Learning about SEO is a bit of a challenge, isn't it? On the one hand, there is no single body of knowledge and the information has to be collected bit by bit from many different places. On the other hand, the information is often misinterpreted, giving rise to fake ranking factors and far fetched theories. That's why to learn the truth about SEO, it's best to go to the very source -- Google itself. In the past, I have already discussed a few sources of SEO information at Google, namely the SEO Starter Guide and the Quality Raters Guidelines.

Tour recommendation and itinerary planning are challenging tasks for tourists, due to their need to select Points of Interest (POI) to visit in unfamiliar cities, and to select POIs that align with their interest preferences and trip constraints. We propose an algorithm called PersTour for recommending personalized tours using POI popularity and user interest preferences, which are automatically derived from real-life travel sequences based on geo-tagged photos. Our tour recommendation problem is modelled using a formulation of the Orienteering problem, and considers user trip constraints such as time limits and the need to start and end at specific POIs. In our work, we also reflect levels of user interest based on visit durations, and demonstrate how POI visit duration can be personalized using this time-based user interest. Using a Flickr dataset of four cities, our experiments show the effectiveness of PersTour against various baselines, in terms of tour popularity, interest, recall, precision and F1-score. In particular, our results show the merits of using time-based user interest and personalized POI visit durations, compared to the current practice of using frequency-based user interest and average visit durations.