At the start of 2013 there is a fair amount of discussion about the activity of search.

There was the ‘victory’ by Google in the FTC antitrust ruling in the US. There is the hope of the anti-Google crowd that the European Commission will play hard ball with the search giant in their antitrust / anti-competitive crusade to bring the search giant to its knees.

Now two articles appear recently that focus on two very interesting areas of search that COULD happen. When you see a lot of these kinds of posts where people are playing the ‘what if?’ game it means there is either a lot of unrest in the marketplace OR there is little real news to report on. It’s probably a little of both but let’s look at two opinions that have surfaced about the future of the search industry.

This is something you don’t hear a lot about these days but considering who is at the helm of Yahoo! these days (ex-Googler Marissa Mayer) it should come as little surprise that the company has announced an improvement in their search offering.

No it’s not nearly as dramatic as say an announcement that says “We’re done getting binged in search” but it shows that the search game at Yahoo! may be getting more attention than we are used to. What it is is the use of Flickr photos that are licensed for free use through Creative Commons terms showing up in the image search function.

The Yahoo! Search blog (which, by the way is pretty sparse on talking about anything over the past six months) tells us

In my last post I talked about how to gain crucial insights from SERP analysis. Through proper SERP analysis, you can put together not only an SEO strategy, but content marketing strategy as well. In today’s post I want to talk about three ways of coming up with dozens of ideas to fuel your content strategy. We will start off talking about word association.

Word Association

When putting my content plan together, one of the very first things I like to do is build a big mind map of all the potential topics I can think of. I do this through word association. For those unfamiliar with word association, this was originally a game in which an original word is chosen and each player finds a different word that they associate with the original word. At the end of the game you might have hundreds of words associated with the original word. It is a great way to brainstorm content topics.

When going through this exercise, I start with my primary or head keyword and then branch out from there. As you can see in my example below, I used photography as my main keyword. In five minutes I was able to come up with 28 different topics I could write about.

This is a very simple, yet powerful way to get your creative juices flowing. If you need a mind mapping software to help you with this exercise, I suggest XMind. It’s free and quite robust. Now let’s talk about the second way to drum up content ideas, internal research.