers to questions that range from simple to very technical in nature

Why is Now the Time for Natural Language Processing

For almost 20 years the evolution of this technology has been expected to progress to point where Natural Language Processing Search can filter out a majority of irrelevant results.  In the last two years we have seen major advancements that means some of the behind the scenes Natural Language Processing technology is scalable and commercially viable for the first time.

MyRoar is the Ultimate Filtering Solution Using Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing is a hot technology in today’s world where we have an overload of information and the inability to adequately filter it.  Because Natural Language Processing provides this filter it is the real answer to the problem, not semantic search, and not because semantic search is bad, but because semantic search solves a different type of problem which is sentiment.  The two are often confused.  With natural language processing you can answer any question as fast as you can type it.  You will no longer have to scour several pages of search results, clicking through links, just to find it is not the right link.  This is why MyRoar, Inc. provides something that people and businesses need, want, and must have with 95% precision and accuracy which is “astonishing” according to an industry analyst.  We call it MyRoar because we provide the power to make you ROAR.

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Web site registration technologies are pitiful

Having gone through the process to register for StumbleUpon and another site called InternetEvolution I’m absolutely amazed at the stupidity of registration even at this date.  With all of the web technologies can’t someone anyone create a basic registration module that saves time and works and integrates into the 1,000’s of different platforms out there?  I mean we are talking about some very simple unique identifiers

name

address

telephone

e-mail

etc

I see problems with Linked in (always logging me out)  I see problems even with my own sites i.e. http://blockbustergraffiti.com.  InternetEvolution was especially interesting since i was told to register and I dutifly did, several attempts, I did not click MA for Massachussetts etc.  But once I was registered I was reading an article,  check out this un-SEO- friendly URL http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=173854 (similar to my own here on SpeechRep.com) article appears interesting enough and I wanted to forward to my partner Ron at http://twitter.com/gorongo and now I had to type my name and e-mail in again to forward this to Ron.  You can bet that I will NOT be back at this site just because they waste my time.

StumbledUpon was the single worst experience I have ever had trying to just register for a service/web site.  Too long to go into and I won’t waste my time.

There are single sign on technologies in the works but there has not been a single standard yet adopted in my view.  To get some better insights on where this is going I did do an interview with Mike Jones and Kim Cameron both of Microsoft.

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Healthcare Treatment Centers Leads

I recently wrote an article for Behavioral Health Journal talking about some simple ways to generate healthcare leads leads online and the same principles are is similar for auto dealers and other large ticket sellers of products and services.  At the end of the day while Google loves optimized pages and content they love relevant links coming into your site even more.

I do a search locally for a new car I see too many auto dealers using blackbox solutions that probably work but they are expensive in the long run and add more value to their URL’s and domains than the autodealership all the while doing this at the auto dealers expense.

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Twitter Friendfeed Facebook YouTube How Businesses Can Use Them Effectively

As time moves on in the Internet world social networks have been all the rage.  First it was MySpace, then it was Facebook now it is Twitter and you have a whole host of other social media plays like Friendfeed, BeBo, Flickr, Ning, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn and way to many others to comment.

I think Liz Strauss really summed it up the best: Speed, trust and the ROI of relationships. This is really where the Internet and social networks are going.  Social networks seem to have the majority of attention right now.  However I will tell you my North Shore Nissan Dealer was looking for ways we could do business together other than just being an order taker for cars.  It thought that new attitude to be welcome and refreshing. I can help them get high quality leads and probably at a lower cost, however it would require a little risk on their part to go where they need to go using SEO as their baseline.

I’m in the process of writing a book for businesses on how they can use social media successfully.  Social Media can be overwhelming and can be frought with landmines if you are not careful. My partner Ron Geodendorp and I have interviewed several industry Web 2.0 social media all stars who are in the trenches.  Ron and I have picked up a few things along the way and we are going to be sharing them with you.

Please join us at the Blockbuster Graffiti Virtual (Online) Conference April 21st at 4:00 PM EST.  Register Early. This conference is being held in 3-D at the state of the art VirtualU.

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How to Be Successful in Business Art Williams Just Do IT

If your day is not going as expected and you want a “little pick me up” this just might do the trick.  Powerful speech by Art Williams

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8976155746368663848

Learn from a average guy who made it really big, over $100 Billion big in 10 years.  Art Williams talks about it, he says JUST DO IT.  Harv Eker talks about it.  (Harv says if you have broken leg show up to work, and he is right, I know a guy how had a broken leg and was just starting out his drains business and he could not afford to tak a day off, today it is a successful small business).

Steps to being successful in business

1) Get excited

2) Have a dream

3) Gotta stand for something

4) Be controversial

5) Total commitment

6) Treat people good, make them feel special, we all want to feel that way

7) Have the desire and will to win

Be a leader

9) Do whatever it takes to get the job done

10) Just do it

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from A Boss Who Tells it Like it IS: To All My Valued Employees I have News for You

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Google helps me organize my stuff

I found this application today through Twitter and thought it was interesting enough to share.  Google Profile of Jim Peake.  It is a portal of sorts linking all of the sites to one person.  The idea is so simple it has to take off.  Check it out by clicking on Jim Peake.

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