Search Optimizer

Forbes magazine reported that pay per click ads accounted for $1.4 billion in 2002 and are expected to increase to $8 billion by 2008. The fundamental core elements of a successful pay per click program are constant monitoring, analysis, and refinement.

Pay per click search engines offer a way to buy your way to the top of search results for any term you wish. With proper management, and a clear focus, pay per click search engines can offer some of the most well targeted and economical advertising on the Internet.

Pay per click advertising works through a bidding process, and the ads appear prominently on the results pages of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. The highest bidder for a particular word or phrase receives top placement, and depending on the engine, the top three to five bidders also generally also receive placement on the first page of unpaid search results.

Fundamental questions to be addressed when formulating a pay per click search engine strategy include the following:

When is the top pay per click bid necessary for highest conversion, and when will bidding for a second or third place position create a more attractive return on investment ROI

How can you keep your PPC bids from cannibalizing your search efforts on other non pay per click search engines

What percentage of your pay per click budget should go to each search engine

Does either Google Adwords or Overture work better for your particular product or service Or, perhaps neither one is appropriate from a return on investment ROI perspective.

It is of critical importance to focus sharply on identifying the search terms that convert most frequently for your particular site, eliminating those that dont perform, and most importantly, calculating and maximizing your return on investment.

The cost structure of pay per click is action-driven and each time a user clicks your ad, the pay per click engine deducts the amount of your current bid from your account. Pay per click offers a high level of assurance that your ad is reaching the proper target.

Pay per click campaigns, however, are not perfect. Without CONSTANT monitoring, you sometimes risk incurring advertising costs that can spiral out of control, focusing on terms that dont convert well for your product or services, or falling way down in position during a bidding war.

PPC advertising can be a great help to a sites success, but only with very close supervision and a thorough knowledge of the unique characteristics of each PPC search engine.

About The Author

Kirk Bannerman operates a successful home based business and resides in California. For more details, visit his website at http://business-at-home.us

Search Engine Ranking for Beginners

Search engine optimization is best left in the mystical land of the Intenet Marketing Guru right Good Search engine rankings are tough to achieve. Understanding search engine marketing takes years of studying and only people with true insider knowledge and secret tools rank well in Google right WRONG. Pure crap as a matter of fact.

Ranking well in the search engines is not difficult. In fact search engine optimization is relatively easy. What stops most people from ranking well in search engines is misinformation. Every week theres yet another quick fix to ranking well in search engines and people jump from one quick fix to the next hoping for that Top 10 position in Google and never achieving it.

There are 6 key areas of search engine optimization that you need to know about. These are the basics. Getting these right will help you achieve the Google rankings that youve always wanted.

Domain Name - The jury is still out on the how relevant a keyword rich domain name is. What I mean by keyword rich domain name is say for example your site was going to be about money making ideas then an idea domain name could be either www.moneymakingideas.com or www.money-making-ideas.com. My own personal preference is with the hyphenated approach e.g. www.money-making-ideas.com simply because I believe that search engines can read it more easily. To registed your domain name I would suggest using either 000Domains.com or GoDaddy.com

Content - Useful content. Not keyword stuffed, spammy pages. Write something useful for your visitors. If you cant write then youll need to learn. Turn Words Into Traffic is a great resource for learning how to write content and is a resource that I use personally. Turn Words Into Traffic gives you an A-Z on article writing - from a writers perspective. If you dont want to learn how to write content then you could always use Create Website Content Fast to help you speed the process up.

Keywords - Keywords are the words or phrases that you expect people to search for your site/service/content with. There are two distinct factors to consider when choosing keywords for your site.

1. You need to target specific keywords. For example if you have a website about dating then youll probably find it quite difficult to achieve high search engine rankings initially with that single term. However if you were to refine an area of your site to target say Gay & Lesbian Dating thats more specific. You could also regionalize your keywords or key phrases e.g. Gay & Lesbian dating in Toronto. This refining process is often referred to as niche pronounced neech marketing.

2. You need to choose the keywords that you want people to find your site with. Put yourself in your visitors shoes - think about what they might use to find you in the search engines. What keywords or key phrases would you type into a search engine to find your site What keywords or key phrases would your potential visitor use to search for you Always, always think like a typical websurfer.

If youre interested in seeing what people are searching for on the web and how profitable that might be for you I would recommened that you check out Good Keywords. Its free and does a wonderful job of helping you find good keywords :-

I would also suggest that you try Wordtracker also. Its a brilliant service for tracking down specific, popular keywords.

Keyword density - This is how often your keyword is used on the the page itself. For example if you have 100 words of text on a single page and you mention your keyword 5 times then you have 5% keyword density.

Opinions vary on this but anywhere from 1% - 7% is considered ideal. If this doesnt make sense to you then its ok. The simple rule is this: less is more. Do not alter the text on your webpages to include your keyword over and over again because.........well.... it looks stupid, wont instill any confidence in your prospective customer and might also get you penalized or removed from the search engines.

Page title - Your tag is critical to your page being ranked well. Stuffing your tag with keywords in the hope of ranking well is pointless. Your tag, once constructed properly, will see you moving up the search engine rankings quickly. Bear this simple fact in mind when building your websites and it will serve you well.

Links - Having good links pointing to your site and good links within your site an often overlooked aspect of search engine optimization is pretty important as far as search engine ranking goes. Having other sites linking to yours proves the importance of your site to the search engines i.e. if the content on your site is so valuable that other site owners want to link to it then it must be important.

META Tags - Meta tags are dead baby. Well not quite dead but they are only used as a point of reference for search engines. Its a shame to see websites that have their META tags still stuffed with keywords. Its pointless. Put your primary keywords in the Meta Keyword part of your webpage but apart from that dont lose any sleep or waste any energy on them.

Theres not enough space in this article to explain all of the above in the detail that Id love to. Also Im not a search engine expert so some of the explanation is best left to those that I learned from Sean Burns and Jay Stockwell take a bow please :-

Having learned the basics of search engine optimization and submission I have achieved Top 10 Rankings for all of my websites. Its not hard to do this. It just takes work, a little patience and a little common sense.

Recommended reading:

Rankings Revealed

Microsite Miracles

About The Author

The author, Niall Roche, is owner of Affiliate-Advocate.com. If youd like to learn more about the Super Affiliates Handbook, Rankings Revealed, Turn Words Into Traffic or Create Website Content Fast then drop by http://www.affiliate-advocate.com. info@affiliate-advocate.com

Defining Meta Tags is much easier than explaining how they are used, and by which engines. The reason is very few engines clearly lay out what they do and do not look at, and how much emphasis they put on any one factor. So, we’ll start with the easy part

Meta Tags are lines of HTML code embedded into web pages that are used by search engines to store information about your site. These "tags" contain keywords, descriptions, copyright information, site titles and more. They are among the numerous things that the search engines look for, when trying to evaluate a web site.

Meta Tags are not "required" when youre creating web pages. Unfortunately, many web site operators who don’t use them are left wondering why the saying "If I build it they will come" didn’t apply to their site.

There’s also a few naysayers in the search engine optimization industry who claim that Meta Tags are useless. You can believe them if you like, but you would be wise not to. While not technically "required", Meta Tags are essential.

If you simply create a web site and register the URL with the search engines, their spiders will visit your site, and attempt to index it. Each search engine operates slightly differently, and each one weighs different elements of a web site according to their own proprietary algorithms. For example, Altavista places an emphasis on the description tag and Inktomi states on their web site that;

Inktomi "... indexes both the full text of the Web page you submit as well as the meta-tags within the sites HTML."

Other search engines like Exactseek are true meta tag search engines which clearly state their policy:

"Your site will not be added if it does not have Title and Meta Description tags."

They also use the keywords tag.

Of course, not all search engines work this way. Some place their emphasis on content. The search engines have over 100 individual factors they look at when reviewing a web site. Some of these factors deal with page structure. They check to see that all the ts are crossed, and the is dotted. They note sites that have omitted basic steps, like missing tags.

One reason so many engines de-emphasized the meta-keyword tag had to do with spam. There was a time when search engine promotion specialists would cram keywords tags full of irrelevant information. The web site would be selling garbage cans, but the keywords tags were chock full of irrelevant terms like "mp3" or "Britney Spears". They figured that if enough people visited their site, some would buy.

So today, to avoid and penalize this kind of abuse, some search engines don’t specifically use the keywords tag as part of the scoring of a site, but they monitor the keywords to ensure they match the content in the site. The reasoning being that, if the tags are irrelevant, they must have an alternate purpose. Is it a spam site When keywords tags are completely irrelevant to the content, some search engines, that don’t specifically use keywords tags, will penalize that web site.

Even for those engines that have downplayed the value of Meta Tags, there are situations where Meta Tags gain considerably in importance, e.g. sites with rich graphics, but poor textual content. Unfortunately, a picture is worth 1000 words to you and me, but zero to a search engine. If a site has poor textual content, the engines will be more dependent than ever on the Meta Tags to properly categorize it.

Even if you ensure you have completely relevant Meta Tags, some search engines will still ignore them. But better they ignore them, than they ignore your whole site because they suspect something is less than above board. Never hope that having Meta Tags will make the difference in all the search engines; nothing is a substitute for good content. But in cases where the engine depends on that content, it may be the only thing that does work for your site.

So How To Use The Meta Tags

Meta tags should always be placed in the area of an HTML document. This starts just after the tag, and ends immediately before the tag. Here’s how the most basic set should look:

Search Engine Optimization Software - Metamend

Always make sure that your meta tags do not have any line breaks, otherwise the search engines will just see bad code and ignore them. You should also avoid use of capitals in your code html5 standard as well as repetition of terms within the keywords tag.

What Goes Into a Meta Tag

For the Description tag: ; Many search engines will display this summary along with the title of your page in their search results. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point, but make sure that it’s an appropriate reflection of your site content.

For the keyword tag;

Keywords represent the key terms that someone might enter into a search engine. Choose only relevant keywords. If the terms are going to appear in your keywords tag, they must appear in the content of your site, or be a synonym to a term on your site. Most search engines compare your meta content with what is actually on your page, and if it doesn’t match, your web site can get penalized, and suffer in search results.

for the Robots tag ;Many web pages have this tag wrong. An example of the wrong usage is content="index, follow, all" - wrong because some spiders cant handle spaces between the words in the tag or the word "all". Most engines by default assume that you want a web page to be indexed and links followed, so using the wrong syntax can actually result in the spider coming to the wrong conclusion and penalizing, or worse, ignoring the page outright. If by chance you do not want your links followed, or the page not indexed, then you would substitute "noindex" and or "nofollow" into the tag.

With the Internet growing at a rate of over 8,000,000 new pages per day, and the search engines adding a fraction of that number, Meta Tags are a common standard which can reasonably ensure a measure of proper categorization for a web site. So, always ensure that you cover all the bases, and use completely relevant terms in properly structured Meta Tags. Using tags properly will pay dividends in the short and long term. After all, using them properly only helps the search engines, which means they will send you more qualified traffic - customers.

About The Author

Richard Zwicky is a founder and the CEO of Metamend Software & Design Ltd., www.metamend.com, a Victoria B.C. based firm whose cutting edge Search Engine Optimization software is recognized as the world leader in its field. Employing a staff of 10, the firms business comes from around the world, with clients from every continent. Most recently the company was recognized for their geo-locational, or GIS, along with their phraseological and context sensitive search technologies. articles@metamend.com

By now, virtually every webmaster has heard or read that the major search engines are responsible for 80% or more of the traffic received by most web sites and that most searchers never look beyond the first 20 - 50 search results. Not surprisingly, an entire industry devoted to search engine ranking and search engine optimization SEO has sprung up to capitalize on these well known facts.

Tens of thousands of web sites compete to achieve top ranking for their chosen keywords and keyword phrases. Weve published numerous articles by various SEO experts on linking strategies, optimizing meta tags and page content, and relevant page content. And, undoubtedly, well publish many more. Achieving a top ranking for a particular keyword or phrase is a major accomplishment, but the sad fact is that most web sites will never come close to reaching a top 10, a top 30, or even a top 100, listing in any major search engine.

Is it possible to be listed in the top 10 - 30 search results of a major search engine Yes, possible, just not very likely for the average web site. Its a lot like playing the lottery and with the same appeal. Get your site in the top 10 search results and the payoffs are big - you just need to knock out a few million competitors.

THE RISE OF PAY-PER-CLICK

The difficulty in achieving a top ranking for a free site listing has in recent years given rise to the pay-per-click search engine phenomena. Overtures singular success with this model has resulted in hundreds of search engines jumping on the pay-per-click bandwagon. Pay-per-click is a great idea and taps right into the frustrated webmaster/site owner market. Many site owners simply do not want to be bothered with checking keyword density, tweaking their page content, fiddling with their meta tags and undertaking linking campaigns.

With pay-per-click, you get the site ranking you can afford. A simple, understandable concept. If money isnt a problem, the PPC system is hard to beat.

Most experts would probably recommend combining search engine optimization with PPC for maximizing traffic. And, there you have it - the two dominant methods for driving targeted visitors to your web site. Dominant, but probably irrelevant to the vast majority of site owners and webmasters who dont have the time to learn the ever-changing art of SEO or the budget for PPCs and SEO firms.

What should be relevant is how to get traffic to your site without breaking the bank or having to earn a degree in SEO techniques. Where it comes from should be secondary. Dont limit your traffic building efforts to just a few of the majors like Google, Yahoo, Inktomi and Overture. The top 8 or 10 search engines may be popular but that doesnt mean that your site will reap the benefits.

Here are several reasons why:

1. Sometimes the numbers work against you. Another billion pages added to Google or AlltheWeb are NOT going to help the average site owner - they are just going to bury the needle - your website - deeper in the haystack. And search traffic is only important, if your website can be found.

2. The major search engines cater primarily to searchers not webmasters. Why Because more search traffic means more revenue and there are far more searchers than webmasters.

3. Even PPC engines deliver more than top 50 search results. That means unless youre a high bidder, your website may still not be seen by many.

From a webmasters perspective what you should be looking for in a search engine is the right balance of search traffic and understandable site listing/ranking options. Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask Jeeves have massive traffic, but you need to evaluate your chances for having your web site added and then ranked well. You also need to determine if a search engine is more focused on revenue generation through ads, paid inclusion and Sponsored listings than they are in catering to your concerns about where your web site appears.

More specifically, when evaluating any engine regardless of size or traffic, you should consider the following factors:

1. Free Site Listings

A few years ago, you could submit your site to almost any search engine, small or large, for free. But times have changed. Today, even many second tier engines have PPC or paid inclusion programs, and free submissions, where offered, are often given little attention. This ties right into the second feature you should be looking for in a search engine.

2. Indexing Speed

The usual pitch is that free listings can take a month or more to be added with some SEs, never is more likely, but a paid listing will be added within 48 hours to a week. Does this make sense Most search engines dont manually review site submissions so whether a submission is free or paid shouldnt affect indexing speed. Slow indexing for free site submissions is most often nothing more than a deliberate ploy to get your money.

3. Ranking Options

Look for a search engine that offers some clues on how to improve your site ranking, short of emptying your wallet. Few engines reveal all the factors they use in ranking sites but knowing where the emphasis is content, link popularity, meta tags, etc. can be enough to point you in the right direction. There are also a handful of engines and directories that offer innovative listing options that give your website a much better chance of being seen.

4. Quality Searches

Important to site owners and searchers alike. When quality sites are buried in a sea of second rate listings, no one benefits.

5. Traffic

If you want your website seen, the traffic a search engine attracts is important, but dont be too quick to write off smaller, up and coming engines. Not too long ago both Google and Overture were considered long shots in the search engine wars. Also, keep in mind that top ranking in an engine that receives a few million searches per month may be more important to you than no ranking in an engine that receives millions of searches per day.

6. Paid Listing Options:

Look for paid listing options that offer more than fast inclusion in a database. With PPC, you get what you pay for, but with paid inclusion, you should receive more than you would with a free listing.

If youre not familiar with any search engines other than the big players, check out FreeWebSubmission.com http://www.freewebsubmission.com where you can find a list of the 50 top search engines that still offer free site listings. Engines are ranked by their Alexa rating which indicates their user popularity. Heres a list of the top 10 from FWS with current Alexa rankings: Google - 5 Lycos - 44 AltaVista - 64 About - 86 Open Directory - 157 AlltheWeb - 215 ExactSeek - 1,999 ScrubTheWeb - 2,483 What U Seek - 2,868 SearchHippo - 2,905

Some other engines and directories worth considering in your promotion efforts are Gimpsy http://www.gimpsy.com/, RoList http://www.rolist.com, SitesOnDisplay http://www.sitesondisplay.com and National Directory http://www.nationaldirectory.com.

About The Author

Mel Strocen is CEO of the Jayde Online Network of websites. The Jayde network currently consists of 12 websites, including ExactSeek.com http://www.exactseek.com and SiteProNews.com http://www.sitepronews.com.

The World Wide Web contains more than ten million websites with thousands more being added daily from all over the world, and search engines are tasked with presenting the most relevant pages based on the search criteria entered. Finding a large and popular site like www.irs.gov is easy because it is related to a large agency, but a small site like mine www.consumermortgagereduction.com would be impossible without the use of search engines. The task of finding a website that relates to a specific subject would be almost without the use of the search engine, yet they perform this task with relative ease using tools that may be unknown to most users of search engines.

The first of these tools utilize by search engines are web-crawlers; they search sites based on meta-tags, or the hidden descriptions of the site encoded in the head of the web page. By using web-crawlers to spider websites, the search engine does not have to search the entire webpage to return results, just the first few lines of code. The majority of the code web-crawlers spider is contained in the head section or top of the web page, and search engines use this information to list relevant search terms results.

Meta-bots and Google-bots are used by search engines in the same way that web-crawlers are deployed, and the only difference is that bots read the first lines of text that is visible on the browser of the user. Meta-bots and Google-bots are useful in providing content oriented sites with a quick description of the site, and is use to match the relative words in a search engine query.

The indexer is not a search engine par say, for example the largest indexer is Yahoo, which is not a search engine like Google that is a true search engine. A true search engine uses keyword searches to find website, whereas an indexer stores a link to sites based on categories. To submit a website for inclusion into an indexer the submitter has to find a relevant category that matches their website, but to submit to a search engine they only have to submit the site Universal Resource Listing or URL and the search engine deploys its web-crawler or bots to index the site.

The search engine has become an intricate part of life, especially in the lives of students that utilize the web for research. Without the search engine the search for sites that contain the terms being searched for would almost be impossible to locate in a world of millions of websites.

About The Author

Thad Collins is the owner of Consumer Mortgage Reduction Service a company that specializes in providing business programs to entrepreneurs that want to start a Biweekly Equity Acceleration and Auditing business. For more information visit: http://www.consumermortgagereduction.com

With all the recent publicity given to Google as the Internets number one search service, its hardly surprising that Microsoft has already started work on re-vamping their MSN search service. Okay, its still powered by the Yahoo engine, but according to Microsoft it has been "cleaned up" and the new service mirrors much more the kind of "non-commercial" results which are currently displayed by Google.

Costing some $100 in development costs and lost advertising revenues, MSNs makeover offer the end-user a much more uncluttered screen and again this aesthetic change mirrors the simple interface of Google. Results too are served quicker than the old system, or so Microsoft claim, although they supply no data on how this compares to Google.

The web search market is currently dominated by Google and Yahoo although Microsoft are now openly stating that they will be edging their own search engine into this market by the end of 2004.

This mega-upgrade, which is currently undergoing full testing at Microsoft, breaks away from the Yahoo engine and be powered by their own software engine and algorithms which will, they claim, enable people to search for what they want rather than be presented with a number of paid/sponsored results. Should this happen, the move away from paid-for results will be a big step for Microsoft, who, in the past, have come under universal criticism, as end-users have not had confidence that the results served to them were unbiased.

With the search needs of over 350 million people up for grabs, Microsoft are keen to dissuade people from using the other engines. But with over 80% of the current daily global Net searches being performed on Google, Microsoft have much work to do. But for those who fear for the future of Google with Microsoft breathing heavily down their neck, you might take comfort from a time, not so long ago, when Microsoft considered itself bigger than the Internet. Does anyone remember Microsoft Network Thought not!

As for Google, while they do not have the same aggressive marketing culture as Microsoft, they are very inventive, creative and above all, they are already internationally successful; holding one of the most recognized brands in the world. Far from standing still, Google has quietly expanded its range of services and now even offers an affiliate scheme to webmasters to host Google Adsense Ads on their websites. But perhaps its a mark of the trust and confidence that people have in Google as a corporation, that their have the only affiliate scheme on the Net which does not specify up front what commision it will be paying.

I suspect that when the Seach Wars are finally concluded it will be the confidence end-users have in the results they are served which will win out and not necessarily the best or fastest technology. Currently of course, Google are streets and houses ahead of both Microsoft and Yahoo in the public confidence stakes and it will be interesting to see if this confidence can be maintained following Googles much publicized floatation on the Stock Market.

Microsoft may well find that winning public confidence in this war is harder than the creation of any technology they wish to introduce and in the end, just as they did with Apple, Microsoft may well consider buying into that confidence and snap up a major chunk of Googles stock.

About The Author

Robert Palmer is CEO of deskNET Communications www.desknet.co.uk - suppliers of the first affordable alternative to opt-in email marketing and newletter publishing. info@desknet.co.uk

I tried out Microsofts new search engine beta version the other day. They have been working on it quite secretly now for almost a year. It has been rumored to be a Google killer once in full public release. They say its accuracy and ability to return relevant results will far surpass any other search engine on the Internet. That remains to be seen. I tried various combinations of single, double, and triple word/phrased searches to inspect the results.

To the casual observer I suppose a certain percentage of the results would seem to be accurate, but upon closer inspection and with a trained eye, the results for the most part ranged from poor to outright terrible.

I then attempted a series of searches on the same combination of words. "custom designed screen printed t-shirts" I was attempting to determine how much the results and rankings changed or did not change within the same set of query words. I searched with a variety of spellings on a particular keyword In this case, I selected the word "T shirts" then t-shirts with a dash and finally "tshirts" no dash, all one word

One web site had very consistent results across all three spelling methods. This intrigued me so I clicked on the link to analyze the site. i.e. Why was this one so well optimized or more specifically why did this new Microsoft beta search engine find this web site so tasty.

The site was completely broken. None of the graphics loaded properly. in Internet Explorer It was devoid of any contextual content on the home page and scarcely little throughout the rest of the pages. Some scrolling Java script overlapped the button for a drop down menu. No outside links. Nothing. Excuse the pun but this was not a pretty site. How then could Microsoft possibly rank this site one, two and three for completely different keyword phrasings and spellings on a soon to be major release for a search engine

The answer revealed itself as soon as I took a look at the web sites HTML source code.

Guess what folks, meta tags are back! At least as far as the Beta version of Microsofts new search engine is concerned, especially the keyword Meta Tag. Above all, this tag seemed to account for the heaviest weight in determining the aforementioned rankings. I will err on the side of caution here and assume that Microsoft has not finalized all their algorithm parameters yet, but the keyword tag was definitely what their spider had been eating.

The problem However, beside the horrible site was that this particular keyword tag, by all SEO standards, was an abomination! Nearly every rule and guideline weve come to know and love ALL thrown out the window! It looked like a tag from 1995. Multiple repetition. Too many characters, way too many words, broken lines, poorly weighted keywords, bad spacing, and completely useless keywords. Whats a "rinsger" anyway

Have a look for yourself. Here it is. Without formatting changes

KEYWORDS CONTENT="tshirts, tees, tee shirts, tee-shirts, printed t-shirts, blank t-shirts, eshirts, ishirts, short sleeves, sweatshirts, long sleeve, v-necks, tank tops, jerseys, screenprintings, screen-printings, custom t-shirts, custom designs, custom printing, custom embroidery, michigan, fraternitys, sororitys, sportswear, artwork, typesetting, imprints, engraves, emboss, stamps, pocket tís, ts, rinsger tiís, ringers, ladieís tís, designs, designing, apparel, clothing, clothes, screens, printers, silkscree embroidery, embroidered, customs, fraternities, sororities, golf, towels, logos, promotional, fundraisers, personalized, company, tailgates, formals, footballs, blocks, carnivals, circus, pledges, bid day, rush, halloween, christmas, easter, thanksgiving, halloween t-shirts, christmas t-shirts, easter t-shirts, thanksgiving t-shirts, floors, dormitory, churches, clubs, sports, sport teams, choirs, schools, businesses, fundraisers, intramural, hanes, jerseys, fruit of the looms, universities, michigan state university, MSU, msu, university of michigan, U of M, UofM, u of m, eastern michigan university, EMU, emu, western michigan university, WMU, wmu, central michigan university, CMU, cmu, colleges, universitys, universities, shrits, tshrits, t-shrits, desings, te-shirts, teshirts, sirts, shits, shitts, custums, screan"

Yup, pretty darn ugly, but the Microsoft Beta search engine seems to be eating it up. Granted this engine is still in beta version but lets review. Broken, useless site. Broken useless tags. Number one ranking! Whats wrong with this picture

Most search engine users will try a new search engine only a few times. When they do not get the search result accuracy and relevance they expect, they will soon dismiss it and move along. Beta version or no beta version, one thing is for certain. The Microsoft coders have plenty of additional work to do before releasing this search engine to the general public. Google coders, take the weekend off.

About The Author

Robert McCourty is a founding partner and the Marketing Director of Metamend Software and Design Ltd., a cutting edge search engine optimization SEO and web site promotion and marketing company. http://www.metamend.com/

Search Engine Marketing - John Alexander Interviews SEO author Susan ONeil about the early days.

Robin Nobles was the very first person to develop a structured series of comprehensive courses and lessons which are recognized and approved by the US educational system for training people in search engine marketing skills. Robin Nobles celebrates her 6th year in the online Web training business with her ever popular SEO certification courses at http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.

Hattiesburg, MS PRWEB July 15, 2004 -- Today we bring you the 4th in a series of interviews conducted by Robins business partner John Alexander, who is looking up some of Robins very earliest online students and asking them about their recollections of what it was like building SEO skills way back in 1998 and how far theyve come in the SEO industry since then.

John Alexander: "Welcome Susan ONeil, Id really like to thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. Susan, you had some background in marketing before you started into the search engine marketing industry. Could you tell us a little about your background and how you first got thinking about search engine marketing"

Susan ONeil: "I began my career in marketing in 1975 as Director of Public Relations with a symphony orchestra. From there I went to Wall Street where I was National Advertising Manager for Paine Webber. When I moved to New Hampshire, I opened a public relations agency, which is where I first got involved with the Internet when a client company launched an e-mail service."

John Alexander: "Could you take us back and share some memories of the early days How did you first find Robin Nobles online courses in the beginning"

Susan ONeil: "I was helping a few of my PR clients with text for their websites and began experimenting with Meta tags and content alterations. The more I learned about the power of optimization, the more I realized that I didnt know it all. Thats when I searched for an online SEO course and found Robin Nobles. Her expertise and her passion for her work inspired me then and it still inspires me now."

John Alexander: "Thats very nice and I know exactly what you mean. Could you tell us how long after your initial training was it, before you began realizing your true SEO skills and begin helping people with their Web visibility challenges"

Susan ONeil: "I had a good deal of early success back them by just applying the basics that Id picked up through trial and error. This was easy to do in the mid to late 90s. However, once I finished Robins course in 1998, I was able to implement a more aggressive program that could better serve the most competitive types of e-commerce sites. Also, through Robin and her students, I found a forum that allowed me to share and learn from peers -- so important in the then-emerging industry. Previous to that, doing SEO was a pretty lonely job since few realized this field of marketing even existed."

John Alexander: "That is very interesting to see how far this goes back. Robins vision for a forum has always been to create an ideal place where people can share information safely together and she has always been so good at bringing the very best talents out in people. I should mention just for our readers sake, that her newest efforts in this regard just recently has been to fashion an excellent networking community called the World Resource Center at http://www.sew-wrc.com."

John Alexander: "Susan, I was reading a copy of your book which you co-authored with Robin Nobles and noted that in the preface, it says that you two actually wrote "Maximize Web site Traffic" without ever actually meeting in person. Can you tell us how this came about"

Susan ONeil: "As I helped more and more of my PR clients move onto the Web through optimized websites, I realized that there was a need for a corporate, comprehensive approach to providing professional SEO services to Americas companies. I decided to create such a company and, in 1998, closed my PR agency and launched @Web Site Publicity. In order to give my new company quick credibility and exposure, I decided to write a book on SEO - a "how to" book. Knowing how time-consuming the writing would be, I asked Robin to share the endeavor with me."

John Alexander: "And this was the beginning of this new book"

Susan ONeil: "Yes, she agreed to the idea, so we divvied up the chapters and started writing. We didnt meet until it was time to do the final edit. Robin flew up from Mississippi to a ski chalet in Vermont where we typed and talked non-stop for a week. Robin brought a great depth of specific SEO experience which mixed beautifully with my years of marketing experience and the result was a book that, outdated as it is, still brings us fan mail!"

John Alexander: "That is very cool! Now as you know, last month just as of June 29, 2004 Robin Nobles has been celebrating her sixth year in the SEO Training industry with her online www.onlinewebtraining.com instructional courses in search engine optimization. Looking back to the early days when you first decided to study search engine marketing, can you describe what your SEO skillset has meant to you personally How much have these skills meant to you

Susan ONeil: "Because of my SEO skills and my marketing expertise, I and my staff have been able to help hundreds of small to large businesses succeed on the Internet. This remains exciting and gratifying. Our clients were also better able to ride out the dot.com bust because our approach to providing SEO services has been to focus on the long term "health" of a website, which means building quality content continuously. Robin in her teaching and, together, in our book - weve never strayed from the truism that "content is king" and that continues to serve my clients well."

John Alexander: "Can you tell our readers about one of your earliest SEO success stories and what it felt like the first time you made a real difference to someones business online"

Susan ONeil: "A longtime PR client of mine is a publisher of fine nonfiction for children. This company was early in recognizing the power of the Internet and so invested in a delightful, informative website that also offered subscriptions to their magazines. However, after spending the money to build the website, they didnt get any visitors. I liken it to giving birth after a long labor to a beautiful new baby that no one comes to admire. Aware of their concerns, I starting tweaking tags, cleaning up code, and adding content and their site began to take off. That early first client has remained with my company all these years and has been generous in their recommending of us to others as they continue to grow their online business."

John Alexander: "What word of wisdom or advice do you have for any of our readers that might be considering building a new career in search engine marketing these days"

Susan ONeil: "I dont think you can be in marketing today without at least an understanding of search marketing concepts, even if you dont build the code and write the content. As this "new" science of SEO has become not only universally accepted but consistently praised for its cost-effective strategies, there will continue to be opportunities for people who can apply consistent, aggressive, yet ethical strategies for growing online success, both in-house for e-commerce companies and with SEO/SEM agencies like mine. In fact, my agency is growing still and when I hire someone who may have a great marketing background but be new to SEO, I have them start their learning curve with one of Robins courses because no one can lay out the ground work better."

John Alexander: "How nicely spoken, Susan."

Susan ONeil: "The other word of advice I have is an old one: dont believe everything you read. SEO newsletters and forums are great starting points and can be entertaining, but the people with the best information dont go giving it away. Whatever you hear or read, never apply a strategy to a clients site without thoroughly testing it first extensively. We developed our own E- Commerce Lab for just this purpose."

John Alexander: "Finally in closing, Ill ask if you have any other favourite online resources you would care to mention for the benefit of our readers

Susan ONeil: "As my company has grown, my responsibilities have shifted from trying to discern the optimum number of words on a Google-friendly page or the best marketing spin in a title tag, to focusing on the bigger picture, so Im not a good one to recommend the best SEO reading today. Instead, as I lead my team into our 7th year of business, Im reading the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the UKs Financial Times, always trying to look beyond the bend - to try to see where business in general is going and the Internet specifically. To keep our clients ahead of their competition, we need to keep ahead of ours.

John Alexander: "That is so very true. Well, I want to thank you again so much Susan ONeil, for taking time today to share some of your rememberances of the early days of search engine marketing and telling us how you first got in to the business. It has been fascinating to speaking to you and Ill just take this opportunity wish you the very greatest of ongoing success in the future."

About The Author

This interview has been brought to you courtesy of John Alexander, Co-director of Training and Education at Search Engine Workshops http://www.searchengineworkshops.com and Online Web Training http://www.onlinewebtraining.com. john@searchengineworkshops.com

I know what youre thinking: Google gives you such accurate results that you dont need any other search tool. Well, lets see about that.

You might - or might not - know that no major search engine indexes ALL the existing Web pages. OpenFind states that it indexes 3.5 billion Web pages, Google claims 2.4 billion, AlltheWeb - 2.1 billion, Inktomi - a little more than 2 billion, WiseNut - 1.5 billion and AltaVista - 1 billion Web pages.

The truth is, nobody knows how wide the Web is. Some say 5 billion pages, some 8 billion, some even more. Anyway, whats definite is that the major search engines SEs index only a fraction of the "publicly indexable Web". Moreover, every SE indexes different Web pages, which means if you use only one SE you will miss relevant results that can be found in other search engines.

One way to more effectively search the Web is to use a meta search engine.

What Is A Meta Search Engine

A meta search engine also know as multi-threaded engine is a search tool that sends your query simultaneously to several search engines SEs, Web directories WDs and sometimes to the so-called Invisible Deep Web, a collection of online information not indexed by traditional search engines.

After collecting the results, the meta search engine MSE will remove the duplicate links and, according to its algorithm, combine/rank the results into a single merged list.

An important note:

Unlike the individual search engines and directories, the meta search engines Do not have their own databases and Do not accept URL submissions.

Pros and Cons of Meta Search Engines

Pros: MSEs save searchers a considerable amount of time by sparing them the trouble of running a query in each search engine. The results - most of the time - are extremely relevant. MSEs can be used by Webmasters to find their sites presence, rankings and link popularity in the major SEs.

Cons: Because some SEs or WDs do not support advanced searching techniques such as quotation marks to enclose phrases or Boolean operators, no or irrelevant results from those SEs will appear in the MSEs results list when those techniques are used.

MSEs Come In Four Flavors: "Real" MSEs which aggregate/rank the results in one page "Pseudo" MSEs type I which exclusively group the results by search engine "Pseudo" MSEs type II which open a separate browser window for each search engine used and Search Utilities, software search tools.

The following provides detailed information on each of the four MSE types, along with my ranking:

1. "Real" MSEs

These real MSEs simultaneously search the major search engines, aggregate the results, eliminate the duplicates and return the most relevant matches, according to the engines algorithm.

Following is a list of a few meta search engines that you might find useful. Its by no means complete, but it might help you find what you need.

The criteria I used to determine the best MSEs were: the amount and the relevance of the results, the capability to handle advanced searches, the ability to enable users to customize searches, the speed of their searches and others.

ez2www [ http://ez2www.com ] Searches the best SEs - AlltheWeb, Google, AltaVista, Teoma, Wisenut - and directories - Yahoo! and Open Directory. Through its "Advanced Search" function it also searches a small part of the Invisible Deep Web. It also searches news, newsgroups, MP3, images and many, many more. Provides excellent results in a very neat interface. Created in September 2000 by the French search engine developer Holomedia. THE best!

Vivísimo [ http://vivisimo.com ] Uses the clustering technology, meaning matches are organized in folders. Dont like the frames Just modify the size of both the upper and the left frames. This MSE was created by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University. Advanced searching options available: exact phrase, Boolean operators, fields searching domain, host, title, URL, etc. and more. A jewel for the serious searcher.

Query Server [ http://www.queryserver.com/web.htm ] Searches an impressive list of 11 SEs - everything important except Google. But dont worry: Query Server searches Yahoo!, Netscape and AOL, all partially powered by Google. This is another example of the clustering technology. Highly customizable metasearch tool. You can modify the appearance of the results page, selecting the search engines, the amount of results, their timeout, etc. It supports quotation marks to enclose phrases, the Boolean syntax and parentheses. Very professional.

Infonetware [ http://www.infonetware.com ] Searches the Web and provides relevant results, organized in topics, in a very clean interface. This MSE is based in Edinburgh, Scotland and is a very good tool.

Metaseek [http://www.pcdigest.net/metasearch/en/main.shtml] Excellent MSE from Ukraine. Searches major international and local search engines. Besides the Web you can search images, MP3, FTP files, news and more. You can use "Phrase" "", "natural language" processing, Boolean logic and field searching by URL, title, site/domain or link. Very nice.

IBoogie [ http://iboogie.com ] Uses a minimalist design. This MSE "performs intelligent clustering of results". It searches the Web, the Invisible Deep Web, images, video and audio files.

Vinden.NL [ http://www.vinden.nl ] Searches "the best," providing very good results in a clean interface. This MSE comes from the Netherlands.

Search Online [ http://www.searchonline.info ] Uses an excellent selection of search engines and directories. This MSE provides relevant results in a relatively crowded interface. For each result you can see the search engine where the hit was found, and its ranking.

Meta Bear [ www.metabear.com ] Provides relevant results from both international and Russian sites. Be sure you type the query in the "Search The World" box.

Web Scout [ http://www.webscout.com ] Searches the Web, news, newsgroups, auctions, MP3 files and jobs. This Australian MSE utilizes the major SEs - except Google - and provides relevant matches in a clean results list.

argosa:de [ http://www.argosa.de ] Searches 17 international and local SEs. I suggest you avoid checking the boxes of Acoon, Abacho, GoClick and ah_ha.com search engines, because they give many irrelevant hits. This is Germanys first MSE, and provides excellent results organized by relevance, source quelle or title.

Experts Avenue [ http://www.expertsavenue.com ] Searches different search engines simultaneously for Web pages, auctions, jobs and forums and provides very relevant results in a neat interface. Enables online language translation of Web pages. Click on "Translate" and you will be brought to AltaVistas Babelfish translation service, powered by SYSTRAN.

InfoGrid [ http://www.infogrid.com ] Provides excellent results in an easy to read layout, despite a very confusing Home Page crowded and with frames. This MSE searches the "big ones" including Google, AlltheWeb, Yahoo! and Open Directory. It also searches newswires, auctions, discussion forums, MP3, FTP files and more. To avoid the frames in the results list select the option "Open in the Current Window".

Suchspider.de [http://www.suchspider.de/meta-suchmaschinen] Searches a whopping 100 ! international SEs and WDs. Google, AlltheWeb, Open Directory, you name it. You can sort the results by relevance, source or - much better - grouped by domain name. This "Meta-Suchmachine" is based in Germany.

EmailPinoy [ http://www.emailpinoy.com ] Sends your query to 15 search engines. Dont use Kanoodle, ah_ha.com and GoClick pay-per-click search engines, because youll get irrelevant results. For better results enclose phrases in quotation marks. This MSE is from the Philippines.

1 SECOND [ http://1second.com ] Searches a good selection of 14 major SEs and WDs, throws out the duplicates and summarizes the results in a neat listings page. Use the Advanced Search if you want to customize the search, especially the timeout of the search engines.

My Prowler [ http://myprowler.com ] Searches over a dozen search engines, news, images, audio/MP3, music videos, auctions and various other sites. Compiles the results, weeds out irrelevant matches and provides a summarized report. It accepts "natural language" query.

Gimenei [ http://www.gimenei.com ] Use of the "Advanced Search" option is strongly recommended. You can customize the results page, including my favorite option, "All Results" in one page. This is a comprehensive and fast MSE based in Manhattan, New York.

Dug Dugi [ http://www.dugdugi.com ] Queries the major search engines, collates the results, eliminates information and aggregates the results in an ultra-clean layout. For each match youll get the search engine and the ranking of the page.

Search 66 [ http://search66.com ] Groups together pages from the same domain. Beautiful. To avoid SEs timeouts, select the "Speed": "Comprehensive". Obviously, youll get more results from this excellent Australian MSE.

Besides the very good MSEs listed above, there are also some others that are worth a try:

Internav [ http://internav.com ],

NetXplorer [ http://www.netxplorer.de ] Germany,

Aaise [ http://www.aaise.com/meta ],

Metengine [ http://www.metengine.com ] Antigua,

One2Seek [ http://www.one2seek.com ],

Ithaki [ http://www.ithaki.net ],

Fossick [ http://www.fossick.com/Search.htm ] Australia,

Pandia [ http://www.pandia.com/powersearch/index.html ] Norway,

meta EUREKA [ http://www.metaeureka.com ] Netherlands,

Widow [ http://www.widow.com ],

VROOSH! [ http://www.vroosh.com ] Canada,

Meta 360 [ http://meta360.com ],

7 Meta Search [ http://7metasearch.com ],

Metor [ http://www.metor.com ] Germany and

Ixquick [ http://www.ixquick.com ].

The following is a list of some unimpressive meta search engines. These MSEs do not provide the breadth of coverage offered by the sites recommended above. Each of these has its own flawed characteristics, but generally they are old and have not kept up with the latest capabilities or they suffer from too many functional problems.

Metacrawler [ http://www.metacrawler.com ],

Dogpile [ http://www.dogpile.com ],

C4 formerly Cyber 411 [ http://www.c4.com ],

Mamma [ http://www.mamma.com ] Canada,

Pro Fusion [ http://www.profusion.com ],

moonmist [ http://www.moonmist.info ] UK,

Bytedog [ http://www.bytedog.com ] Canada,

il motore [ http://www.ilmotore.com ] Italy,

METASEEK.NL [ http://www.metaseek.nl ] Netherlands and

ApocalX [ http://search.apocalx.com ] France.

2. "Pseudo" MSEs Type I

The type I "Pseudo" MSE sends the query to the search engines, and then presents the results grouped by search engine in one long, easy to read scrollable list. Be careful. Based on how many SEs you select, the waiting time can be very long. Some people might find these MSEs useful, however.

The best MSEs in this category are:

Mall Agent [ http://www.mallagent.com/web.html ], which provides results from 38 SEs and WDs,

qb Search [ http://www.qbsearch.com/ ] from 17,

Better Brain [ http://www.bette

Statistics show that 85% of pages visited on the Internet come from people who have gotten there from a search engine. Statistically, people look first at the top of the first page of the regular search results, then the bottom, and then they go to the sponsored listings.

There is an art and science to being ranked highly on the search engines. The science is formatting the pages with the right meta tags and submitting them in the right way to the search engines. The art is to make the site look and read normal in spite of filling it with key words.

Here are five and a half ways to get a higher ranking and more visitors:

1. Pick the right Key Words and Phrases

These are the words and phrases that people will put into search engines to try to find your product, business or organization. Having good key words and phrases is foundational to have good optimization. This takes research using such tools at Wordtracker and Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. They give you a good idea of what people are searching for and what you should focus on.

2. Use Good Header Tags

Header tags are hidden in the code within your Web page. The most important one is the "title" tag, which isn’t considered a META tag. It tells what’s within your page and it’s important to have your keyphrases in it. It is also good to have keyphrases in your "description" META tag, though it doesn’t rank nearly as high as the "title" tag.

3. Use Keyphrases in Your Visible Page Title

Provide a unique title to each page on your site that is chock full of key words and phrases. Search engines like this because it means that there is a higher probability that your site is a good match for what people are looking for. This is should be placed within the H1 tag top heading of your page and is visible to the visitor. It also pays to have your keyphrases in subtitles on the page.

4. Provide Plenty of Content on Your Site

Shoot to have at least 450 characters on your page. Concentrate on putting key words and phrases in the first paragraph and last paragraphs.

5. Secure a Lot of Related Incoming Links

The more sites linked to your site, the higher you will be ranked by the search engines. These links can be from strategic partners, vendors, directories or other types of sites with whom you exchange links.

If you are a web site developer, put in your contract that you are going to put a developer’s link at the bottom of the site, such as, "Web site design by Green Chair Marketing Group," with an active link to your site. This will help your site grow in its link popularity.

5.5 Keep Optimizing Your Site

The more content on your site, the better. I suggest adding a couple pages a month, whether it’s case studies, more product information, testimonials, articles, press releases, etc. If you add just five new pages a month, you will have 60 new pages by the end of the year, and over 100 pages by the end of the second year.

You are bound to catch some people you would have missed because there is more content to choose from. And your site will be more highly ranked by Google, because they highly weigh sites that have more content.

While you’re at it, continue to get relevant links coming into your site. Google loves incoming links. And you might have people click through to your site from these other places.

If you don’t have time to work on the optimization or would feel more comfortable having someone else do it, consider strongly hiring a professional to do your search engine optimization. That way you can focus your energies on sales or creating more and better product.

One caveat, I would stay away from companies that initiate contact with you through emails or phone calls. They often use techniques that can get your severely penalized by the search engines. Ask people you know who have been successful in their search engine positioning who they use.

About The Author

Dave Carlson owns Green Chair Marketing Group, an Internet marketing firm specializing in driving visitors to web sites by search engine optimization, pay per click, and web design/redesign. 720-427-5660 Visit his site at http//:www.GreenChair.net. links@greenchair.net

Statistics show that 85% of pages visited on the Internet come from people who have gotten there from a search engine. Statistically, people look first at the top of the first page of the regular search results, then the bottom, and then they go to the sponsored listings.

There is an art and science to being ranked highly on the search engines. The science is formatting the pages with the right meta tags and submitting them in the right way to the search engines. The art is to make the site look and read normal in spite of filling it with key words.

Here are five and a half ways to get a higher ranking and more visitors:

1. Pick the right Key Words and Phrases

These are the words and phrases that people will put into search engines to try to find your product, business or organization. Having good key words and phrases is foundational to have good optimization. This takes research using such tools at Wordtracker and Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. They give you a good idea of what people are searching for and what you should focus on.

2. Use Good Header Tags

Header tags are hidden in the code within your Web page. The most important one is the "title" tag, which isn’t considered a META tag. It tells what’s within your page and it’s important to have your keyphrases in it. It is also good to have keyphrases in your "description" META tag, though it doesn’t rank nearly as high as the "title" tag.

3. Use Keyphrases in Your Visible Page Title

Provide a unique title to each page on your site that is chock full of key words and phrases. Search engines like this because it means that there is a higher probability that your site is a good match for what people are looking for. This is should be placed within the H1 tag top heading of your page and is visible to the visitor. It also pays to have your keyphrases in subtitles on the page.

4. Provide Plenty of Content on Your Site

Shoot to have at least 450 characters on your page. Concentrate on putting key words and phrases in the first paragraph and last paragraphs.

5. Secure a Lot of Related Incoming Links

The more sites linked to your site, the higher you will be ranked by the search engines. These links can be from strategic partners, vendors, directories or other types of sites with whom you exchange links.

If you are a web site developer, put in your contract that you are going to put a developer’s link at the bottom of the site, such as, "Web site design by Green Chair Marketing Group," with an active link to your site. This will help your site grow in its link popularity.

5.5 Keep Optimizing Your Site

The more content on your site, the better. I suggest adding a couple pages a month, whether it’s case studies, more product information, testimonials, articles, press releases, etc. If you add just five new pages a month, you will have 60 new pages by the end of the year, and over 100 pages by the end of the second year.

You are bound to catch some people you would have missed because there is more content to choose from. And your site will be more highly ranked by Google, because they highly weigh sites that have more content.

While you’re at it, continue to get relevant links coming into your site. Google loves incoming links. And you might have people click through to your site from these other places.

If you don’t have time to work on the optimization or would feel more comfortable having someone else do it, consider strongly hiring a professional to do your search engine optimization. That way you can focus your energies on sales or creating more and better product.

One caveat, I would stay away from companies that initiate contact with you through emails or phone calls. They often use techniques that can get your severely penalized by the search engines. Ask people you know who have been successful in their search engine positioning who they use.

About The Author

Dave Carlson owns Green Chair Marketing Group, an Internet marketing firm specializing in driving visitors to web sites by search engine optimization, pay per click, and web design/redesign. 720-427-5660 Visit his site at http://www.GreenChair.net links@greenchair.net

Edited by Olya Crawley

Many of our customers http://www.internet-marketing-australia.com find search engine optimisation SEO services quite expensive. From the clients point of view the results are intangible and the process is lengthy. Therefore, the clients are often reluctant to commit to the additional expense.

Typically, a call for SEO comes after the website is already up and running. The quoted price depends on the clients needs, industry, positioning, etc. The price varies a lot, yet the cost of optimisation is comparable to the cost of Web design.

Is it expensive - You bet!

During the negotiations with the Web designers the client gets an expectation of having a beautiful and functional site developed for an X amount of dollars. The client is also getting a free hosting, free search engines submissions and other freebies. That is why the price looks reasonable.

Only at some later stage the client realises that there is not enough traffic and potential buyers coming through the website. Consultations with the Internet marketing gurus reveal that in addition to the extra cost there is a need to restructure the content - copy. Why was it not done during the Web design phase

The answer is simple. Skill sets of Web designers, graphic designers, programmers and Internet marketing people are different. Each of the specialists focuses on a different aspect of the Web site. Thus, when starting the search engine optimisation, we come across design obstacles that take time - the clients - money to overcome.

Consider this: we discovered that the client’s home page was overloaded with JScript and had only two sentences of actual readable text. To rectify the situation,we suggested and created new home page content at least 250 words. We also asked the web designers to move the script out into a separate file.

The client had to pay for all the above services plus testing!

Wouldnt it be smarter read: cheaper for the client to consider SEO issues during the Web design phase, rather than after

Customers would be happier, the websites would perform better...

Will the Web design firms have enough courage to approach SEO at the initial stage

We hope they will….

From www.internet-marketing-australia.com

About The Author

Rkd Unger, Internet marketing consultant, founder of www.internet-marketing-australia.com articlecity@smartstrings.com

Search Engine Optimization commonly referred to as SEO is one of the best waysto get traffic to your site. The best thing about SEO is that the traffic you get is free! If you manage to get top ten listings in a major search engine like Google, you can get hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your site.

Depending on your site’s subject matter, you might even be able to start earning a significant income purely from the popularity of your site. For example, if you have a site on jokes you might be able to get a substantial amount of traffic, but you’re unlikely to earn a huge income.

On the other hand, if you have a top ranking site on Google for the keyword phrase “web hosting”, you’ll be able to earn at least $1-2 million probably more like $3-4 million per year from that site alone. However, to get into the top 10 in Google for the phrase “web hosting” is extremely difficult, you would need to be a search engine pro to do it - even then, it might take you two years to get there with a team of 5 people working around the clock.

A profitable site will be based on a good keyword phrase, a good topic or subject material and be different enough to stand out from the competition. If you can combine these elements successfully you’ll increase you chances of turning a profit from your site.

Keep in mind that there are a number of niche areas where there is not so much competition but still the opportunity to make a decent profit. There are hundreds of such areas where you have the potential to earn $500-2000 per month.We’ll talk about keyword research and finding profitable niche areas in later issues, but for now, let’s look at the basics of how to get a site to the top of the search engines.

I’m going to focus on SEO for Google because it’s the largest and the best search engine which will generate the most traffic, especially if you can master all of the right optimization methods. Google has a very complicated system for determining which sites make it to the top of the search engine. There are manyfactors involved and there is no precise formula. A further consideration isthat Google often changes its formula so you can’t rely on it being the same from month to month. However, there are a few key factors which are unlikely to change dramatically:

Keywords phrases should be one of the most important considerations when you are optimizing your site remember that for each page of the site you should concentrate on one or two keyword phrases.

Keyword phrases which you want to get to the top of the search engine forshould be well researched. For more information on researching keywords, have a look at http://www.profitpuppy.com/keyword-research.htm where you can find links to useful keyword tools.

Key factors for getting to the top of Google:

The keyword phrase in the title of the page - you should have the phrase in the title of the page.

The keyword phrase in the text of the page – you want the keyword phrase to be up the top of the page, preferably as high up the top of the code on the page as possible. You also want the phrase repeated a few times on the page. Don’t worry about how many times, just at least 3-4 times and more if you think it fits in naturally with the content of the page.

Include the keyword phrase in a large font heading with H1 tags this may make a small difference.

Links into your site from other sites covered in more detail below.

Links within your site covered below.

Links to other sites covered below.

Links into your site from other sites

This is probably the most important factor for getting good search engine listings. You need to have good links coming into your site from other sites.

You want those links to be from popular sites that also have lots of links coming into them. Google uses a Page Rank system which is a rough measure of how many links are coming into your site. You want links from sites that have good Page Rank. Creating 50 of your own sites and interlinking them won’t increase your page ranking.

How do you get links from other sites

The main ways are to: Create a great site that people naturally want to link to, Get an affiliate program so people can link to your site and get paid, swap links with other sites, get listed in directories such as dmoz.org and buy links from people who have sites with a high PR Page Rank. Again, we’ll be talking about this in more depth in another issue of the newsletter.

The most important consideration with incoming links is that you need to have the keyword phrase in the link that directs traffic to you your site. Getting listed in directories such as DMOZ Open Directory Project can also help you significantly in getting a good search engine ranking in Google.

Links within your site

It helps once again if you have the keyword phrase in the links to each page of your site. For example, let’s say you have a site on baby products and you have one page where you are trying to optimize for the keyword phrase “cheap baby supplies”. You should make sure that links that come into that page have the phrase “cheap baby supplies” so that your links look like this: Click here for cheap baby supplies

Links to other sites

You can improve your page rank if you link to other sites that have high search engine listings for the phrase that you are trying to optimize for. Note: it can also hinder if you link to pages that are off-topic. For example, you don’t want to link to a chemical arms factory from your baby supplies site.

Some other things you don’t want to do and some things that make no difference at all are:

- Repeating the keyword phrase multiple times on the page unless it makes contextual sense.

- Placing hidden links on your site – for example, links that are the same color as the background of the page won’t be recognized by Google.

- Optimizing your site too carefully – if it’s obvious that you have optimized your site for Google for example, if all your incoming links use the same keyword phrase you may be penalized. Google looks for sites that are more ‘natural’ in their structure, so if all links look the same this won’t look like an organic site to Google robots and you may be penalized for it.

- Despite popular opinion, Meta tags don’t really help at all. However, the description tag is important because that is the description that will appear in your listing on Google.

Finally, you may have heard of people using automated pages and or ‘cloaked pages’ to get high search engine rankings in Google. Personally, I don’t believein taking this approach as it’s a non-sustainable way of getting high search engine rankings that’s not say that some people who aren’t very successful at it. I know of atleast 3 highly successful companies who generate automated pages using this software http://www.profitpuppy.com/traffic. This is a sneaky way to make it to the top of of the search engine rankings, but it can work; one guy I know is earning several million dollars per year using this technique. So it can work, but as I mentioned before, I don’t think it’s sustainable and the Google engine doesn’t take kindly to it.

How do I submit my site to the search engines

My personal philosophy is that if your site is not found naturally by following links then it is unlikely to rank in the search engines - I don’t usually bother submitting to search engines.

So that’s the basics of how to get to the top of the search engines. We’ll have a look at the more advanced stuff later on. It takes a lot of time knowledge and dedication to get there but once you master it, SEO is a fantastic way to gettraffic and make money on the web.

www.profitpuppy.com

About The Author

Rob Rawson

You may reprint/republish any of the following articles on your own Site, in your own ezine, auto-responder series, product, bonus items, or any other format you wish as long as you adhere to the following:

1. The article must not be altered in anyway and the links must remain active

2. You must not abuse the Internet in anyway, shape, or form with ANY of your online marketing. This includes but is not limited to sending unsolicited commercial email SPAM, abusing online forums, using copyrighted materials without permission, or infringing on the trademarks of others. info@profitpuppy.com

The Cold Hard Facts…..

One of the most important factors in being successful in your business is to learn how to rank high in the search engines. It has been said that the search engines can account for as much as 95% of all the traffic to your website! If you fail to take advantage of the major engines you could be neglecting almost ALL of your targeted traffic!

I don’t know of any business that can afford to throw away that many visitors.

Is your site ready

There are many factors in which to consider before submitting your website. Have you prepared your website for maximum placement Each page will need to be submitted separately, and each page will need the following. Page Title Meta Tags Keywords in Header tags ALT Tags on all images Keyword- filled content Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible Keywords in links to other pages Keywords in outbound links

[Page Title]

It is crucial to place keywords as close to the beginning of your page title as possible. The search engines will typically display your page title as part of the description that shows up when your website is displayed in search results. Placing keywords towards the top of your page can be extremely beneficial. For example, my website page title is, Affiliate Programs Directory@Smokesoft Inc. This means my website will do well in searches on “affiliate”, “affiliate programs” and “affiliate programs directory”. Try to create your page title in such a way that you can include as many keywords as possible.

[Meta Tags]

Although the importance of meta tags is fading each day, they are easy to create and for some search engines they are a factor, so you would be wise to include them in your pages. For the search engines that do not take meta tags into consideration they will merely ignore them.

[Keywords in Header tags]

This means to create a separate heading for each page containing the keywords you are targeting for that specific page. For example, the heading for my home page is as follows:

Affiliate Programs Directory

Meaning that on my webpage it would appear as:

Affiliate Programs Directory

This will greatly increase your positioning in the rankings. take care to prepare EVERY page with this in mind. [ALT tags on all images]

Another worthwhile little “trick” is to add the ALT attribute to every image on every page of your website. You can effectively place a keyword in each image on your website! Follow this example:

Some search engines will use the text in images when considering keyword relevancy, therefore adding more content in your favor.

[Keyword-filled content]

There is no excuse for not filling your web pages with quality keyword-filled content this is a major factor in how well you will rank in the search engines. The more keywords the search engines locate the higher your site will rank….period.

I’ve found that one of the best ways to accomplish this is with articles such as this one. Imagine for a moment that I used “search engines” or “keywords” as two of my keywords for a given page, now skim through this article and see how many times these two words appear. As you can see this would be a huge asset in determining how well my site places, and this is just one article! If you are incapable of writing your own articles there are many places where you can obtain articles to place on your site from another author. One such place is http://www.smokesoft.net/Articles.html

[Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible]

This is one of the easiest and most effective ways to increase placement. On each page make sure that the first visible text is a keyword, the search engines LOVE this! If you do not have keywords placed as the first visible text on your page, you may want to consider modifying or redesigning it to allow for this. It is well worth the time and effort and you will most likely see almost immediate improvement in your search engine rankings.

[Keywords in links to other pages]

You should try to insert keywords into your links whenever possible. For instance, if you are targeting the keyword “marketing” on a particular page, create a link to a page on your site and call the page “marketing tactics”. The page the link leads to could consist of articles you have written on marketing tips you have discovered. Not only will search engines use the text in a given link to determine what your page is about, but they will also use it in determining the subject of the destination page. If you really want to take it to the next level, try using a keyword filled link as the first visible text on your page. This too will skyrocket your rankings in the search engines.

[Keywords in outbound links]

This concept is identical to that of linking to other pages except you instead will be linking to another site. For example if I were linking to another affiliate promotion site I would place the keyword “affiliate program” somewhere in the link.This is a must! My advice to you is to save this article and refer to each and every step when you setup a webpage. This is by no means all there is to know about search engines however, if you follow these guidelines you will do extremely well.

Good Luck!

About The Author

Adam Buhler is the owner of Affiliate Programs Directory: http://www.smokesoft.net Adam is the author of the weekly newsletter "Affiliate Secrets". He is offering a free copy of the ebook "Internet Cash Machines" For a limited time to anyone who subscribes at: http://www.smokesoft.net/newsletter.html smoke@dwave.net

There is perhaps no more level playing field in business than the Internet. It is this fact that has created millionaires from paupers. The amount of money that can be made depends of course on your industry and your products and/or services but to be sure, if it can be sold at all, it can be sold online.

While there are many methods out there for building a profitable website, from banner ads to email campaigns, by far the most cost effective over time has proven repeatedly to be search engine positioning. That major advantage search engine positioning has over other methods of producing revenue online is that once high rankings are attained and provided that the tactics used were ethical and that continued efforts are made to keep them, they can essentially hold and provide targeted traffic indefinitely. Your site will rise and your site may sometimes fall in the rankings but a solid and complete optimization of your site will insure that through algorithm changes you may fluctuate but you will not disappear.

I have been ranking websites highly on the Internet for quite a few years now and there are some essential rules that, if followed, will insure that over time your website does well and holds solid and profitable positions on the major search engines.

Here are the 10 steps to higher search engine positioning:

Step One - Choosing Keywords

You first must choose your keywords. This is perhaps the most important step of the process as incorrectly targeting phrases can result in traffic that is not interested in your product. There are three tools that I use virtually every day to help pick the most appropriate keywords:

Overtures Search Term Suggestion Tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

WordTracker http://www.wordtracker.com/

A Brain

The last in the list is the most important. Look through the potential keyword phrases and think, "Who would be searching using that phrase" If the answer is, "a student looking for information" then chances are it wont result in a sale. If the answer is "Someone who is looking specifically for a product I offer," then obviously this is a prime candidate as a targeted keyword phrase.

Step Two - Site Content

Even before I optimize websites I like to get a good deal of new content down in order to insure that I know exactly where Im going and exactly what I need to do to get there. Creating some of the new content before starting the optimization process can be doubly helpful in that it can reveal potential additions to your website that you may not have considered a forum or blog for example. If you already have a site, perhaps simply sit on your back deck, sip on a coffee and image what you would do if your whole site was lost and you had to start again other than launch into a very colorful discussion with your hosting company.

Step Three - Site Structure

A solid site structure is very important. Creating a site that is easily spidered by the search engines yet attractive to visitors can be a daunting and yet entirely rewarding endeavor. To adequately structure your website you must "think like a spider" which is not as difficult as it may sound. A search engine spider reads your web page like you would read a book. It starts at the top left, reads across, and then moves down.

Priority must be given then, to what you place near the top of your page.

Step Four - Optimization

Once you have your keyword targets, your content created and your site structure established you must now move on to the most obvious step, the optimization of your content.

As noted above, a spider places importance on what it reads highest on the page and so beginning with a sentence that includes your targeted phrase only makes sense. That said, stuffing in keywords in hopes that it will add weight to your page generally doesnt work. The term "keyword density" refers to the percentage of your content that is made up of your targeted keywords. There are optimum densities according to many reputable SEOs though exactly what they are is debata ble. Estimates seem to range anywhere from 4 or 5% to 10 to 12% quite a gap isnt it.

Personally, when it comes to keyword density I prescribe to one rule: put your keywords in the content as much as you can while keeping it comfortably readable to a human visitor.

Some do it first, I do it last, regardless of when you do it you must choose your heading. At the beginning of your content you have the opportunity to use the tag to specify the heading of your content. This tag is given extra weight and is also an indicator to the search engine of where your actual content starts. Make sure to use your keywords in the heading but dont shy away from also adding additional words though not too many.

Step Five - Internal Linking

To insure that your website gets fully indexed you have to make sure that the spiders have an easy path through your website. Text links make the best choice as the anchor text the actual words used to link to a specific page add relevancy to that page for the words used to link to it. For example, if I ran a website on acne and had a treatments page I could link to it with an image, with text reading "Click for more information on how to treat this skin condition" or simply "Acne Treatments". When a search engine spider hits an image it has no idea what the image is and, while it will follow the link, it will not give any weight to the page it hits. If you use text that does not contain the keywords you are targeting you are essentially supplying the engine with the same lack of relevancy as with an image, but if you use the phrase "Acne Treatments" to link to your acne treatments page you are attaching relevancy to that page for those keywords.

There are two main ways to insure that your site gets well spidered AND that the relevancy is added. The first is to place text links on the bottom of your homepage to your main internal pages not EVERY page, that just looks odd. The second is to create a sitemap to all your internal pages and link to it from your homepage. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages but thats a whole article unto itself.

Step Six - Human Testing

So now you have your site, its optimized and you have your navigation in place. The next step is to put it past someone who has never seen your site and preferably who wont know how much work youve put in and tell you its great even if its not.

Ask them to find specific information and see how long it takes. Ask someone else to just surf your site and watch which links they click and ask them why they chose those ones.

Most importantly, find out how the content reads to them. Youve spent hours working through the content at this point and are probably not the least biased on its readers. Find out how it reads to someone who has no invested interest in the site and correct any issues they may bring up.

Step Seven - Submissions

I take a different philosophy than most when it cones to search engine submissions. I submit to directories both general and topic-specific and to a few topical search engines but for the most part Ive found submitting to Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other major engines has proven to be a bit of a waste of time. The major search engines are spidering search engines which means they will follow links to wherever they go. Simply having sites that are spidered by the major search engines linking to you will get your site found.

When I have spent time submitting my sites I have found they get picked up in about a week. When I have simply skipped this step and sought out reputable directories and other sites to get links from I have found that at least the homepage of the site gets indexed in as little as two days.

Neither will hurt your rankings but simply to make the best use of your time, seek our directories and other websites to get links from and leave the spiders to find you on their own.

Step Eight - Link Building

All of the major search engines give credit to sites that have quality links pointing to them. How many is enough depends on your industry and targeted phrases. Running a search on Google the reads "link:www.yourcompetition.com" will reveal approximately how many links a competitor has.

The first place to seek links is with general and topic-specific directories. After that you may want to move into reciprocal link building. Reciprocal link building is the exchange of links between two websites. Some webmasters will simply link to any website that links back to them. I highly recommend being more particular than that.

Find websites that you believe your site visitors would genuinely be interested in and youve probably found a good link partner. You want to find links from sites that are related to yours.

There are obviously many more methods to building links than directories and reciprocal link building. Again though, this is a whole article or more in itself.

Step Nine - Monitoring

Whether you use WebPosition Gold http://www.webposition.com/ or just run searches manually by hand you will have to monitor the major search engines for your targeted phrases. Also, you will need to review your stats to see where your traffic is coming from and what search terms are being used to find you.

If a month passes and you dont see any changes then more work needs to be done. Im certainly not stating that you should take a month off, a solid search engine positioning strategy involves constantly adding content, building links, and insuring that your visitors are getting the information they want to have and finding it as easily as possible.

Step Ten - Reward Yourself

So youve done it. Its taken many many hours of work but youre rankings are doing well. What youve created is a solid position that will stand the tests of time provided that you continually revisit the above noted steps and insure that your website is always one step ahead of your competition who have noticed you climbing and succeeding as you would notice others climbing up around your ranking.

Now its time to turn off your computer, take your partner out you havent had much time for them lately and have a great weekend. Youve got a lot of work to do to maintain and build on these rankings but the hardest part is over. Congratulations!

About The Author

Dave Davies is the owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/. He has been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search engines. info@beanstalk-inc.com

So you have a beautiful website that you paid a pretty penny for and you are completely happy with it … except no one can find it. Many web designers do not understand search engine positioning, so when they design your website little or no thought is given to the elements of design that may affect your rankings on search engines. On the other hand some search engine positioning companies offer services that will boost your rankings but at the expense of your design. A good search engine positioning company can get your website ranking for key phrases without affecting the overall design and navigation of your site. You can make small changes to your website on your own as well utilizing the tips noted in this article. There is a happy medium, you can “have your cake and eat it too.”

The first step in designing a website that will rank well on search engines is to build the proper table structure. This framework for your website will easily guide the search engine spiders through your site taking the route you want them to. A good table structure is essentially a map to the spiders, it guides the way as they travel through your website.

This table structure is very beneficial to your website ranking as it guides the spiders to the text rich, most important content of your site as quickly as possible. The spiders will enter your site at the first table, the header, and then travel through to the empty cell in row 1 of the second table, the next stop is your content area, the “meat” of your website. After going through your content the spiders will then continue onto row 2 where you have inserted a table holding your navigation, if your navigation is image based, as most is, it holds very little content that matters from the spider’s perspective. The spiders will then follow through to row 3 where you have your footer, a place to add in valuable text links rich in targeted keywords.

If this table structure does not fit your design at all there can be work arounds. A good example of this is shown on http://www.far-sited.ca. Notice that the index page upon load has a very simple look, no text, clean, crisp image. This is a good way to present your business with a simple entry page. If you scroll down the page you will see that there is in fact a lot of text below this main image. With a simple 100% x 100% table you can achieve this affect on your website. This table will open the same way in all resolutions giving your index page the look of a text free page when in fact it is not.

100% x 100% table used as mentioned above:

If you choose to use the 100% x 100% table noted above you should still try to stick to the general table structure shown first for your internal pages. There can always be room for adjustments based on the size of your site however most websites use left hand navigation and this table structure is based on left hand navigation. If your navigation is across the top of your page, maybe reconsider it. It can remain at the top, I have designed a few websites that are ranking well with this top navigation, but for the best result, the left hand navigation using the table structure first mentioned in this article is best.

All in all I cannot stress enough that a well designed site will rank higher. Even if you do not have a complete SEO overhaul of your site this table structure will increase your rankings over those that do not have a clean, properly structured website. Though the table structure is not noticed so much by the visitors to your website aside from the look of it, it is very noticed by the spiders and they will go through your website based on it. For an added edge, have your site designed with this table structure, or do it yourself. Make a point of not only giving the visitors to your website the information you want them to have but also the spiders and as quickly and easily as possible.

About The Author

Mary Davies is the search engine friendly design expert for Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/. She works and writes with years of experience in web design and search engine optimization. info@beanstalk-inc.com

80 percent of web surfers start their journey on a search engine. There are close to four billion pages indexed in the major search engines. While search engines are not and should not be the only way to promote your business online, it is one of the most important.

If you have a small business website, and you want to rank well, there are a few things you need to do. First, dont think that users will search for your site for your company name. If, for example, you have a website design firm in Dallas, you should try to rank high when somebody searches for "web design dallas", or "web design company dallas". These phrases are known as "keywords", and they are the first thing you must define even before you start designing your website.

There are several ways to choose the right keywords. When choosing them, remember to make sure that they are terms that search engine users actually use, or you may end up ranking high for search terms that nobody uses. For some tips on chosing the right keywords you can check out my article at http://www.theinternetdigest.net/archive/keywordoptimization.html .

The next question is, how do search engines know that your page is relevant to your chosen keywords The answer is twofold:

They rely on your page copy: If your keywords, and other related terms, are mentioned frequently on your web page, your relevance for those words will increase dont overdo it, though, or the search engines will treat is as spam. For more information on how to optimize your pages copy for the search engines, you can check out my article: http://www.theinternetdigest.net/archive/web-page-optimization.html .

They rely on links to your page from other web pages: This is understandable, since if search engines relied only on web page copy, it would be too easy to manipulate results. Outside inbound links from quality sites are difficult to get, and therefore carry significant weight.

Regarding inbound links, two things are important:

the quality and topic of the page where the link originates should be relevant to your topic, and

the words on the text used to link to you must contain your preferred keywords: if those links say "Dallas Web Design Company", the search engines will conclude that you are a web design company based in Dallas by the same token, the words "click here" wont tell search engines anything about your site.

In a nutshell, find the right keywords, make your page copy relevant to those keywords, and get a lot of quality inbound links with your keywords in the link text, and you will be on your way to high search engine rankings.

For more tips on internet marketing and search engine optimization, you can visit my site at http://www.theinternetdigest.net, read my article "Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization" at http://www.accordmarketing.com/tid/archive/diy-search-engine-optimization.html or check out the SEOBook at http://www.accordmarketing.com/seobook/

About The Author

Mario Sanchez is a Miami based freelance writer who focuses on Internet marketing and web design topics. He publishes The Internet Digest http://www.theinternetdigest.net , a growing collection of web design and Internet marketing articles, tips and resources.

Someone sent me the following e-mail today:

"Your site is missing from Azoos.Coms Internet search engine! To submit it, simply click the *ADD URL* button found at www.azoos.com.

As one of the Internets 20 most visited unique search engine databases, Azoos offers sites like yours valuable traffic that only your competition is enjoying! Submitting your site to Azoos takes only ONE minute and GUARANTEES INCLUSION .... TODAY!

Thousands of users visit Azoos EACH day but cant find YOUR site. With a simple look and an easy-to-use search tool, Azoos appeals demographically to the NOVICE INTERNET USER - a targeted group likely to make purchases from sites like your own! Featured in a recent issue of SEARCH ENGINE WATCH, Azoos is one of the Nets hottest up and coming search engines for end users -- Make sure YOUR site is included TODAY!

If your companys website cant afford to miss out on even a few thousand potential hits, it cant afford NOT to be listed with Azoos!

Goto www.azoos.com and click "ADD URL" -- let the traffic flow....!"

Sincerely, Joanna R. Heth Internet Position Analyst http://www.azoos.com/

The Internets COOLEST Search Engine! Why should we crawl the web...when we can RUN it

***Add YOUR Companys Web Site To Azoos.Com TODAY!!!***

I honestly dont know who sent me that e-mail. Whoever sent it didnt bother to sign his or her name. The e-mail simply said "Check this out!"

I have to admit, that e-mail got me more than a little curious about Azoos, so I did a little digging and I found the following press release:

Not only has Azoos.Com managed to remain one of THE fastest services of its kind when it comes to including user-submitted URLs in its vast database, it’s now also one of THE fastest search engines on the ‘net! Thanks to the implementation of new technologies developed & improved by its software engineers during the last six months, Azoos has joined the ranks of those search engines capable of returning results in less than 1 second!

But unlike other high-end search engines who boast comparable speeds, Azoos.Com goes one step further by guaranteeing instant placement for webmasters who submit their company’s webpage via the engine’s "add url" feature. Combined, these elements make Azoos the ONLY key player online capable of speedy search results AND speedy spidering of user-submitted sites!

In an age where so many sites have given up their individuality to become "meta" search engines; pooling the databases of other engines to produce unoriginal search results,--Azoos.Com remains true to traditional search engine format by selecting its own data, spidering URLs from its own database, & producing its own unique search results.

And while so many other successful engines have gone on to charge fees as high as $300 or more for website "reviews," Azoos still bills its instant-add submission service at only $69 for a guaranteed listing and site spidering.

As Azoos representative Andrew Greenstein says, "We originally set out to create a search engine that offered something unique not only for the end-user but for the site submitter as well. Now that our search technology has improved so dramatically, it’s clear that our initial vision has become a reality and our primary goal has been achieved."

And although the bright yellow search engine may still have a long way to go before it can compete with the "big boys" in terms of audience size, Azoos.Com may very well be one of the most promising prospects on the debt-riddled Internet today.

Well, I can certainly agree with them on one thing. They do indeed have a long way to go, before they can compete with the big boys--a very long way!

Heres the problem as I see it with Azoos. They want $69.95 to add you to their database. This despite the fact that not one of the top search engines charges money to spider your website. And those colors are brutal on the eyes! Whose brilliant idea was that Blue text on a screaming yellow background, with a design reminiscent of the Cartoon Network.

I wasnt impressed, and I certainly wasnt interested in spending $69.95 to be included on some cartoonish looking search site.

While I was there I figured Id check out their search function. I did a few searches and got some satisfactory returns. Nothing special, but satisfactory. Also, their traffic count is low, comparatively speaking, for a search engine.

In conclusion, I cant recommend Azoos. There are just far too many superior, free alternatives!

About The Author

Dean Phillips is an Internet marketing expert, writer, publisher and entrepreneur. Questions Comments Dean can be reached at mailto: dean@lets-make-money.net

Visit his website at: http://www.lets-make-money.net

1. Search Engine - Is a database of web sites that is ranked according to the computerized criteria that the programmers decide upon called an algorithm. Various search engines determine ranking on their own different factors of importance or relevancy. For the last few years the Google search engine was the most popular search engine supplying the search results for Yahoo and to a lesser extent MSN and AOL. This all changed recently after Yahoo purchased different search engine companies and developed its own search engine. Soon MSN will enter this market with its own search engine algorithm.

Searchers input keyword queries into search boxes and are given results from the databases of the search engines in accordance with the ranking algorithm from whatever search engine they are using.

In other words, search engines index sites it feels will be of value to its customers, which are Internet surfers searching for information.

The most important concept to grasp with a search engine, is that it uses an automated computerized system to find and rank the sites within its database of web sites.

2. Internet Directory - An Internet directory is a large listing of categorized web sites - however the concept that should be understood with the Internet directories, is that they actually have editors that decide what goes into the directory. Remember an Internet directory is decided and managed by human editors, while in contrast, a search engine is ranked by a computerized algorithm or system. Directories are important to get links from because, they will raise your rankings in the Google algorithm which is based on PageRank™ or links from other sites to a great extent.

3. SEO - Search Engine Optimization From the Tao of Search Engine Promotion represents the Ying or Female Principle in that it is more fluid and receptive to the algorithms of the search engines, which of course you - do not control. SEO promotion is using known conventions and in some cases deconstructing the algorithms of the developers of the search engines and working with them. In other words it is like Judo where you use the momentum and power of the search engines to build your business. You will have to be constantly vigilant, in order to try to stay abreast of the latest developments in SEO promotion.

4. Pay-Per-Click PPC advertising with the search engines is bidding for particular keyword phrases or search terms used most frequently by Internet users related to information on certain niches and sectors. Overture was the first great pay-per-click advertising sales channel for the search engines. It presently represents Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, and related partners allowing advertisers to bid on particular keywords. Google presently runs its own PPC Search Engine advertising branch called Googles Adwords Select. Since PPC advertising is so expensive use it in moderation by setting daily and monthly budgets otherwise for high volume searched keywords you could go broke.

After setting budgets, which you do in the Overture and Google advertising interfaces, use PPC to test your conversion rates for subscribers, sales, etc., and constantly monitor it and fine-tune it. You want to increase your conversation rates. This is critical because as we alluded to the expense of PPC in earlier in this article the typical major ad agency or corporate brand only spends $5 - $15 dollars to reach a thousand people CPM. Although they may go higher for a responsive direct mail lists like $100 or $150 to reach a thousand people. In PPC advertising small business are usually paying at least 35 cents on the dollar for any word with any real competition to reach a thousand people or $350 dollars. I have seen and experienced people paying $2.50 a click or $2250 dollars to reach a thousand people.

The true expense of PPC is never discussed by experts in that industry. Any small business using PPC should have an outstanding product ready for prime time, to see any return in investment. Alternately, they should only use it for limited testing or to get a product quickly to market on-line. Given the expense of PPC some small business people might be better off buying classified direct response advertising in a niche publication or obtaining ad space in ezines.

Another point to discuss in PPC is how the major companies hurt their advertisers stab them in the back by using pop-up blockers, which hurts the advertisers ability to collect email addresses on the front end, and with spam filters block even legitimate marketers ability to reach opt-in subscribers on the back end. Google is more of a front end pop-up blocker, AOL is more of an email blocker, while Yahoo is both. There are better ways to stop email and web site spam. What is important is that small business, if it is not careful with PPC could be paying AOL, Google, and Yahoo/Overture to put them out of business.

5. Pay Per Inclusion is paying to be included in the database of a search engine or Internet directory. Presently it is free to be included in the Google search engine. You just need a link to your site from a few other sites already in the Google database and your site will be spidered in many cases. Recently it has been announced Yahoo will charge a fee to update your new content into their search engine database. From what I understand if you are already listed in Yahoo its all well and good, but any new content that you put on your site will not be indexed.

6. Search Terms AKA Keywords or Keyword Phrases - Search terms and more specifically keyword phrases are words searchers put in a search box to find information on a particular product, service, or item. Keywords and Keyword phrases have different tiers. For instance the top tier keyword business probably receives 500,000 searches a month. But it is so general that it would not be a good keyword for which to optimize your site. However, the second tier Keyword phrase small business would have less searches, but it is more of a targeted search. The third tier keyword phrases are even more targeted and would be ideal for persons to optimize their sites for although there are less monthly searches for them.

7. Search Engine Algorithm - Algorithms are sets of rules according to which search engines rank web pages. Figuring out the algorithms is a major part of SEO. The thinking is that if you understand how they calculate relevance, you can make specific pages on your site super relevant for specific search terms. For more on algorithms and SEO in general, please check out http://www.searchengineplan.com .

About The Author

Kamau Austin, helps small and minority business make more money, by creating, search friendly web sites. He is the owner of http://www.Ebizbydesign.com, http://www.Einfonews.com, http://www.carolsartshows.com and the creator of the Free Search Engine Promotion Tele-course. See the free telecourses at: http://www.SearchEngineplan.com

Where can I find free web hosting

There are hundreds of free web hosting services on the web. You can type “free web hosting” into any major search engine and get an expanded list. However, when you sign up for free hosting account, you are basically signing an expanded advertising agreement.

What exactly is free hosting

In exchange for free hosting, the company can place ads your website. The ads can be placed on the top of the main page, the top of every page, or on the sides. The ads are usually not targeted. It is possible that they won’t match the demographics of your web visitors. In addition, they are not customized to match the content on your web page.

This is a very expensive exchange program if your goal is to build up an online business. The area above the fold, everything that is visible without scrolling, is the most effective advertising area on the entire site. This is the area you should use for your affiliate links, Google Adsense, paid links and expanded site navigation.

Some free web hosting contracts go a step further and ask for your participation in their email marketing campaigns. You will receive emails that require a click through to a merchant site, and/or fill out endless surveys. This can be very time consuming and annoying.

Before you sign any free hosting contract ask to see sample sites. You want to get a feel for the types of ads that are being shown on other website. What do you want to look for Do you see pop-up ads What about banners How large are the ads Are they just off topic or are they inappropriate Where are the ads Are they on every single page or on selected pages

Even if the ads are not on every page, watch out. It could mean that the hosting service has figured out which pages bring in the most revenue and they can afford to ignore everything else. Guess what If it brings in lots of revenue for them, it could probably bring in lots of revenue for you.

There’s free and then there’s FREE

If the space is free, what about the domain name

If your new site will look like http://yoursite.freewebhost.com you’re getting a subdomain for your site. It’s not really your unique domain name. They are simply loaning you a space for your stuff.

This is not a unique domain name that you can use to brand your business. You can’t use it anywhere except with this particular web hosting company. Ditto if the new domain names is http://www.freewebhost.com/yoursite/.

So what if they offer a truly unique domain name

How long will it take before you actually own the domain name Even the cheap web hosting services will require that you stay with the company for thirty to sixty days before you can keep a free domain name.

What happens if you want to switch to another company before the period is up Sometimes there’s a charge to keep the domain name or to transfer it. This should be clearly stated in their FAQs or in the text of the hosting contract before you agree to use their service.

Do you have enough bandwidth

Many free web hosting services are providing their services in such a way that you will need to upgrade your hosting package if your site has any degree of minor success. The tipping point is usually bandwidth. That is a measure of how much text, pictures, ftps etc. you can send to your web customers every month.

The Bandwidth in your contract is measured on a monthly basis. Check the contract to see if there are any fees for going over your monthly amount, or if you will lose your free hosting privileges.

Free host today, no host tomorrow

There is a very high turnover for free web hosting services that heavily depend on advertising revenue. Even the most successful web companies will find that their advertising revenue varies on a monthly basis. Will the company suddenly go out business if they hit a three month slump

There should be a written policy on what happens to your content if they site suddenly goes out of business. Can you still access your files Is there an alternative URL or login site with your information How much time do you have

You are only as reliable as your hosting service

Check out the statistics on the uptime for their servers. This applies to any hosting service, whether you are paying or not. If their uptime is in the low 90’s and below, then try to find another hosting provider.

You are taking a big risk if you use a free web hosting services for your business site. The inability to control your advertising, high turnover rates among the free hosting providers, and variable contracts usually spells disaster for e-commerce sites.

To run a successful online venture, 24-hour live customer service, high uptimes ratios and control of your advertising space is a must. These features are also the major weaknesses of the average free hosting provider.

A better option for you company would be to sign up for an affordable or cheap web hosting provider. You will have many service options in this category and can usually avoid the limitations of the free hosting companies.

About The Author

Syd Johnson is the Executive Editor of RapidLingo.com, Financial Solutions Website. You can see more articles at http://www.rapidlingo.com.

This article may be freely distributed as long as the authors bio is included with an active link to http://www.rapidlingo.com.

In this era of Internet, most people are frequent users of computers. Many of us use computers through out the day, accumulating morasses of information in various formats, which include email, digital photo, word document, spreadsheet, presentation file, ebook, article, other downloaded files, music, visited web pages, and many others. We stuff them in multiple folders in our PC. Before we know it, our hard drives become a storeroom of misplaced items. As a result, finding a needed file of information some times become a daunting task!

The search function integrated to Microsoft Windows is not a big help either. It requires you to know, albeit vaguely, where the file could possibly be located. If your data storage is significant and you made a search on your whole hard disk, it might take ages to get search results and, then again, there is no guarantee that you will find the right file. Frustrating Thanks to new Google Desktop Search this is about to change!

What is Google Desktop Search

Google Desktop Search is a free downloadable small program, which will quickly and easily find your files no matter where in your hard disk they are stored. The great thing about this program is by making your computer searchable, this program frees you from having to manually organize and sort your files, emails, and downloads. You no more have to mull over where in your PC the information you are looking for is residing – in your email, files or web pages that you browsed recently.

At present Google Desktop Search works only with the full text in Outlook and Outlook Express email, text, HTML, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, AOL chat, and Web pages viewed through Internet Explorer. Other files like PDF will be probably added in future version.

How it works

Google Desktop Search is fairly easy to download and set up. The address for downloading the program is http://desktop.google.com. Once you installed the program, it begins initial indexing process of your hard disks. This may take several hours for an average size disk. The one-time indexing process only works when the computer has been idle for more than thirty seconds. Indexing for Google Desktop Search is an ongoing process, new files and emails get updated automatically. The search index created by the program resides on your own computer.

On your system tray you will see a swirled icon in Google colors, by clicking on it you will open the regular Google search page with the addition of Desktop along side with other search areas. Once the indexing is done, files are searched in under a second and the results are impressively precise. The top bar shows quantities of files found under the four categories, which include emails, files, chat and Web history. The results are shown in much the same way as regular Google interface. You can choose to see relevant results from all or any of the categories. You can also sort results by relevance or by date. By clicking on any result you open the file in respective application software.

The email query results are the best! No longer have you had to remember in which folder you stored the email written to John in reference to Peter. By searching for Peter or John, you will find all relevant emails and related correspondence. You can read and answer to any of the discovered email from the thread. This really saves time when you need to follow up to a large numbers of emails each day.

There are two more text buttons next to the search field. One is Desktop Preferences and other is Remove Items. Desktop preferences allow you to choose the types of files you would like the program to include in its index out of available ones. You can also point out not to index specific folders from your hard disk. If you share your PC with others, it’s a good idea to eliminate your private folders from the Desktop index. You can also specify not to index certain websites from your cached web history as well. The Remove items button allow you to eliminate selected results from the index.

The advance search option allows you to search by phrase by putting the phrase within quotation marks, to eliminate a word from search by putting a minus sign in front of the word, to search by file type, and to search within a web URL. A neat feature is to integrate your desktop search with your web search. This is very handy if you have already done an extensive search for some information and after a few days doing search for similar information once again. Privacy question

By default, Google Desktop Search collects a limited amount of non-personal information from your computer and sends it to Google. This includes summary information, such as the number of searches you do and the time it takes for you to see your results, etc. You can opt out of sending this information during the installation process or from the Desktop preferences later. According to Google Privacy Policy no personally identifying information, such as your name or address, will be sent to Google without your explicit prior permission.

What is missing

I bemoan not having PDF files in the search process as yet. I have dozens of e-books and PDF whitepapers residing in my PC, and I really would prefer to have them indexed. That way, I’d have been able to read materials, when I needed them most.

The other thing I want to see is clustered result of my query, which shows organized search results into meaningful hierarchical folders similar to the way Vivisimo search engine works. This clustering is particularly helpful for desktop search, as this allows us to see other relevant documents connected to the searched word.

Conclusion

Due to Google’s immense popularity as a search engine, it’s logical that most users will prefer Google’s desktop search program as oppose to other similar programs, such as Copernic and Hotbot. Finally you can search your very own computer with similar ease and preciseness as you have been searching the Internet for quite some time.

About The Author

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business. You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com, http://ezine.rusbiz.com/archivenews.htmlnl_oid=46

Most web surfers start their sessions at a search engine or a web directory. There are a number of different methods you can use to capture their traffic and drive it to your site:

Stick to the big names: The two largest directories: Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com and the Open Project Directory http://www.dmoz.org, and the two largest search engines: Google http://www.google.com and Inktomi used by MSN search http://www.msn.com and AOL http://www.aol.com are likely to deliver 80% of your traffic, so concentrate on those and don’t spend too much time on anybody else.

Yahoo and the Open Project Directory are administered by humans, so an editor will inspect your site before its added. They receive so many submissions that it can literally take months before your site is reviewed, and nothing not even paid subscriptions guarantees that it will be listed. It’s worth to keep trying, though, so check back every month or so and, if your site isn’t listed, submit it again.

Google and Inktomi are robots software programs that “crawl” find and read millions of sites on the web, and add them to their index. Thats why it is not absolutely necessary to manually submit your site to a search engine, since they may find your site and add it automatically when they find a link to your site on another page.

You don’t need to submit all the pages on your site to a search engine. Once the search engine finds your main page homepage, it will find the other ones by following links. To improve the chances of your secondary pages being found, create a link called ‘site map’ in your homepage, and have it point to a page that is nothing but a collection of links to all the pages on your site. This way, the search engine will follow the link and “suck in” all your pages. Try putting this link as close to the top of your homepage as possible, since it will have a better chance of being picked up by the search engine.

Your site will stand a much better chance of showing up at the top of the search results list if you choose keywords that are as specific as possible. In general, niche sites that use very specific keywords have a better chance of being at the top of the list than generic sites that use more common keywords. For example, a restaurant that specializes in brick oven pizza keywords: brick oven pizza has a better chance of showing up in a prime position than an all-encompassing Italian restaurant keywords: Italian restaurant.

A good search engine ranking is also conditioned by the amount of inbound links to your site that the search engine finds in other websites. A significant amount of links to your page from high ranked, quality sites with content related to yours, will significantly boost your rankings. Try contacting the webmasters of the leading websites for the keywords of your choice and try to get them to link to your site. You can offer a link exchange or place a paid link advertising on their pages, if that’s an available option.

Creating a good page title tag is also key, since it’s usually the first thing the search engines display in the search results page. Also, you must create a well written, easy to understand ‘Description’ meta tag, since some search engines will use it to describe your site. The more your title and description match your preferred search keywords, the more likely web users will click into your site. Dont pay too much attention to the Keywords meta tag, since most search engines ignore them nowadays, due to the potential for abuse.

Finally, one last word of advice: don’t obsess with search engines, since they are not the only way to generate traffic to your site. Try different approaches, like writing articles and posting them in discussion groups and newsgroups. Also, don’t overlook bricks-and-mortar techniques like passing around business cards embedded with your website address, or advertising in traditional media. It is a combination of all these things, and high quality, original content, what will make your site popular.

About The Author

Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest http://www.theinternetdigest.net a website and newsletter that gives you free advice on web design and Internet marketing.

Sometimes our jobs as marketers means we need to look beyond the obvious. Google, for example, offers their Google Alerts service. At first glance, this may seem most useful to companies who want to track certain searches within their industry, or to hobbyists who want to stay on top of changes in their topics of interest.

But Internet marketers can also use Google Alerts to help keep track of whats going on around the net, and even to keep tabs on their direct competition for that matter. Google Alerts, which are email notifications, can be created based on the top 10 Google news stories, but more helpful to marketers is the possibility of creating alerts for the top 20 Google web search results.

By setting up alerts for your competitors company, web site, brand, or product name, you can monitor search results for changes. Some results may indicate a new product launch, or perhaps a publicity campaign, and you will be able to make appropriate adjustments in your own business.

If you want to market an affiliate product through SEO, you can monitor the top 20 results for a search on that product. You will know if and when your site breaks into the top 20 results, and can watch it as it hopefully continues climbing to that first position.

There are other uses as well. SEO firms can monitor clients results. Niche marketers can easily monitor both industry news and niche search results. You can even monitor search results for your best keywords and your own high ranking pages.

Google Alerts, though free, can provide valuable marketing intelligence to online entrepreneurs who take advantage of it.

By Jakob Jelling http://www.sitetube.com

About The Author

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.

Yahoo has long offered email, an online calendar, notes, bookmarks, and more through their free My Yahoo service. Now Yahoo has expanded this service even more by adding My Yahoo Personal Search to the mix.

Personal Search is another way of storing bookmarks, but with more features than the older bookmarks offered. To use Personal Search, you add a My Yahoo Search button to your browser links bar supports IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Safari. When you find a page you like, you click on the button to add the page to the "My Web" section of Personal Search. You can perform a search and optionally save or block any results pages. Of course, you can also enter a URL directly, then click the Search button to add that page into My Web as well.

Your My Web contents are accessible from any computer with Internet access, so it functions as an online bookmark storage service. Typically, bookmarks are stored only within the browser on the computer you normally use, so online availability is a convenient feature if you travel.

The results stored in My Web are both shareable and searchable. To share, you select the pages you want to share, and click the Share button. Easy enough. You can share directly from search results as well, without adding the page to My Web.

Once you have some pages stored in My Web, you can then easily search within those pages to find what youre looking for. This isnt a simple search of a description field like those offered by some browsers. This is an actual live search of just the pages youve stored in My Web. Pages stored in My Web can be sorted by date, search terms, or URL.

All in all, My Yahoo Personal Search is a very useful addition to the Yahoo collection.

By Jakob Jelling http://www.sitetube.com

About The Author

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.

Ever wondered how one search engine is dominating the entire web. In any business, you have so much stiff competition. Is there any business that you can start that has no competition Whether you decide to open a restaurant or a real estate company - you are going to have a lot of competition. And picture the competition that you will have - you will have 100s or probably 1000 other people doing the same business. But in search engine competition, you can probably count in your fingers as to how many search engines there are. But still people are hesitant to go into this field.

Ever wondered what is the market of having your own Search Engine. As of today, this is a multibillion dollar industry and it is being dominated by one search engine. Imagine ten years down the road - when everything is moving towards the internet - what huge advantage it would be to have a search engine. Why do you think, companies like Microsoft are jumping into this market.

In order to break the monopoly of one search engine, Objects Search has introduced a concept of topic search engines. They believe that if there is a search engine on a specific topic - people looking for information on that topic would prefer going to that topic search engine rather than going to a general search engine like Google. For instance- say if there is a search engine exclusively for music. If a person wants to search something on music, would he prefer going to a specific music search engine or google.

Objects Search hosted solution allows you to run your own search engine.You can have your own special search engine such as travel, games,animals, medical, software, sports, music, cars or any other category you like.They create and host custom search engine for you by indexing only those sites which meets your selected category. You can also select to index the whole web instead of some specific category.

It is a very bold concept. Right now people are very hesitant to step into this field. They think it is not possible to compete with giants like Google or Yahoo. Well look at it this way, even if you dont compete with google and yahoo, but just by being in that industry - you wud end up getting a small piece of the multibillion dollar industry pie which would amount to a lot.

About The Author

Omair Aasim is the founder and president of Software Objects - the parent company of Objects Search. You can contact the author at objectsearch@gmail.com.

Pay Per Click Search Engine ads are one of the most cost-effective ways of targeted internet advertising. According to Forbes magazine PPC Search Engine advertising accounts 2 billion dollars/year which is expected to increase to 8 billion dollars by 2008.

This article explains how easily you can profit from this 2 billion dollars industry.

But what are Search Engines

A Search Engine is special database-driven web site designed to index and categorize internet addresses. Search Engines focus to help people to find information stored on the Web.

There are four basic types of Search Engines: Crawler-based automatic, Human-powered Directories, Meta and PPC Pay-Per-Click.

Although most of the Search Engines that operates today shall be classified as Hybrid Search Engines because it has become extremely common for two or three types of gathering and ranking results to be utilized for presenting them on results pages to the end user.

How the PPC Search Engines work

PPC Search Engines create listings and rate them based on a bid amount the web site owner advertiser is willing to pay for each click directed from that Search Engine. Advertisers bid against each other to receive higher ranking for a specific keyword or phrase. The highest bidder for a certain keyword or phrase will have their site ranked #1 in the Pay-Per-Click Search Engine results followed by the second and third highest bidder, up to hundreds or even thousands, for the same keyword or phrase. Due to bidding process required to get your site ranked, PPC Search Engines are also known as Pay-For-Placement Search Engines, as the ads will appear prominently on the results pages based on the dollar amount bid you will agree to pay for each click.

Affiliate Programs and PPC Search Engines:

Most affiliate programs only pay when a sale is made or a lead delivered after one of visitor’s clicks through from your site. Depending on the program, your web site content and traffic target, earnings may be slightly different.

The reason why you should consider joining a PPC Search Engine affiliate program is that it is much easier to earn from PPC Search Engines than other affiliate programs. You will earn from your visitor’s click-thru’s to an advertisers site and not per sale or action.

Plus PPC Search Engine affiliate programs can very well collaborate with your existing web site’s content or ventures.

Resourceful of your web site:

With PPC Search Engine affiliate program you will be able to profit from visitor’s who are not interested in your product or service and more likely they would leave your site and never come back. Providing those with an opportunity to search the Web and find the service or product they are looking for will not only earn you commission but also will build your site’s brand recognition as a valuable resource. The visitor who finds what he/she needs on your website will more likely come back and review your services more carefully, eventually will be back to search the web for other products.

Key benefits: extra money or “Free” targeted traffic:

As you should have noticed PPC Search Engine affiliate program is an easy way for you to generate additional revenue. When a visitor on your site does a search in the PPC Search Engine and clicks on the advertiser bided listing, the advertisers account will then get deducted for that click. Depending on the Search Engine, you will be compensated with from 30% up to 80% of the advertiser’s bid amount.

PPC Search Engine affiliate program shall not be only considered as additional source of income, since it also can help you to promote your own site. Most programs allow you to spend your commission for advertising with them instantly with no minimum earning requirement. This is the most effective method to exchange your raw visitors for targeted surfers who will more likely purchase your product or service.

PPC Search Engine affiliate program integration:

PPC Search Engines usually have a ready-to-use suit of affiliate tools that you can easily integrate to your web site. The most common tools are search boxes, banners, text links and 404 error pages. Many Search Engines utilize custom solutions and provide with a white-label affiliate program, which enables you, with only few lines of code, to integrate remotely-hosted Co-branded Search Engine to your website.

Also referring your webmaster friends to the engine will grant you a lifetime commission for your 2nd tier earnings or deposits.

About The Author

Krzysztof Wojtowicz is an owner and manager of LooKiez.com PPC Web Search Engine. http://www.lookiez.com main focus is delivering relevant results and helping webmasters to monetize their web site’s traffic.

You can read about LooKiez Affiliate Program at: http://www.lookiez.com/affiliate.php

If you have an online business or you just use Internet as one of your marketing tools, you know that how important are the search engines in your quest to get more targeted visitors to your website. The changes in search engine field can have unexpected outcome for your online endeavors. That’s why it is important to be well-informed on impending progress in this sphere.

Microsoft has recently come out with the latest beta version of its much touted search engine. Supported by 5 billion indexed pages, it is poised to become one of the most powerful search engines in the market. Right now MSN is using Yahoo provided search results for queries done through its search page, which it’s planning to change somewhere in early next year with its own. You can check out the search engine at http://beta.search.msn.com.

Google’s immense success and profitable business model enticed Microsoft and others to look into lucrative search engine market seriously. Amazon, for example, has recently launched its web search site A9.com. Today, Google carries out almost 50 percent of all searches on the Internet. Yahoo with 24 percent of the market share is trailing in a distant second place. MSN with 14 percent lags far behind from the competitors – a situation, which won’t be very easy to change.

However, Microsoft has a long history of copying booming products; make their replicas some times, arguably, better then the originals, and clinch larger portion of the market shares. Microsoft has successfully done this to Borland’s dominance of programming languages in the early days. The list of victims continued with once utterly popular word processor –WordPerfect, market dominant spreadsheet – Lotus 1-2-3, Novell’s Netware and finally Netscape. Since 90 percents of all personal computers run on Windows, Microsoft gets an extra edge against its competitors, which it’s capable of exploiting very effectively.

What is new in MSN search

This version of MSN search incorporated several interesting features, which other search engines are lacking at this moment.

Direct answers to plain language factual searches

Unlike Google or Yahoo, Askjeeves has better ability to find answers to direct plain language searches. MSN search has taken this one step further by adding Microsofts Encarta reference tools to its features. Ask, what is the capital of Russia You will get the right answer at the beginning of the result page. Questions like “What is the size of a Blue whale” also brings in exact answer. No doubt, students will love this feature as it makes a lot easier for them to get specific answers to the questions related to facts and figures.

Near me

Microsofts new search engine includes a near me button that helps users find websites for a given location. In this release, this works only in United States.

Once you press this button MSN search figures out where are you located using your computer’s IP address. However, this can be easily superseded by changing setting preferences. This is important if you are located in New York and looking for something near Boston.

Search Builder

In other search engines, if you would like to customize your search you have to use advance search options from a separate page. MSN search has made it a lot easier for average users by adding the ability of customization right on the search box.

Once you click on the Search Builder from the link right underneath of the search box a drop down menu will open. Initially, the menu might look a little confusing; with little patience you will be able to use available great features easily.

The tool “search terms” allows you to add Boolean search options. Site/ Domain tool is used for limiting a search to specific site or domain, or excluding them from your query. “Links to” tool helps you make your query within the sites linked to a specific site. Country/ region and language options are required to make geography or language specific searches.

The best option from this group of features is the “Result Ranking”. This option allows you to refine searches and give you a better control over the search result by using a set of three bars. By sliding the bars up and down you choose whether you want to see more of exact match or approximate match, more popular or less popular, static or dynamic pages as search results. You can generate an impressive range of results for a single query thanks to this option. This could be very useful for some types of searches. For example: if you are looking for news based pages, you might prefer to choose more dynamic pages rather than static ones.

Preference setting

Most notable options on the setting page are “Safe Search” – ability to filter out sexually explicit images and texts, and ability to fix the number of results displayed from one particular site.

Relevancy

Many reviewers claim that if you compare the search results with Google, MSN search engine “falls short” in relevancy. However, my results showed otherwise.

I ran a search on the phrase “trade leads”. The results from both the search engines were very relevant. The only difference in MSN I noticed is our http://trade-leads.rusbiz.com managed to turn up on the first page. But, a search on the word “e-catalog” was brought better – more relevant – results on MSN then Google. This time too I was happy to see http://e-catalog.rusbiz.com on the first page of MSN search results.

Conclusion

If you consider all the new features of MSN that Google does not have yet, its ability to cover natural language queries, quality level and relevance of results, ability to refine searches, there is no doubt that MSN search engine is as good as Google.

About The Author

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business. You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com

Contrary to what most people think, it is not necessary to submit your site to the search engines. In the early days of the web, when search engine technology was still primitive and search engines ability to crawl the web was somehow limited, it made sense to submit your site.

Today, search engines like Google, MSN or Yahoo! Search have no problem crawling billions of pages and adding them to their index every month and sometimes even more often. Most likely, they will find your site once they find a link to your page in another website.

That website can be a directory a site that uses human editors to select, categorize and list websites, a site you exchange links with, or an article-posting site where you submit articles you write, complete with your resource box a small bio about yourself with a link to your site.

The two best general directories are Yahoo! $299/year fee and DMOZ free, but they may take a while to list your site. Listing your site with them will give you two of the best links you can get.

When exchanging links, make sure you do it with reputable, non-competitive sites with a topic related to yours for example, if youre a real estate agent, you may want to trade links with a mortgage brokers site.

Writing articles and posting them in sites like Article City or Ideamarketers is not only a good way to get links, but also a great way to establish yourself as an expert. The idea is to allow other webmasters to re-print your articles for free, provided that they include your resource box with a link to your site at the end of the article.

In summary, dont waste time, energy and money submitting your site, or using one of those services that claim to submit your site to "thousands of search engines" they are worthless. Instead, focus on getting high-quality inbound links. They will get your site listed faster while building your sites online reputation and popularity.

About The Author

Mario Sanchez: http://www.theinternetdigest.net.

For more search engine tips go to: http://www.accordmarketing.com/seotips/.

A simple method to convert files from Php to Html Extensions, on an Apache Server

Most will agree Php has become the common language for creating dynamic Websites. Although the language is simple and efficient, developers are finding trouble getting traffic to their Php site. It is believed by many educated Search Engine Optimization Specialists that spiders do not read beyond the, “.php,” on a URL. Therefore, dynamic pages that pass a variable will be overlooked. For example, on a PHP directory, variables may be passed to a file as, “index.phpcategory=x”. In this instance, the category specified as “x” will not be read or indexed by Search Engines. Spiders will open the parent page index.php. This is supported by the belief that nothing is read beyond the “”, thus making all category links, “index.php”.

While many dynamic Websites still receive modest traffic, it may be in a developers’ best interest to allow some, or all, dynamic pages to be seen as well. Having two pages indexed may not double a sites’ traffic, but it will ensure a noticeable increase. Developers’ can easily overcome this problem, if their Site resides on an Apache Server.

This simple fix will satisfy the problem for a simple script, as in the example above, where one or more Php files are passed variables to perform different functions. Bare in mind, if a Php file only performs one task, this is not required. Files that perform a task without the “variable=x” being required will be indexed. Therefore, it would be useless to transform them to a Static URL HTML File.

Identify the Php File Needing to be changed to an Html

First, identify the desired file, or files, that require the change, along with the variables that generate a common page. Generally, this may be, “index.php”. To help readers follow along, I am going to utilize the above Directory example. On our Directory program, we have a main page, “index.php,” which always displays links to Subdirectories. The subdirectories are opened by passing a variable to the index file. For example, a subcategory called, “Arts and Crafts,” is displayed with, “index.phpcategory=1”. Additional subcategories are displayed with an identical syntax, but the end variable changes. Because of this, we need to modify the way our server opens the index.php file, when a variable is attached.

Next, we need to place a simple .htaccess file in the directory where, “index.php,” is located on the server. The .htaccess file is a simple text file that we name .htaccess. Vdeck users may need to create a file named something.txt, and then rename the file to .htaccess, from the admin panel. Now we need to specify some variables to the server. For this example, I am going to change the, “category=x,” variable to, “directory-x.html”. This step will eliminate our problem of having the subcategories noticed by Search Engine Spiders.

To start our server variables, we need to create a rewrite engine in the .htaccess file. Simply put our first line will read, “RewriteEngine On”. This tells the server we are changing the way certain files are to be handled. No we need to specify our Rewrite rule. On the next line, “RewriteRule ^directory-[0-9]*.* index.phpcategory=$1 [L,NC],”. This is delegating, “requests to this directory, where the file is named, “directory-,” followed by a range of 0 to 9, followed by anything * = Wildcard and, “dot,” anything * = Wildcard, we are going to display, “index.php,” file with the variable attached. We can create another rewrite rule on another line of our .htaccess file. However, a meticulous developer likes to test things out before making changes to the actual Php file, or progressing ahead of oneself. We can test our, “RewriteRule,” by opening another browser window and entering, “directory-1.htm or directory-1.html,” into the address bar. We should see the same page displayed as, “index.phpcategory=1,” is called.

Finally, we want the Search Engine spiders to be able to see our shinning new readable URL that can be indexed. Rather than scurrying around to every search engine and submitting the URL, we are going to open up our Php file for editing. Before this is done, make a copy of each script that is going to be modified. Save the copy to the hard drive in a memorable location. Then identify the different areas of the program that create the links being changed. We don’t want to change things on the back-end, just the front-end. The Php file will still be getting the information as, “index.phpcategory=x,” from the .htaccess file. We want to change the display part that users to the site see. This is where links are dynamically created on the Php Script. We need to replace, “index.phpcategory=,” to read, “directory-,” where, “index.phpcategory=X,” is found and follow behind the variable x with, “.html”.

Once the area to be modified is found, check the modification following your changes. If you make a mistake on a script and get ahead of yourself, it may be difficult to fix the problem.

To see this exact modification in action, visit http://links.mjmls.com/index.html. Follow any of the category links on the page. Then change, “directory-,” to, “index.phpcat=,” and drop the html extension.

About The Author

Michael Medeiros is the founder of http://www.Mjmls.com an independently owned Internet domain. He has obtained a Bachelors Degree in Business, and works as an Independent Real Estate Agent in New Jersey. With the development of Mjmls.com, Michael has performed extensive research into Website Development. Mjmls.com is a Beta released free marketplace for businesses and individuals, allowing consumers to browse nationally or locally by individual state.

If youre anything like me, you have a favourite search engine and youre loyal to it. You never use any others which made this research difficult for yours truly, insist yours is the be-all and end-all and you even go so far as to deny any shortcomings it may have. But is your search engine truly the best Inspired by a great article at the BBC News BBC News: Search Wars, we decided to compare the major search engines. Heres what we found.

We chose the search term "real estate fiji" because its a competitive industry and geographically specific. We also searched with the same phrase, misspelled to see if the search engine would suggest the correct spelling.

Google Initially loading the search page for Google is lightning fast. The look is clean and easy to understand. Search time was 0.15 seconds. The search yielded 1,190,000 results. All results on the first page were relevant. Spellcheck was available.

Yahoo! Initially loading the search page for Yahoo! is a little bit slower than Google, but still fast. Search time was 0.18 seconds. The search yielded 711,000 results. It is difficult to tell the sponsored links from the actual web results. All results on the first page were relevant, however one of them directed you to another set of results for your search at DMOZ.org. Spellcheck was available.

AskJeeves Initially loading the search page for AskJeeves is fast. Search time was not posted and was much slower than Google & Yahoo!. The search yielded 63,100 results. Sponsored links take up the whole screen. You have to scroll down to see the web results. All first page results were relevant. Spellcheck was available.

A9.com Initially loading the search page for A9 is fast. Search time was not posted but was average. The search yielded 209,000 results. All the results on the first page were relevant. There were image results alongside the text results. This could be helpful. Spellcheck was available.

MSN Initially loading the search page for MSN is fast. Search time was not posted but was average. The search yielded 112,607 results. All except one of the results were relevant. This result pointed to Philippines real estate. Also, one the results directed you to DMOZ, where a second search for your keywords is performed. Spellcheck was available.

Alexa Initially loading the search page for Alexa was fast. Search time was not posted but was somewhat slow. The search yielded 208,000 results. It was difficult to tell the sponsored results from the web results. Some results included screen shots. The look was kind of disorganized. Spellcheck was available.

AltaVista Initially loading the search page for AltaVista is fast. Search time was not posted but was a sliver slower than Google. The search yielded 736,000 results. The sponsored results take up almost the entire screen. You have to scroll to get to the good stuff. The results are all relevant, though one redirects you to DMOZ, where a second search for your keywords is performed. Spellcheck was available.

Lycos Initially loading the search page for Lycos is fast. Search time was not posted but was rather slow. The search yielded 114,356 results. The sponsored results take up almost the entire screen. Once again, you have to scroll to get to the good stuff. All the results are relevant although 2 of them redirect you to DMOZ.org. Spellcheck was available.

Excite Initially loading the search page for Excite is slow. Search time was not posted but was rather slow. The search yielded 114,356 results. All the results on the first page were relevant. The look of the site was clean. Spellcheck was available.

HotBot Initially loading the search page for HotBot is fast. Search time was not posted but was fast. The search yielded 114,389 results. The sponsored results take up almost the entire screen. Once again, you have to scroll to get to the good stuff. All the results are relevant although 1 of them redirects you to DMOZ.org. Spellcheck was available.

AllTheWeb Initially loading the search page for AllTheWeb is fast. Search time was not posted, but was fast. The search yielded 679,000 results. It is difficult to tell the sponsored results from the web results. An offensive content filter was available. All the results are relevant although 1 of them redirects you to DMOZ.org. Spellcheck was not available.

Looksmart Initially loading the search page for Looksmart is fast. Search time was not posted but was rather slow. The search yielded 300 results. There were 3 completely irrelevant results on the first page. The look of the site was clean. Spellcheck was not available.

Jayde Initially loading the search page for Jayde is somewhat slow. Search time was not posted but was average. The search yielded 60,424 results. There were quite a few irrelevant results. The look of the site was clean. Spellcheck was not available.

So, whats the conclusion My favorite search engine is the best. All hail Google! ... Alright, alright, some of the others are pretty cool, too.

About The Author

Courtney Heard is the founder of Abalone Designs, an Internet Marketing and SEO company in Vancouver, Canada. She has been involved in web development and marketing since 1995 and has helped start several businesses since then in the Vancouver area. More of Courtneys articles are available at www.abalone.ca/resources/.

The Internet is a wonderful place full of resources that can be really helpful for us.

The best way for finding information is through a virtual search engine. A search engine explores the resources on the Internet and gives results relating to your queries. Search engines allow keyword searches and use crawlers to locate sites or pages that match requests.

However, finding the information that is relevant for you is a challenge. Everyday more sites come into existence.

A simple query like "web hosting" on Google returns 15,100,000 results. Now how does the user know which site is useful for them, thus creating an "Information Overload" of sorts. How is the user assured of the quality of the information

The thing about search engines is that they generally display all the web pages that contain any or both of the words contained in the search query.

So comes the question: how do we find the information we are looking for

There are various techniques that you can use to make your search query better which will then help to achieve more relevant results.

For instance if you use the "+" operator and restructure your query to "web hosting" + Windows it will show only those sites that offer Windows hosting. You can also use the "AND" Boolean operator, depending on what you are comfortable with.

You can use the "-" operator and key in "web hosting" - Linux thereby telling Google to make sure that it does not display Linux related hosts. This is the same as using the "NOT" Boolean operator.

There are also keywords like ADJ, NEAR etc. that are used by some of the search engines. The NEAR operator looks for keywords specified in the query within certain proximity of each other i.e. it makes sure that both the keywords "web" & "hosting" are present on the same page and are placed nearby to each other in the text.

The ADJ operator is a stricter filter and returns only those pages where the keywords are next to each other i.e. it will only return pages where the keywords "web" and "hosting" are mentioned together.

Another technique to make sure you get better results is to use a sensible query. Make use of words that you think will be contained on the site you are looking for: "web hosting" is better then "I want web hosting".

Also remember that search engines normally ignore certain words like "a, "for", "of", "in", "at" etc.

Another important thing to remember is that most search engines have a tips page that specifically contains information on how to make better searches on the search engine. It is always good to read these tips.

Most search engines have an advanced search option that is really useful if you are not proficient at using operators while searching.

Searching and finding what you are looking for is easy if you are armed with the know-how of how to do it.

About The Author

Ashish Jain M6.Net http://www.m6.net danielp@m6.net

Wouldnt it be nice if the search engines could comprehend our impressions of search results and adjust their databases accordingly Properly optimized web pages would show up well in contextual searches and be rewarded with favorable reviews and listings. Pages which were spam or which had content that did not properly match the query would get negative responses and be pushed down in the search results.

Well, this reality is much closer than you might think.

To date, most webmasters and search engine marketers have ignored or overlooked the importance of traffic as part of a search engine algorithm, and thus, not taken it into consideration as part of their search engine optimization strategy. However, that might soon change as search engines explore new methods to improve their search result offerings. Teoma and Alexa already employ traffic as a factor in the presentation of their search results. Teoma incorporated the technology used by Direct Hit, the first engine to use click through tracking and stickiness measurement as part of their ranking algorithm. More about Alexa below.

How can Traffic be a Factor

Click popularity sorting algorithms track how many users click on a link and stickiness measurement calculates how long they stay at a website. Properly used and combined, this data can make it possible for users, via passive feedback, to help search engines organize and present relevant search results.

Click popularity is calculated by measuring the number of clicks each web site receives from a search engines results page. The theory is that the more often the search result is clicked, the more popular the web site must be. For many engines the click through calculation ends there. But for the search engines that have enabled toolbars, the possibilities are enormous.

Stickiness measurement is a really great idea in theory, the premise being that a user will click the first result, and either spend time reading a relevant web page, or will click on the back button, and look at the next result. The longer a user spends on each page, the more relevant it must be. This measurement does go a long way to fixing the problem with "spoofing" click popularity results. A great example of a search engine that uses this type of data in their algorithms is Alexa.

Alexas algorithm is different from the other search engines. Their click popularity algorithm collects traffic pattern data from their own site, partner sites, and also from their own toolbar. Alexa combines three distinct concepts: link popularity, click popularity and click depth. Its directory ranks related links based on popularity, so if your web site is popular, your site will be well placed in Alexa.

The Alexa toolbar doesnt just allow searches, it also reports on peoples Internet navigation patterns. It records where people who use the Alexa toolbar go. For example, their technology is able to build a profile of which web sites are popular in the context of which search topic, and display the results sorted according to overall popularity on the Internet.

For example a user clicks a link to a "financial planner", but the web site content is an "online casino". They curse for a moment, sigh, and click back to get back to the search results, and look at the next result; the web site gets a low score. The next result is on topic, and they read 4 or 5 pages of content. This pattern is clearly identifiable and used by Alexa to help them sort results by popularity. The theory is that the more page views a web page has, the more useful a resource it must be. For example, follow this link today -

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_detailsq=&url=http://www.metamend.com/

- look at the traffic details chart, and then click the "Go to site now" button. Repeat the procedure again tomorrow and you should see a spike in user traffic. This shows how Alexa ranks a web site for a single day.

What Can I Do To Score Higher With Click Popularity Algorithms

Since the scores that generate search engine rankings are based on numerous factors, theres no magic formula to improve your sites placement. Its a combination of things. Optimizing your content, structure and meta tags, and increasing keyword density wont directly change how your site performs in click-tracking systems, but optimizing them will help your web sites stickiness measurement by ensuring that the content is relevant to the search query. This relevance will help it move up the rankings and thus improve its click popularity score.

Search Engines Can Use the Click Through Strategy to Improve Results

Search engines need to keep an eye to new technologies and innovative techniques to improve the quality of their search results. Their business model is based on providing highly relevant results to a query quickly and efficiently. If they deliver inaccurate results too often, searchers will go elsewhere to find a more reliable information resource. The proper and carefully balanced application of usage data, such as that collected by Alexa, combined with a comprehensive ranking algorithm could be employed to improve the quality of search results for web searchers.

Such a ranking formula would certainly cause some waves within the search engine community and with good reason. It would turn existing search engine results on their head by demonstrating that search results need not be passive. Public feedback to previous search results could be factored into improving future search results.

Is any search engine employing such a ranking formula The answer is yes. Exactseek recently announced it had implemented such a system, making it the first search engine to integrate direct customer feedback into its results. Exactseek still places an emphasis on content and quality of optimization, so a well optimized web site, which meets their guidelines will perform well. What this customer feedback system will do is validate the entire process, automatically letting the search engine know how well received a search result is. Popular results will get extended views, whereas unpopular results will be pushed down in ranking.

Exactseek has recently entered into a variety of technology alliances, including the creation of an Exactseek Meta Tag awarded solely to web sites that meet their quality of optimization standards. Cumulatively, their alliances combine to dramatically improve their search results.

ExactSeeks innovative approach to ranking search results could be the beginning of a trend among search engines to incorporate traffic data into their ranking algorithms. The searching public will likely have the last word, but webmasters and search engine marketers should take notice that the winds of change are once again blowing on the search engine playing field.

Did you find the information in this article useful Feel free to pass it along to a friend or drop us a line at comments@metamend.com.

About The Author

Richard Zwicky is a founder and the CEO of Metamend Software, a Victoria, B.C. based firm whose cutting edge Search Engine Optimization software has been recognized around the world as a leader in its field. Employing a staff of 10, the firms business comes from around the world, with clients from every continent. Most recently the company was recognized for their geo-locational, or GIS technology, which correlates online businesses with their physical locations, as well as their cutting edge advances in contextual search algorithms. articles@metamend.com

Studies show that after email, searching the Web is the most popular activity on the Internet. Searching is easy; finding what youre looking for can sometimes be difficult. Hopefully the advice below will make your next Web search a breeze.

Do you really need the Web

Before using the Web to search for information, youll have to ask yourself if the Web is the most appropriate medium to use to find your information. You can find a florist shop in your neighborhood faster by using the local, printed Yellow Pages instead of using the Web. And sometimes a library can give you better, more comprehensive answers than the Web.

However, in most of the cases, the best and fastest way to find information is... a Web search.

Obviously, the first thing you need to search the Web is a computer with Internet access.

Before really starting your search, youll have to decide which browser you are going to use. As a reminder, a browser, according to WhatIs.com is a program "that provides a way to look at and interact with all the information on the World Wide Web." You can select a popular browser such as Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla or Opera or you can use an alternative browser. My favorite: Avant Browser. I have NO connection with MyBookmarks.com Keep in mind that some browsers are faster or have more options. You can download these browsers from their companies web sites.

Tools for searching the Web

There are many search tools available: search engines, subject directories / virtual libraries, invisible deep web databases, meta search engines, etc.

A search engine is a keyword searchable database of Internet files that uses a software program to continually scour the Web. The resulting information is then indexed and stored in its database.

My favorite search engines are: Google™ [ http://www.google.com/ ] AlltheWeb [ http://www.alltheweb.com/ ] MSN [ http://www.msn.com/ ] Teoma [ http://www.teoma.com/ ] AltaVista [ http://www.altavista.com/ ] WiseNut [ http://www.wisenut.com/ ]

A subject directory web directory is a searchable collection of Web pages gathered, selected and organized by human editors into hierarchically subject categories. A virtual library is a web directory that includes highly selective links, chosen mostly by librarians.

Web directories cover a much smaller proportion of the Web but using them will bring you more highly relevant results. The largest web directories index a few million pages compared with the billions of pages indexed by some major search engines.

Remember that the web directories - like the search engines - do not search the Web directly. Instead, they search their own databases of indexed Web pages. Also, be aware that directories might not be up-to-date. Some search engines are in fact hybrid search tools because they are both search engines and web directories. Google™, for example, has a search engine and a directory, powered by Open Directory Project

Some widely used web directories are: Google™ Directory [ http://directory.google.com/ ] Open Directory Project ODP [ http://www.dmoz.org/ ] Yahoo! [ http://www.yahoo.com/ ] Zeal [ http://www.zeal.com/ ] JoeAnt [ http://www.joeant.com/ ] Gimpsy [ http://www.gimpsy.com/ ]

Popular virtual libraries include: Librarians Index to the Internet [ http://www.lii.org/ ] Internet Public Library [ http://www.ipl.org/ ] The WWW Virtual Library [ http://www.vlib.org/ ] Internet Scout Project [ http://www.scout.wisc.edu/Archives/ ] BUBL Link [ http://www.bubl.ac.uk/ ]

The so-called invisible deep web is a collection of online information stored in live databases accessible on the Web but not indexed by traditional search engines. Examples of excellent invisible web databases are: ProFusion [ http://www.profusion.com/ ] Invisible-web.net [ http://www.invisible-web.net/ ] Complete Planet [ http://www.completeplanet.com/ ] Resource Discovery Network [ http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ ] direct search Gary Price [ http://www.freepint.com/gary/direct.htm ]

A meta search engine also known as metacrawler or multithreaded engine is a search tool that sends your query simultaneously to several search engines, web directories and sometimes to the so-called invisible deep web. After collecting the results, the meta search engine removes the duplicate links and - according to its algorithm - will combine and rank the results into a single merged list.

Because most of the meta search engines take only the top 10 or 20 from each search engine, you can expect excellent results, "la crème de la crème."

But be aware that because some search engines and web directories do not support advanced searching techniques - such as quotation marks to enclose phrases or Boolean operators - no results from those search engines will appear in the meta search engines results list when those techniques are used.

Remember, meta search engines do not maintain their own databases and therefore cannot accept web site submissions.

The best meta search engines are: ez2Find [ http://www.ez2find.com/ ] Vivisimo [ http://www.vivisimo.com/ ] InfoGrid [ http://www.infogrid.com/ ] Infonetware [ http://www.infonetware.com/ ] iBoogie [ http://www.iboogie.com/ ]

A special kind of meta search engine is the search utility also called desktop search programs or client-side search software. Unlike the web-based meta search engines listed above, search utilities are software programs that you download to your computer. The most popular are: Copernic [ http://www.copernic.com/en/index.html ] Arrow Search [ http://www.rt-software.co.uk/arrow_search/ ] SearchRocket [ http://www.searchrocket.com/ ] WebFerret [ http://www.ferretsoft.com/index.html ] ProtoSearch [ http://www.npccenterprises.com/products.shtml ]

Meta search engines are excellent tools, but they do not eliminate the need for search engines.

For more about meta search engines, see my article: The Meta Search Engines: A Web Searchers Best Friends.

Which Search Tool Should You Choose If youre looking for specific information use search engines. If youre looking for a unique or obscure search term or if you want to make an in-depth analysis of whats out there on a specific subject, then use meta search engines. If youre looking for general information on popular topics, use subject web directories. If youre looking for scholarly information use virtual libraries. If youre looking for real-time information or for dynamically changing content such as the latest news, phone book listings, available airline flights, etc., then use specialized databases invisible or deep web.

There are thousands of search engines, hundreds of meta search engines and dozens of web directories and specialized databases. Choosing the right search tool - from the start - can make the difference between a successful search and a frustrating experience.

Before Starting the Search

The easiest way to find information is when you know a web page Internet address or URL Uniform Resource Locator such as Fortune Magazine at http://www.fortune.com. You can find these addresses on business cards, TV commercials or newspapers. Simply type the URL in the browsers address box and hit the PC or Mac key.

Be aware that in most browsers, you do not have to type "http://" or even "www" before the domain name. You can access a site simply typing the domain name such as "sony.com."

Special note: Be careful when you copy and paste a long URL from an email message or from some web sites. URLs that span two lines have a gap space between the last character of the first line and the first character on the second line. First, get rid of the gap and then paste it in the browsers address line.

Other times you may not know the URL but... you can guess it. Often companies will use their name, acronym or abbreviated name followed by ".com", such as ibm.com or apple.com. The same thing is true for educational institutions add the ".edu" suffix or government sites add ".gov" So, whenever you dont know an URL, you can try to guess it.

If you do not know the URL, youll have to find it by searching the Internet. In many cases, a simple search on the name of an organization within most search engines will return a direct hit on their web site.

Tips For Searching Smarter: Read the search engines "search tips" or "help" page before using a search tool. Strangely enough, most of the time youll find the "search tips" link on the "Advanced Search" page or on the "results page." Anyway, regularly check the search tips page because the rules often change. Customize the output of the results. Use the search engines "preferences" page. Some search tools allow you to select the value for: the total results per page; usually 10 by default select the maximum - often 100 the search tools timeout - select the maximum the search depth - select maximum.

Be sure to save the new "settings" or "search preferences" for the next time you use the search tools. Also, set the browser you use to accept cookies.

Tips To Make Your Search Faster:

If youre searching for information and you are not interested in graphics on the pages you see, turn off or disable graphics. You can also turn off sounds, animation, Java, JavaScript, etc. See your browser documentation for instructions.

If you decide to keep the graphics, in the case of a "heavy" page, you can always press the button in the browser, immediately after you see the text and before the graphics are entirely loaded.

More Tips: Most search tools are case-insensitive which means that you can construct a query - your search request - by typing all the words - even proper names - in lower case text. If you type a long query, most of the search tools search boxes are not very wide so you cannot see the entire query. Write the query in a word processor and then "copy and paste" into the search box. Be aware that Google™ only allows 10 words in the search box. Some search tools offer an option called "similar pages" Google™ or "related pages" AltaVista and Teoma. Clicking on that option will show you relevant results for the page youre interested in. Some search engines have a function called "see more hits/results/pages from the same domain." Sometimes it can be useful. Also, some search tools, such as Google™, allow you to see an English translation for a results page that is written in a foreign language. If you want to translate a web page and you have the URL, you can also use these sites: Systran [ http://www.systransoft.com/ ] Fagan Finder [ http://www.faganfinder.com/translate/ ] AltaVista Babel Fish [ http://babelfish.altavista.com/ ] alphaWorks IBM [ http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/aw.nsf/html/mt ]

Remember, dont expect perfect translations because that seldom happens. Looking for pages in a specific language Some search engines Google™, AlltheWeb, etc. have an advanced search page that allows you to select the language from the pull-down menu. If your search terms contain letters not present in the English alphabet such as "é" or "ü" example fiancé or München, use Fagan Finders Search Engine Ultimate Interface which allows you to use these special letters in many major search engines. It makes a big difference. A search for Munchen in Google™ gives 570,000 results while for München - "u" with umlaut - gives 51,700,000 - almost 10 times more.

So, lets start searching!

Most of the search tools can be searched using keywords. Web directories and the invisible web databases can also be searched by browsing categories and subcategories.

Start with a popular search engine such as Google™, for example.

Before typing the keywords, take your time and brainstorm relevant words. Create a list of search terms. Write them down. A few seconds of brainstorming could save you minutes or hours of retrieving irrelevant results.

Advice for Searching Better: Select the most descriptive words. Brainstorm thoroughly. Use at least two keywords. Place the most important words or phrases first. Whenever two or more words can appear in exact order, enclose the words with double quotation marks "word 1 word 2". Example: "United States." If you use a longer phrase, you will achieve more precise results. With a very long phrase, however, you may get zero results. Some search engines allow you to select the "phrase" option in the pull-down menu on their advanced search page or you can type it in special phrase search box, so you dont have to use quotes. When possible, use unique, rare or unusual keywords. The more uncommon / obscure or less frequent the keywords you use are, the fewer and more relevant results you will get. Use nouns and objects as keywords. Do not use the so-called "stop words" such as "what," "where," "the," "in," "and," etc. Many search tools ignore them. If you need a stop word to appear in the results, place the implied Boolean operator "+ " in front of that word. The standard Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT or AND NOT, NEAR, BEFORE, AFTER and the Boolean logic "parenthesis", are used to construct complicated queries. The implied Boolean operators "+" and "-" can replace the AND and NOT respectively. An example of Boolean logic is tips OR tricks AND "search engines" OR "web directories". It will find tips or tricks for search engines or web directories. Check the search tools tips to see if they accept Boolean operators. For example Google™ does not support full Boolean logic. Do not use common terms such as Internet, Web, etc. except for cases that it is necessary. For example, the query is "searching the web" with quotes. Avoid redundant terms and complicated query structures. Choosing the right words for your query is the most important part of web searching. The more specific the search term, the more relevant your results will be and the more likely it is that you will find what you seek. Remember, work smarter not harder. The secret to constructing a professional query is to type words you expect to find in the matches.

Note: Some search tools, such as Ask Jeeves allow you to use the so-called "natural language." This means that you can construct a query as a question in plain English, such as "Whats the weather in LA" When you have a specific question in mind, these tools can be helpful.

Checking the Results:

After typing your keywords into the search box press either the "enter" key on the keyboard or, click on the "search," "find" or "go" button on the search tools homepage. You will receive a list of documents that - hopefully - match your query. If you do not, it may be because some unscrupulous webmasters use unethical methods to cheat the search engines and achieve undeserved, top rankings for their sites. To learn more about this topic, please read my article, "Search Engine Spamming Sucks!"

The results returned, also called "matches" or "hits" will be web pages related to the subject youre searching for, ranked in order of relevancy according to the search tools algorithm or by date, URL, title, etc.

Each result will contain information such as the title of the page, a short description, the pages URL and the size of the page.

Now you have a tough job. You have to decide which of the search results will take you to the most informative site. Your best bet is to take a look at the title and description of the page. Are they relevant to your search If yes, open the page. If not, check the next result, by scrolling down on the right side of the browser.

To view a page you have two options:

Click on the title of the page - even if says "No title" or "". Place the cursor on the page title and the cursor will change to the picture of a hand. Usually the links are in blue and underlined, but often they are not. You can find links in any color, including black, which makes it difficult to recognize a link in text of the same color.

The second method is to open the page in a new browser window. Right-click over the title of the result. This produces a pop-up menu. Select "open link in new window." After checking the result, close the new browser window. You will still have the first window browser with your search. Some search tools have an option that allows you to open the result in a new window. Dont get used to that, do the right thing: open a new browser window by using the mouses right-click.

If you use the first method most likely you will not use the back button to go back to the results page, but instead you will simply close the window, losing the search page altogether.

Criteria for Evaluating a Web Resource:

First of all, dont believe everything you read on the Internet. Recently I found a page where it stated that Google™ has about one billion web pages indexed. Well, according to Google™, it indexes 3,307,998,701 web pages. Be careful what you believe. Governmental agencies, educational institutions, libraries and prestigious publications are the most reliable sources of information. Be circumspect with information found on personal sites stored in free hosts.

Six Tips For Evaluating A Site:

Is the web site published by an authoritative source Is the author a recognized expert in the field or subject area

Is the information relevant, credible and accurate It doesnt hurt to cross check two to three additional, reliable sources.

Is the site current and recently updated

Does the site have a professional "look and feel": structure, layout, color scheme, navigation menus, etc.

Are there spelling, grammar or punctuation errors

Does the site have contact information such as a postal address, phone or email

Four Additional Tips:

Dont look only at the top ten listings. Excellent results can be found on the top 20, or even top 50 results. This is why customizing the result output at 100 results per page is handy. You dont have to open a next ten-results-per-page page. If you dont find relevant results in the first 20 to 50, reformulate your query or try another search tool - a meta search engine, for example.

Check only results that truly looks relevant.

Be aware that many search tools list "sponsored links" at the top of their results page. These are not results from the search tools database. Instead these results are paid listings from corporations that have an interest in providing you with information about their products or services. Studies show that searchers find it hard to distinguish between regular and paid results, so be aware that these exist.

To quickly discover if a result is relevant, use the "Find on This Page" command of the browser in the Edit menu or simultaneously press CTRL and F keys then type one of your important words and press "Find next". You will find the location of that word, and you can see if the page is really relevant or not.

What To Do When You Get TOO MANY Results:

Its common to receive millions of results, often unrelated to the search. To receive more relevant results youll have to refine or even rethink the search. Here are some ideas to help you refine your search: Add one or more descriptive words to your query. Use phrases. Enclose two or more words that can appear in exact order within double quotation marks. Exclude words you dont want in the results by using the implied Boolean operator "-". Example: the query "red apples" -"yellow apples" will find pages that contain "red apples" - in that order - and will not include pages that contain "yellow apples. " As you see, there is no space between the "-" sign and the word or phrase you want to exclude. There is, however, a space between the "-" sign and the previous word. Use the search tools "advanced search" functions. Limit your search by language, date or by field searching: title, URL, link etc. See the search tools "search tips" for details.

What To Do When You Get Too Few Or Irrelevant Results:

Sometimes you will get messages like "Your search did not match any documents" or "No pages were found containing your query" or "No results." Other times you may get few or irrelevant results.

What You Should Do: Check the spelling of the query. Some search engines automatically detect misspelled words and will show the correct spelling. Just click on the suggested word or words. Delete the least important word from the query. If you used a search phrases try eliminating the double quotes. Use more general terms, alternate spellings, plural forms or synonyms. Recently, "Google™ introduced a new advanced search feature that allows you to not only search for a particular keyword but also for its synonyms. Just place the "~" tilde diacritical mark directly in front of the keyword in your search query. For example, "browser ~help" not only searches for "browser help", but also for "browser support", "browser tips" and "browser tutorials." You can also check the spelling of the Web pages URL if you typed it directly into the address field of the browser. If all the above strategies fail, switch to another search tool, preferably a meta search engine such as ez2Find formerly ez2www.

Remember: if youre doing a serious research, consider asking a professional Web searcher to do the job. In a few hours, he may find information that would have taken you days to find.

If you receive the message "The page cannot be displayed" or "Not found" the page has been discontinued.

What you can do: If a page that doesnt display is not the sites home page you can use the following trick. Cut the Web address of the page starting on the right-hand side and stopping at every forward slash /. Lets say that the URL of a dead link is www.domainname/archive/article_1.html. First delete "article_1.html" and click "enter." Hopefully you will see the "archive" page and the "article 1." If not, also delete "archive" and click "enter." Hopefully you will get the home page and there will still be an option "archive." When you cannot see a page, use the "cached" function of some search engines, such as Google™. Go back to the results list and click on the "cached" link near the result. You will get a snapshot of the page stored in Google™s index. Keep in mind that Google™ does not cache all the Web pages in its index and cached pages are often not up-to-date. Wayback Machine can also show you previous versions of a Web page. Simply type the URL and than select a date in the results list. Keep in mind that there are a limited number of URLs indexed in the Wayback Machines database. Be aware that sometimes receiving few results means that ONLY a few results matched your query. Switch to a meta search engine and I guarantee you will receive better results.

Sometimes a search tool simply will not work. Why Because it may be disabled or undergoing changes. Try again later. Other times you might receive messages like "503 Server is busy" or "Too many users. " Check back later. For U.S. residents, early morning and late night are the least busy times.

Qualities Of A Good Web Searcher: Patience. You can find what youre looking for in ten seconds, ten minutes or never. Keep in mind that searching the Web can be a very time consuming operation. Persistence. Dont be scared of millions of results. Dont give up too fast. Searching the Web is a process of trial and error. Good memory. When conducting extensive research, youll have to remember all your previous search queries so you know what terms you have already tried. Write them down - its easier. Good organizational skills. Plan your strategy ahead of time and stick with the plan. Creativity. Select the best words for your query. Decisiveness. Learn to quickly recognize relevant results in the search engines result page. Dont waste your time with search tools or strategies that dont work. Learn and accept the Webs limitations. Sometimes you cannot find the information because there is no information available on the Web related to your search. But this happens very rarely. Most of the time, the problem is not a lack of information but rather being overwhelmed by relevant results. That is if you know where and how to search.

And yes, practice, practice, practice. The more you search, the more youll know and soon you will be scoring the most relevant results in the timeliest manner.

A final piece of advice: use bookmarks or favorites.

When visiting a page that you think you might want to visit again, its wise to save its web address URL in your "bookmarks" or "favorites" folder in your browser or - much better - in a Web-based bookmarks manager - such as MyBookmarks.com - which allows you to access your bookmarks from any computer at any location. I have NO connection with MyBookmarks.com

The next time you want to visit that page, you simply open the saved bookmark instead of searching again or typing the pages URL.

Be aware that in time you can collect thousands of bookmarks. Be smart and organize them in thoughtfully labeled categories and subcategories.

Last but not least, back-up your bookmarks just like all the other important information you back-up from your computer.

Rest assured that finding information on the Web is never a question of luck. Instead it is the result of a thorough understanding of how search tools work, combined with mastering the art of creating a targeted search query. Searching the Web is not difficult. Like any task, you simply must press the right buttons.

Good luck with your searches!

Note: Google™ is a trademark of Google Inc.

Do you have searching tips not listed above Please send them to mailto:danielbazac@hotmail.com. Thank you.

About The Author

Daniel Bazac is the Search Engine Marketer for Web Design in New York [ http://www.web-design-in-new-york.com ], a site design, search engine optimization and promotion company. He also maintains Bazac Weblog [ http://www.bazac.blogspot.com/ ] a blog about the search engines and search engine marketing news and articles. He can be reached at danielbazac@hotmail.com.

MSN finally unleashed its new search technology to the world on Monday. The official announcement coming from Bill Gates introduced the New MSN Search engine, ending with a personal invitation to visit www.msn.com and “type in your question.”

Here at WebAdvantage.net, we consider ourselves to be veteran internet searchers, often able to easily find the information were after. Considering we spend all day every day online, we should be. Even so, we rarely venture to type search queries in the form of questions on search engines, except for the handful of times we visit AskJeeves.

The thought of being invited to type in a question at MSNs new search engine intrigued us. We decided to follow the trail of links to learn more about what they were offering. We were, at first, impressed with the pages singing the praises of the new "more precise, more powerful" MSN Search service. We were impressed, that is, until around page five of the "learn more" series of MSNs site pages. Thats when we started to get tired of clicking "next."

Turns out there were ten pages devoted to learning more about what MSN Search offers which perhaps could have been explained less painfully. But at WebAdvantage.net, were dedicated online marketing professionals, so we hung in there.

We were informed that MSNs search results would now be drawn from their encyclopedia, MSN Encarta, enabling it to function effectively as a reference tool for finding things like definitions, conversions, geographic capitals and historical events. And that it could also now perform news and image searches and would draw music related results from its own MSN Music, placing artist information and sample song clips at the top of any music related search results.

MSN was also offering search functions for your own desktop or Outlook email if youre so inclined to download those. Throughout the "learn more" pages, they gave search examples. The first search examples given were in the form of questions; questions with specific answers like "Who is LeBron James" and "What is the mass of Jupiter"

MSN Search, they said, would give you more control over your searches, with filters to refine and a "near me" button to instantly localize results. Sounded good and well, but we were still more intrigued with that initial invitation to "visit and type in your question."

So we tried it. We visited MSN Search and decided to use one of their examples, typing in the question, "What is the mass of Jupiter" To our shock and pleasure, there it was--an answer, right at the top and separated from the actual web results. It said, "Answer: Jupiter: mass: 318 Earth Masses."

Inquisitive and competitive by nature, we wondered what would happen if we typed in the very same question at Google. So we asked Google, "What is the mass of Jupiter" Amazingly enough, Google spat out an answer right at the top of their results page as well. But Googles answer was, "mass of Jupiter = 8987 × 10 to the 27th power kilograms." Now, were Internet marketing experts, not rocket scientists, but it appeared that Google actually provided the more precise answer.

Good humored sports that we are, we went promptly back to MSN Search to give it another try. Since their first result at least taught us that Jupiters mass is 318 times that of the Earths mass, we typed in the next logical question, "What is the mass of the Earth," thinking that we could then arrive at our own conclusion by multiplying that answer by 318 to arrive at the answer Google had already provided.

Unfortunately, MSNs answer to "What is the mass of the Earth" was "Answer: World: mass: 1 Earth masses"

Youd think that the folks over at MSN would have tested their examples on MSN Search as well as testing the same queries on other major competitors before selecting them for the final cut. Well, maybe not.

We then spent the better part of the afternoon periodically asking MSN Search and Google questions to see how theyd fare. If youre ever bored, try asking them, "How hot is the sun", "How many eggs are in a bakers dozen" or "How far is it from New York to Utah"

Heres what we learned from our afternoon of follies.

1. If youre looking for encyclopedia-type answers to questions like "What is a marsupial" ask MSN Search or visit encyclopedia.com or Britannica.com

2. If you’re looking for a black and white photo of daisies, use MSN Search because the image search is nicely arranged and you can filter results by size as well as by color or black and white.

3. If you’re looking for results “near me,” stick with Google’s automatically localized results by including the city and state in your query.

4. If you’re looking for the most precise answer, perhaps you should stick with Google at least for now.

About The Author

Lisa Melvin is the Search Engine Optimization Copywriter at WebAdvantage.net, the Traffic Optimization Company, Maximizing the visibility of their clients’ sites, driving targeted traffic and increasing sales with their Search Engine Optimization, Media Buying and Online Marketing Services.

marketing@webadvantage.net

Sometimes questions will arise around the subject of gateway information pages or doorway pages. People have heard that "doorway pages" are BAD and some have stated that search engines "hate doorway pages".

For clarification on these type of issues, lets start by explaining some simple ground rules looking beyond the jargon and terminology.

Do Search Engines Hate Doorway/Gateway Pages

To answer this well examine it in two steps.

Lets understand:

1. What it is that the Search Engines "HATE"

and then...

2. What type of pages the search engines "LOVE"

With this approach it will help us gain some understanding of the criteria that is most important.

1. What the Search Engines HATE:

a To put it simply, search engines despise low quality doorway pages that contain little or no useful content. A few years ago these type of low quality doorway pages were rampantly produced as a means to try and trick the search engines. Looking at it from the search engines point of view, why even publish a page if all it contains is a couple of lines of text and an "enter the store" link. Pages with VERY LITTLE VALUE to the reader, do not belong in a search engines index.

b Search engines also despise any kind of duplication or use of mirror pages. Again, little or no content often just garbled text or keyword rich paragraphs that have no real value were reproduced over and over and cluttered up the search engines. These pages were supposedly going to bring great traffic but the bottom line is that they were and still are all labeled by engines as Spam.

c Search engines hate any attempt made by Webmasters to manipulate pages optimized with content unrelated to the actual Web site. Some Webmasters were guilty of all types of trickery to try and attract clicks regardless of the site content.

Understanding these issues, clearly you could NEVER blame the search engines for their war on Spam and low value doorway pages which contained no useful content or information.

Next lets talk about

2. What pages the Search Engines LOVE:

a Search engines love pages that far "information rich" and contain useful, original content that will actually make valued reading to the online visitors.

b Instead of doorway pages or pages with no value or little useful content, the term "information rich" can be used to describe a page loaded with useful, quality information. Search engines love pages that are content rich and able to stand on its own merit. A quality information page is also part of the overall Web site allowing visitors to obtain more relevant and useful information having easy navigation through the Web site.

Instead of lightweight pages with no content, todays pages need to contains high quality information, which is relevant to the online audience. The information rich page is 100% quality, put together with research, relevance, thought and care. No tricks are ever needed.

Next Question is..... What kind of information goes into creating an information rich high performance page

Invariably this question often comes up when I am teaching one of our live hands-on workshops. People need to understand that this is wide open to all the discoveries you make while researching your target audiences behavior. How you can meet the audiences needs exactly, is only limited to "your imagination" and the most effective way to present the information you know they are looking for, back too them. You want to give them what they "really want" as opposed to what you "think" they want and do this right up front.

The focus is on creating genuinely "useful content" for your ideal target audience of "potential customers" who happen to be already out there searching for you.

Not only is this what your visitors want, its also the key to success for search engine acceptance. You will never run in to trouble with search engines by offering lots of original, quality content that is interesting, useful and of high value, to your online readers.

In brief, key to success for attracting your target audience, is doing quality research on your target audiences searching behavior and learning to identify their needs and what they are searching for and then, giving them what it is that they really want.

Okay, so what kind of information might a information rich page really contain That will depend on what "your research" reveals of course, but here are about 20 rough ideas just to get you started thinking in this fashion.

20 Ideas for High Performance Information Rich pages:

Your high performance, information rich pages might be any of the following but not limited just to these either:

1. A Questions and Answers information rich FAQ page.

2. An introductory story related to the appropriate Web site theme something that is compelling or educational on topic.

3. Interesting and original statistics which you have discovered through your research, are in high demand by your audience.

4. An interesting interview with someone make it exclusive and original. People love to read about other peoples experiences and or opinions and views.

5. It might be a page loaded with various product reviews with an emphasis on benefits of each in comparrison.

6. It could be a theme related feature article or story.

7. It could be a detailed tutorial loaded with valuable "How to" or "instructional" advice.

8. Your information page might even be a biography about someones life that people are looking for detail on. Of course it should relate to the topical interest of your sites theme.

Recent eg. At the recent, sad passing of legendary screen icon Marlon Brando, just do a search for his bio and see all of the movie or film related sites that are no doubt getting additional exposure from Marlons fans who are looking to buy up some of his old classic films.

9. Your pages might something with a current events or newsworthy or hard news angle. Your audience is probably looking for interesting news if you take time to study what they are searching for.

10. Your information rich pages might want to contain detailed historical information that your audience is seeking.

11. There may be room for the use of information pages that use some humor or emotional content that is still of good value.

12. Would there be value to having a questionnaire which asks your audience a series of important questions. Remember that like real life, most Web based businesses are about building rapport and relationships.

13. You could build an index to a whole library of similarly themed topics and all though your articles would all be similar in theme, each individual information rich page would contain useful and diverse subject matter. Remember high value to your readers but all original and no duplication in content.

14. What about an information rich page offering an entryway into a useful, interactive section like a message board perhaps detailing terms of use for the message board.

15. It might be a page containing an interesting advice column on your chosen theme. Just old fashioned "good reading" which offers your readers advice or solutions to their challenges.

16. Your information page might be a reference page loaded with interesting, inspirational or famous quotes quite popular with all types of personalities.

17. Your pages might contain a related territorial map yes images can be used most effectively with text

18. It might be a sales letter but remember the emphasis is on quality content and originality. Things like detailed product reviews or content that emphasized some value added layout.

19. It could be a community related page with important localized community information. Tremendous value for Web sites that are looking for region specific traffic.

20. It could be any of the above suggestions with a seasonal angle relating to Christmas, Halloween, Easter, or something else appropriate to the Web content within your main theme.

One of the best ways to come come up with original ideas is to think laterally about "your audiences needs" in comparison to how they are searching on the major search engines. For more insight on how to research your audiences realtime behaviours you may want to visit http://www.wordtracker-magic.com

Best Regards,

John Alexander

About The Author

John Alexander is Co-Director of Training for Search Engine Workshops. He has trained hundreds of people from over 80 different countries through seminars and workshops at locations across the globe. John also teaches instructional chats through his partners, online SEO courses. Robin Nobles and John Alexander are also members of Wordtrackers special technical support team. John has written an eBook, Wordtracker Magic, offers unique strategies for applying the Wordtracker service to generate profits for online marketers. http://searchengineworkshops.com john@searchengineworkshops.com

For years, the search engines have continued to introduce new factors into their algorithms to make their search results more relevant and to keep savvy search engine marketers from "cracking the system."

Weve seen many ranking factors come and go in importance. For example, years ago, META tags were the key to success, or so we thought. Stick in META tags that were loaded with your keyword phrases, and you were sure to achieve top rankings.

Then, we had keyword weight as a ranking factor. We struggled to determine the keyword weight of our competitors pages, then duplicate that weight in all of the various areas of our pages.

Along came link popularity, and with it, the massive link farms and link exchange programs. Web site owners joined as many as they could in an effort to boost the sheer number of incoming links pointing to their sites.

In the midst of these evolving ranking factors came changes to page components like the title tag. Put your keyword at the beginning of the tag for maximum ranking potential. Oops. Things have changed. Put your keyword as the 3rd and 4th words in the title tag. Wait - lets try the 2nd and 3rd words.

These are just a few of the ranking factors that have come into play over the last several years.

Can you see the potential for problems here

After all, including keywords in your META tags doesnt mean that the page is more relevant for those keywords. Just because you have 12,792 worthless links pointing to your site doesnt mean your site is relevant for your keyword phrase.

Now, were in the middle of another "link popularity" or "link reputation" surge. But the rules have changed. Now, we want sites that are related in content to our site, or authoritative, popular sites in our focus area.

Okay! Now were beginning to get on the right track! After all, if an important, authoritative site in a particular topic area links to your site, it must mean that your site is important and popular for that subject too. Or, if other sites in your subject area link to you, it must mean that your site is truly about that subject as well.

Equally important, or even more so, comes the "link reputation" factor. If enough popular sites in your topic area use your important keyword phrase when linking to you, its telling the search engines that your site is relevant for that keyword phrase. After all, the Web community has deemed to describe your site using that keyword phrase, which is a vote of confidence to the search engines.

Makes sense, except for one small problem. I can have a site thats devoted to wireless Internet connections, and you can have a site thats devoted to kitchen utilities. I can link to your site from mine and use the keyword phrase "kitchen utilities" in the link text. Some of the engines appear to use the link text as the determining factor when deciding link reputation, not the contents of the page pointing to the site. So, two sites that arent related in content whatsoever could potentially help boost the link reputation of each others sites. We may see the engines consider other factors in the near future, such as the contents of the title tag on the page containing the link, which will help solve this potential problem to some degree.

However, when looking at all of the factors listed here so far, do any of them truly prove that the page is relevant to a particular keyword phrase

With relevancy comes a much more stable, trustworthy search engine. When you search for a particular topic, youre assured of getting search results that contain pages with good, solid content related to that keyword phrase.

After all, most people venture onto the Internet looking for information. If we can provide that information in content-rich, valuable pages, weve done the search engines, the users, and ourselves a big favor.

With all of these various ranking factors, what is the one area that is sorely missing

How about a site ranking algorithm based on a combination of content relevancy and user popularity data

"Content" relevancy and "user popularity" arent as easy to manipulate as link popularity, link reputation, or even keyword placement, so the search engine results should certainly be more relevant. After all, anyone who is concerned about relevancy in search engine rankings should want the most relevant pages and sites to rise to the top of the rankings. If our pages arent the most relevant, we have some work to do!

Introducing an Innovative Search Engine Ranking Algorithm

I just learned of a new search engine that actually uses a combination of content relevancy and user popularity to determine rankings. Its called ExactSeek.com.

How does ExactSeek measure user popularity The engine has teamed up with Alexa, which offers a toolbar that measures activity on the Web. By measuring the surfing activity of millions of Alexa users, ExactSeek is able to determine the user popularity and relevancy of Web sites in its index. User popularity is a far more reliable indicator of where Web sites should rank and gives users some input on the search results they see.

Mel Strocen, CEO of Jayde Online, which is the parent company of ExactSeek, says,

"Alexa traffic data will be a strong factor in the ExactSeek ranking algorithm but not the dominant factor, that being page content. Essentially, weve opted to emphasize user popularity over link popularity."

In fact, in an effort to make the results even more relevant, ExactSeek.com will be in flux for the next week or two as they work to determine how much weight to give Alexa traffic data in ranking search results.

The beauty of ExactSeek.com is that the harder you work toward increasing traffic to your Web site by adding new, relevant content, paying for SEO, advertising in various publications, investing in a PPC campaign, etc., the better your rankings will be in ExactSeek.com.

Can User Popularity be Manipulated

I think a better question would be, what search engine results cant be manipulated The key is to consider relevancy and valuable content, which is something that ExactSeek.com has wisely chosen to focus on.

Its true that not everyone uses the Alexa toolbar. However, it does provide results based on an excellent sampling of users on the Web. Plus, user popularity will be more difficult to manipulate than other factors, because it is certainly more difficult to manipulate the surfing public than it is to manipulate the search engines.

Give ExactSeek.com a Try!

ExactSeek.com is innovative in more ways than the way it determines rankings. For example, you can check your sites rankings in the ExactSeek database from a link on the main page of the engine. How convenient!

In Conclusion . . .

As the search engine industry evolves, well begin to see more and more innovations geared toward arriving at relevant search results that arent as easily manipulated as some of the ranking methods in the past. One of those innovations is being put into place now at ExactSeek.com: user popularity combined with content relevancy.

About The Author

Robin Nobles is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops with John Alexander. They teach 2-day beginner, 3-day advanced, and 5-day all-inclusive "hands on" search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe. She also teaches online search engine marketing courses through http://www.onlinewebtraining.com, and she’s a member of Wordtracker’s official question support team. With partner John Alexander, shes co-authored a series of e-books called, "The Totally Non-Technical Guides to Having a Successful Web Site." And, they opened a networking community for search engine marketers called The World Resource Center for Search Engine Marketers. robin@searchengineworkshops.com

There are a variety of advertising options available to online business owners small and large. Theres traditional banner advertising, text ads of both static and contextual varieties, popups and popunders, layer ads and pay-per- click search engine advertising.

For just about any business looking to advertise online, pay-per-click search listings should come first and be used to their maximum potential before investing elsewhere. They are the foundation of most online advertising plans, delivering the most precise targeting and the furthest reach for the lowest cost.

The concept of pay-per-click, or PPC search advertising is simple -- you have your listing placed within or alongside search results in exchange for paying some fee each time a someone clicks on your listing in those search results. Most search engines set advertisers against eachother in auction-style bidding for the highest positions on search result pages.

There are several benefits to this advertising method that make it useful to just about any web business, and make it so important that it should be exploited to its fullest before advertising in any other medium.

BENEFIT #1: TARGETING

Targeting is essential to any marketing, online or off. In order to be effective, ads have to reach the right people. If thats not happening, youre just wasting your money.

More than anything else, people turn to search engines to find things they need on the Web. Pay-per-click search engine advertising lets you capture these people while they are actively seeking out your product or service. By listing your site under specific search results, you capture your target audience and pre-qualify them with your ad at the same time. By the time the visitor is on your site, you already know they are looking for your product or service and have an interest in your particular offer.

BENEFIT #2: REACH

No matter how large the website, magazine or newspaper you advertise on, it will never reach as many individuals as the top search engines. Google and Yahoo! each reach 80% of the Internet using population and display pay-per-click ads above and alongside search results. Billions of searches are made every month which you can easily be listed within at no cost until an individual decides to click through to your website.

BENEFIT #3: COST

Banner advertising can cost $25 for 1,000 impressions of an advertisement regardless of the number of real website visits those impressions deliver. Top news portals can charge even twice that. PPC search ads cost nothing until an interested individual actually clicks through to your website. Even with the competitive bidding process that pits you against other advertisers for top spots at most PPC search engines, costs per click can still be just pennies. If you work out the average cost to acquire a new visitor from other mediums, itll likely end up higher than the search engine ad without the benefits of precise targeting and pre-qualifying the visit with the ad text.

It becomes clear why pay-per-click advertising should be the foundation of an online advertising plan when you consider the combined benefits of the targeting, costs and reach of the medium: Theres no guessing how many visitors will result from an advertising spend. Since you set your own click price, you know how many visitors each dollar buys in advance. Conversion rates and ROI are easy to calculate. Visitors are pre-qualified before arriving at your website by your ad text. Ads are placed without long-term commitments or high up-front fees. PPC search advertising reaches so many internet users that almost any niche audience can be targeted. Ad text can be changed at any time.

PPC search advertising is targeted, affordable and abundantly available. It should be exploited in full, at the many available companies, before spending money elsewhere as almost any other medium will be less targeted, less controllable and more expensive.

About The Author

Dan Grossman of Awio Web Services LLC http://www.awio.com reviews pay-per-click search engine services at http://www.searchenginereviews.info dan@awio.com

Youve got a web site; and you want to attract lots of people to visit it so you can grow your business. But youre only getting a handful of visitors currently. What is the first thing to do to help people find your site

A top listing in the search engines, especially in Google, can increase visitors to your web site and help. Lets say you sell web design services. If your site was at the top of the list when people searched for "web design" in Google, it could increase the number of people who know you exist and know what you do, by a factor of ten or more.

You may already know that a top listing in Google will help your business, but at present you are having a tough time even finding your site in the Google search engine listings. What can you do to help Google find your listing and put it as close as possible to the top of the list

Submitting Your Site

Google uses a "spider" to look for links from one site to another and to add information about additional sites and web pages to its database. Googles "spider" is very active and may already have found your site. If any other site has a link to your site and is listed by Google, Google may have found your site on its own. To find out if your web site is listed, just type in www.yoururl.com into the query box at www.google.com and press search.

If your site isnt listed, you can prompt Google to spider to it at http://www.google.com/addurl.html Submit your primary url and Google will find the rest of your site.

Getting your site listed by Google and the other search engines is the first step. Next you need to make it easy for the search engines to code your site pages correctly and move them towards the top of their listings. Heres how:

Picking the Right Keywords

If you want your prospects to find your site use the words and phrases most commonly associated with your product or service in your web pages. These are called keywords. In selecting your keywords, think about the problem your prospects want to solve. If you sell ergonomic chairs, which will work best, "comfy chairs" or "eliminate back pain" or "ergonomic chairs"

Pick keywords that people use the most frequently. Test different keywords and keyword combinations and compare the number of searches that result from each using http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Using Your Keywords

To help the search engines know what a web page is about, use your top keywords 6 to 8 times on a page. If you sell a number of different products and services, build individual pages for each set of keywords.

Make sure you dont just repeat your keywords more than 6-8 times. In this case more repetition is not better. Search engines reject pages with too many keyword repetitions. Use natural sounding copy and integrate your keywords so the copy reads well for both visitors and the search engines.

Linking Your Own Keywords

Once you have your individual product or service pages optimized for your keywords, link other pages on your site to them using your keywords again. If you have articles on your site on back pain, link your keywords to the corresponding optimized page from 4 to 5 other pages.

Building Incoming Links to Your Site

The above steps lay the groundwork for getting noticed by the search engines. The next step in getting your site listed at the top of the search engines, and particularly Google, is the number of links found from other sites to your site.

Your sites "link popularity" is one of the most important factors the search engines look at in ranking your site. When the search engines see that hundreds of other web sites have links to yours, they rank your site higher than those with fewer links.

How many links do you have to your site Use http://www.linkpopularity.com to see. You can also use this site to find the number of links to your competitors sites, and identify who has links to them.

Getting other people to link to your site is easy. Ask for a link, ideally one using your keywords, and offer a link in return. Create a links.html page and when businesses link to your site, provide a link back.

Link Example:

Attract more clients with Charlie Cooks Free Marketing Plan Guide and grow your business. Learn how to generate more leads and increase sales with the articles and marketing manuals on this site. Highly recommended. http://www.marketingforsuccess.com

Get noticed by the search engines and many more people will visit your web site so you can market your products and services to them.

About The Author

2004 © In Mind Communications, LLC. All rights reserved.

The author, Charlie Cook, helps service professionals and small business owners attract more clients and be more successful. Sign up for the Free Marketing Plan eBook, 7 Steps to get more clients and grow your business at http://www.marketingforsuccess.com

What was once such a good thing is now a rip-off and a sham!

Im talking about pay-per-click search engines, and how theyve become a really bad investment!

There are two reasons for the deterioration of pay-per-click search engines: high bid prices and out of control click fraud.

A few years back, you could get popular keywords at a halfway decent bid price. Nowadays, even moderately popular keywords are ridiculously high.

How high Well, let me give you an example, using the most popular pay-per-click search engine: Overture.

Lets take the popular keyword phrase, "home business."

At the time this article was written, Overtures top bid for the keyword phrase "home business" was an exorbitantly high $2.28. Just to get on the first page, it would cost you $0.61, which would place you last at number forty.

Now lets just delve inside the numbers for a moment, shall we Im not going to even bother breaking down the number one bid price, because quite frankly, its obvious the top spot is reserved for and controlled by the high-rollers.

So, lets break down bid number forty. The bid price of $0.61 means that for every 100 visitors Overture sends to your website, its going to cost you $61.00. Now, heres where the numbers really get interesting.

According to the so-called experts, a decent conversion ratio is right around one percent. In other words, one out of every one hundred visitors to your website converts to a sale. I happen to know for a fact that most websites dont even come close to converting one percent. However, thats a subject for another day.

Using the very generous one percent conversion ratio, heres the problem. Unless youre selling a big-ticket item and making $100 or more per sale, its impossible to make any real money with pay-per-click search engines. You just cant do it!

For example, if youre selling a $20 e-book and youre paying $61 to get one hundred visitors to your website, with a one percent conversion ratio, that means your website is making a measly $20 for every one hundred visitors. That leaves you $41 in the hole. Even, if you were selling a $50 product, youd still be $11 in the negative.

And even if you cut the bid price in half and made it $0.30, theres still another problem. Its called click fraud and its a major problem among all of the pay-per-click search engines.

In a nutshell, click fraud is what occurs when someone fraudently clicks on your ad over and over again, without any intention of responding to your offer. Click fraud hurts advertisers by driving up the cost of each click because many online advertising programs adjust the price of each click based on the popularity of a particular keyword and the number of competing advertisers.

And depending on how popular your keyword is, it can take just a few minutes to register hundreds or even thousands of clicks. Click fraud can quickly deplete your pay-per-click account and leave you with nothing to show for your expentiture.

At the present time, the pay-per-click search engines seem to be powerless to stop click fraud. To their credit, Google even admitted as such.

In a recent filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google acknowledged, "We are exposed to the risk of fraudulent clicks on our ads. We have regularly paid refunds related to fraudulent clicks and expect to do so in the future. If we are unable to stop this fraudulent activity, these refunds may increase. If we find new evidence of past fraudulent clicks, we may have to issue refunds retroactively of amounts previously paid to our Google Network members."

In conclusion, because of unreasonably high bid prices and rampant, out of control click fraud, I consider pay-per- click search engines a really bad investment, and recommend you stay away from them!

About The Author

Dean Phillips is an Internet marketing expert, writer, publisher and entrepreneur. Questions Comments Dean can be reached at mailto: dean@lets-make-money.net.

Visit his website at: http://www.lets-make-money.net

Do you ever wonder how people search for things on the Internet What if you knew exactly what words they typed when using a search engine If youre marketing a product or service its extremely insightful to know what are the most popular search terms relating to whatever youre marketing.

The Overture Company

Overture.com is a Yahoo! company that supplies the Pay Per Click infrastructure for Yahoo! and other websites on the Internet. If you do a search on Yahoo! youll see anywhere from 1-3 paid promotions appear at the top of the search page and then others at the end. These are paid advertiser listings and they come from Overture.

The Overture Search Tool

In order to maximize the number of clicks on their network, Overture supplies a keyword tool so that their customers know which are the most popular keywords relating to their product of service. This way when an Overture customer selects keywords to advertise on, they can pick the ones that are most popular or the ones that most precisely relate to their product or service. This generates more revenue for Overture and more clicks for advertisers.

Anyone Can Use the Search Tool

Fortunately you dont have to be a customer of Overture to use the search tool. Click Here http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/ to find the search tool; its at the bottom of the page.

How to Use the Search Tool

The best way to get started is to type in a major word associated with your business. For example if youre in the marketing business, heres the top 10 search terms and their search count. Search Count Term 1253354 direct marketing 460115 internet marketing 380450 marketing 76542 business marketing small 48494 email marketing 44160 marketing web site 43064 advertising marketing 42613 network marketing 42414 business marketing 31484 health care marketing

This search count number represents about 20% of the Internet so multiply it by 5 to get an approximate number of searches for the entire web, i.e. the total searches for email marketing are 48494*5=242470 searches across the Internet every month.

How to Use the Data

The value of this search tool goes far beyond just determining popular search terms. Heres a few ways to use the tool for market research: Type in your state or city to find out the most popular searches Compare the number of searches for your product compared to those of your competitors Use the most popular search terms relating to your business for your web site domain names to increase their visibility in search engines. Use it to brainstorm new products or services, especially if something is being searched for but is not widely available Considering a celebrity endorsement or joint venture partner for your next Internet promotion, compare the various candidates and make an informed decision. Use it for determining market size or segmentation information for your business plan. Use it to drive all your web content, from web page titles to Meta Tag keywords and descriptions. Use it to determine which categories to list your business, from Internet to Yellow Page listings. Use it to determine important searches relative to your business in foreign cultures and countries that you are unfamiliar with.

Make Informed Decisions from Now On

The Overture Search tool takes the guesswork out of many of your marketing decisions, from choosing Pay Per Click keywords, to determining the next market your company should pursue. Take a look today and youll be amazed at the wealth of information that is available. You can try the search tool now on the Overture website at the following URL http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/.

About The Author

Bryan Brandenburg has published 5 books as well as a number of articles both in print and on the internet. He has published almost 30 software programs both for consumers and business. More information can be found at www.vmmg.net.

Over the last few months, search engine submissions have changed dramatically. Now is the time to analyze the way were submitting our Web pages and to rethink our submission strategies.

Regretfully, I still see people paying big bucks to search engine submission services who will submit their pages to thousands of search engines for one "low price." What they arent told is that the act of "submitting" their pages has nothing to do with top search engine rankings. Even taking a step back, submitting doesnt guarantee indexing.

Fact: The majority of traffic to your site will come from the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! search engine, and MSN. Therefore, submitting to "thousands" of search engines really isnt doing your site any good.

Lets take a serious look at the reality of search engine submissions. Do we need to pay a submission service to submit our pages to the search engines Can the search engines find our pages on their own, or do we have to pay them to index our pages Lets look at the variables and try to save you some money.

Search Engine Submissions . . . Ways to Submit Your Pages

1. Dont submit! Let the search engines find your pages through links on other Web pages or Web sites.

To be honest, this is my favorite, most "stress-free" way to submit to the search engines. Think about it. You create your Web page and optimize it. You make sure to link TO the page from another page on your site, such as your site map. The idea is that when the search engine spiders your site map, it should find the link to your new page, visit the page, spider it, and index it. Can I guarantee it will happen Of course not. Thats why you need to monitor your spider traffic and your rankings to make sure that the page makes it into the search engines index.

Search engine spiders were created to SPIDER the Web. Thats their "job" -- to crawl the Web and index new pages. I have always found this method of "submitting" to be the most effective.

2. Submit pages through free add URL pages at the various search engines.

My main concern here is that the search engines have always said that over 90% of all submissions through free add URL pages is spam. I have never wanted my submissions to be lumped in there with all of that spam.

Therefore, I personally stay away from free add URL pages. In particular, I never submit to Google through its free add URL page.

3. Use Overtures Site Match to submit to Yahoo!s family of search engines.

Overtures Site Match http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/bjump/sm.jhtml has taken the place of the old Inktomi, FAST, and AltaVista paid inclusion programs. However, Site Match isnt just a paid inclusion program -- it is also a cost-per-click program, with the cost being based on the type of industry youre in. You pay a flat fee for your site to be reviewed, and then you pay a cost per click as well. The paid inclusion spider crawls the page every 48 hours, so youre able to tweak it to try to get better rankings.

Site Match gets your pages into Yahoo! Web pages, FAST, AltaVista, Overture supplemental results, HotBot, and more, so the visibility is certainly impressive. Its important to note that Site Match pages are shown with the regular Yahoo! crawler results with no distinction between the two.

If a page is important to you and youre having problems getting it picked up by Yahoo!s family of search engines, you may want to consider Site Match. However, it can certainly get expensive if you have a number of pages to submit.

4. Do we need software programs or search engine submission services that will submit our pages to thousands of search engines for one "low price"

In a word -- NO!

Weve already learned that the majority of traffic comes from the major search engines. Submitting to the important international or minor engines through a software program like WebPosition Gold 3 http://www.webposition.com/gold.htm is a consideration. But submitting to thousands of search engines, many of which are "free for all" Web sites pure junk, wont benefit your site at all.

Save your money!

5. All of this is fine and good, but what if the site is brand new with no inbound links

Get your site listed in a directory such as Yahoo! Directory http://www.yahoo.com/ or the Open Directory Project http://dmoz.org. Then, spend some time finding a few sites that will agree to put links on their sites to yours.

Are there any vertical search engines and directories in your topic area Visit Search Engine Guide and search through their topical search engine directory: http://www.searchengineguide.com/searchengines.html

So, take the stress-free approach with search engine submissions and . . .

1 Link to all of your important pages from another page on your site.

2 Get inbound links from another site pointing to your site.

2 Let the major engines find your pages on their own.

3 Monitor your progress. If a search engine hasnt indexed one of your pages, make sure to place additional links to that page in the pathway of the spiders.

Important Note: You may be using an SEO company to handle the optimization of your Web pages, including your search engine submissions. Does this mean youre paying too much for those SEO services No. SEO work is extremely complex and time consuming, and a good search engine optimizer is helping to make your online business a success. The purpose of this article is to educate you on search engine submissions in general, since so many people wrongly believe that the acting of submitting pages will get those pages to the top of the search engine rankings.

In Conclusion . . .

So many Web site owners and SEOs make search engine submissions much harder than they have to be. Take a deep breath, direct the spiders through your Web site to make sure they are able to find your Web pages, and relax. Let the search engines do what they do best . . . spider the Web!

About The Author

Robin Nobles is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops, where they teach "hands on" search engine marketing workshops http://www.searchengineworkshops.com in locations across the globe. They also offer Ultra Advanced SEO Symposiums http://www.ultraadvancedsymposium.com for advanced search engine marketers who want to take their learning to a new level. They have opened the first networking community for SEOs called The World Resource Center for Search Engine Marketers http://www.sew-wrc.com and have expanded their workshops to Europe with Search Engine Workshops UK http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk.

robin@searchengineworkshops.com

Without doubt, it is hard to reach top positions in search engines especially If you are not an expert and intend to reach this high rankings with the most frequently used keywords and key phrases like, Internet marketing, home business, Money, money making. In a word, the most relevant keywords and phrases to sites which contain information about the art of making money on the Internet.

Despite of this fact we all, who are involved in Internet Marketing, do our best to reach top positions in search engines, knowing that this is almost a guarantee for getting visitors - for making sales. But to believe that just a top ranking will stay as guaranteed asset for ever, for long time is too optimistic. Top rankings are a very good thing but, you can never have 100% control over your position. Therefore, if one day you reach a top position and visitors begin to flood your site, - keep in mind - your position lays in the hands of the search engines leading personnel.

When I say search engines, I am talking like the most people about the major search engines. Google, Yahoo, MSN.

More than 80% of all searches worldwide occurs through them, which means, your site will get more traffic from Google, Yahoo or MSN as from all the other search engines together. This major search engines, Using their leading position, are creating the "Internet laws", making you a hard time in optimising your pages for high ranking. The page rank, how you know, is calculated through periodically changing algorithms. The sad part is that you never know how the current algorithm works and when it will be changed to a completely other one.Just remember Googles "Florida Update" from October 2003 , when many sites lost their top position and hundreds of thousands of dollars with it, because of a totally new algorithm.

It is a kind of "mission impossible" to create The perfectly optimised site and there is no reason to try to create it since the algorithm can be changed any time - in a funny situation exactly than When your site optimisation is finished. Dont get me wrong I suggest you to optimise your site for top rankings as good as you can. What I mean here is that you will never get it perfect, because of the dynamic of algorithms used by search engines. According to Google: "PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms."

http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html

If you read carefully the directives on the search engine webmasters pages, you can learn about the criteria requested from a site to correspond their listing guidelines, however there it is almost nothing to find about how to optimise a site for high ranking. See too. http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/appropriate.html

This information remains for some reasons hidden and you can find it only in webmaster forums like http://www.webmasterworld.com, different marketing courses or newsletters. Yes it is possible to optimise your site and reach high rankings - Thats why SEO companies survive and make huge money, and thats why they can keep their pages in top positions.

There are some general rules to keep, when creating a website, to reach almost guaranteed good rankings in all search engines - If… and I want to accentuate, If you have a large number of incoming links to your Website from "authority" sites. This are generally high ranking sites. http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html

Because of the huge competition you can not reach top rankings with more than 1-3 keywords or phrases per page, thats why the best solution is to optimise every single page for one or two keywordsphrases as follows: Your main keywords should be contained in: The title tag: Take care how you formulate this first sentence because it is human readable. The line on the very top of the screen on blue background Your headline tag H1 tag if you wish should contain the same keywords. Your sale copy: should begin with this keywords and in your first three sentences you should repeat this keywords 3 more times. This Keywords should make 3% to 11% of all the other keywords on this page.

To learn the details about this points and much more about search engine optimisation I recommend two Excellent sources.

http://www.trafficsecrets.com/lharmath/nov_blogger and http://selfpromotion.com/CF=Llando

As I have mentioned incoming links are more important as keyword optimization. The simplest way to get hundreds of incoming links to your site is to contact 10-20 webmasters daily owners of relative sites to yours With your link exchange request. You can also automate your link exchange using automation software like Arelis. http://www.Axandra.com/go.to/Llando

And there it is a neat not widely known trick which I want to talk about shortly in this article. The method of creating multiple keyword optimised pages which direct to your sales page containing your main or even other content.

How you can do this

The trick is exactly what I was talking about above. Create optimised web pages with great content for many hundreds of keywords. - One page for each keyword.

Since on The Internet everything is a numbers game, It is obvious, the more pages you have listed In search engines the more visitors you will receive.

Search engines are warning you not to put up doorway pages which sole propose is to redirect traffic to another site. Optimising one page of your site for one keyword Is something totally else as a doorway page. You can use the approximately same, high value content, optimised for many different keywords.

The neat part is that you can create this pages with a push of a button If you use the right software. You link from your main site to this pages and your job is done. The search engine spiders will follow your outgoing links and will find your pages. Within three months Your visitors will crash down your server.

Ok this is a joke, but the truth is the number of your visitors will grow to many thousands a month. This is not a joke.

My site http://www.marketingadvices.com/nov. according to Alexa ranking came up from position 700 thousand some to 160 thousand within three months. You can check this easily if you go to http://www.alexa.com

If you are curious how this programs are working just go to: http://marketingadvices.com/trafficequalizer.com and http://marketingadvices.com/rssequalizer.com

As final conclusion, I would say free traffic from search engines Is a very good thing and It is worth to spend some hours with the optimisation of your website. Even if you pay a SEO company to optimise your site can be worth your expenses if you own a great selling products.

Search engines will definitely make your life always harder. You can never be sure that your site will stay on the same position tomorrow as today. No problem if you have thousands of pages but dont forget, everything can change very fast. So my personal meaning is you can optimise your site and stay in top positions but never build your life around this single Asset.

About The Author

Llando Ford Started The M.A.Newsletter with the goal to report about the latest Internet marketing news. To get instantly your Free bonus send an email to: mailto:marketingadvices@getresponse.comsubject=SUBSCRIBE&cc=llando@marketingadvices.com.

Llando@marketingadvices.com

It is no secret that search engines are the number one traffic generating method for driving visitors to the different web sites. Search engines are very useful in helping people find the relevant information they seek on the Internet. The major search engines develop and maintain their own gigantic database of web sites that can be searched by a user typing in a keyword or keyword phrase in the search box.

Search engine optimization SEO is the process of studying the search engines in an effort to determine how to get your web site to rank high on user searches. Depending on the statistical information reviewed, search engines account for over 80% of the visitor traffic to web sites.

Within the search engine category, Google accounts for most of the search engine traffic. The other top search engines include but are not limited to: Yahoo, AOL Search, Overture, AllTheWeb, MSN Search, WiseNut, HotBot, Teoma, and Ask Jeeves. You can register your web site with the various search engines but it is a demanding process and takes time.

Visitor traffic from the search engines can be obtained through organic natural or pay-per-click PPC search results. The non-paid organic search results are the list of web sites generally 10 per page returned when a user searches on a specific keyword or keyword phrase. Keyword is the word or phrase that is typed into the search engines search box. The PPC items are the paid advertisements for a specific keyword or keyword phrase and listed on the same page as the organic search results.

You are telling the search engines what your web site is about when you employ SEO tactics. Search engine optimization involves the layout of your web page so that it is very easy to navigate and read. In addition, you must skillfully place your keywords in your web page in a manner that conveys the information that is being searched for by your visitor. The keywords should be placed in the Title tag, Meta Description tag and at the beginning of the Body tag sections. Search engines look for relevant and original content in your web page that is relative to the your site’s keyword theme.

Search engines find out about your web site through your submission to the search engine or through a link to your site from another web site that has already been indexed. The search engine uses a spider i.e., a computer program to index i.e., classify and include in the search engine database your individual web site pages. The spider is often referred to as a crawler. These spiders follow links from one site to another site and create an index of information for inclusion in the search engine database on each web page they visit. The spider is more likely to index a static HTML web page higher than one generated dynamically.

You can make your web page more search engine friendly by reducing or eliminating any flash animation or graphics in your home page. Design each page of your web site so that the keyword or keyword phrase information being searched for by your visitors can be easily found. You need to convey the central message or theme of your web page to your visitors.

In addition, your web site should have a site map. A site map displays a visual model of the pages within your web site. It enables your visitors to navigate through your web site that has more than one page. Each listing in your site map should be an active link to enable your visitor to click on the link and move directly to that specific section of your web site.

It will take a lot of concentrated work to achieve a top ranking in any of the search engines. Rank is the position in the search engine results page that a web site appears when someone searches for a specific keyword or keyword phrase. The typical search engine results page has 10 positions for web sites returned as the result of the users search.

--

Copyright C 2004 F. Terrence Markle – All Rights Reserved

Get my F.R.E.E multi-part series on generating targeted and quality traffic to your web site. http://www.QuikSystems.com/WST/TrafficSeries.htm Get my F.R.E.E newsletter on building your own targeted mailing list: http://www.QuikSystems.com/EzineSub.htm

About The Author

Copyright C 2004 – F. Terrence Markle has worked for over 20 years with public and private companies. He has an MBA in marketing and finance. He has been involved with Internet-related businesses for over 3 years. His primary focus is the marketing of affiliate programs.

tmarkle@quiksystems.com

As you are building your site or getting your site built, you need to do as much as you can to ensure higher rankings in the search engines. There are a variety of little tips and techniques you can use to do this.

Meta tags & keywords - Meta tags are included in the section of your site and are read by the search engines. The two most important kind are "description" and "keywords" Description is a description of the content of your site and keywords is a list of keywords relevant to the page.

Research what people are searching for and use those searches relevant to your site in your meta tags. A great little keyword search tool is available here: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Find more great info on meta tags here: http://www.metamend.com/search-engines-meta-tags.html

Site content- Make sure you match your site content with your meta tags. Also, keep updating your site content. Search engines love new content. Try adding articles to your site or doing a blog. Do NOT let your site get old and stale!

Blogging - A blog is basically a journal that is posted on a web site. A person who blogs is a blogger. Blogs are usually updated daily or every other day. Blogs can be used on personal or business websites. Blogs can draw a lot of targeted traffic to your site. You can create your own blog here: http://www.blogger.com/start

Site map - A site map is simply a page that lists all the links on your site. This makes it easy for the search engines to spider your site. A site map page is a good navigational tool for your visitors as well. It contains links to all important pages of your web site and it gives your visitors an overview of your web site structure all in one page. Take a look at these well designed site maps. http://www.ireland.com/about/map/ http://www.google.com/sitemap.html

Links page - Having a quality reciprocal links page can benefit your site in several ways. First of all, it gets your site listed in more places on the net which can bring you more traffic. More and more major search engines will rank your pages higher when there are more links to your site. Also, quality links can help the spiders find you more easily each week, therefore keeping you indexed longer and dropped less frequently. Take a look here for an example of a link exchange page. http://www.seymourproducts.com/exchange/index.shtml

Articles - Not only do you want to post relevant articles on your site, but writing and submitting them to other sites will help you as well. Posting new articles on your site will keep your content fresh and new so the spiders like your site. It will also keep your visitors coming back for more.

Writing and submitting articles can increase your link popularity and bring you more traffic as well as helping your search engine ranking. A few places to submit your articles is listed below: http://webmarketingspecialists.com/articlesubmit.html http://wahmteam.com/submissionform.shtml http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com/articles/submit.html http://www.webpronews.com/submit.html http://www.creativehomemaking.com/submit_article.shtml

Using these techniques and others will greatly improve your rankings in the search engines and bring you more targeted traffic which in turn can increase your sales substantially! For more info on search engine tactics, visit http://www.searchengines.com/

© Terri Seymour www.seymourproducts.com

About The Author

Terri Seymour and her husband Terry offer a no-cost, non-MLM home business opportunity. They strive to help you build a successful home business. They also provide a very affordable website building service. Free ecourses, decorating tips, business resources, and much more at: http://www.seymourproducts.com. FREE ecourse at: business-building-ecourse@getresponse.com.

webmaster@seymourproducts.com

From the early days of search engine optimization, keywords and content have always been vital to achieving your goals. Starting back in the days when we used to shove every slightly relevant keyword into our Meta tags, it has been obvious that search engines love text. The more advanced the engines have gotten over the years, the more complex and sophisticated many writers have gotten with their search engine copywriting.

Supposed formulas, saturation levels, and other mysterious concoctions have been developed to help us outsmart the engines. However, what we should have been doing all along was writing for the visitor first and the engines second. Why Because creating a site thats loved by visitors is a prime factor in linking, ranking, and marketing as a whole. As the engines make great strides with more personalized and efficient searches such as semantic search natural search engine optimization writing is even more important.

Rather than just indexing the copy on your site, engines are learning to "understand" what a page is about. The ironic thing is, as the search engines get more complex the "formula" for SEO copywriting is actually getting more simple.

Write Naturally

In the future, search engines will be looking for Web pages that reflect a natural tone with the copy. Is it obvious that keyphrases are being shoved in wherever possible Does every headline/sub-head, image tag, and comment tag have a keyphrase included Does the copy sound fake, unnatural, and stiff If so, then spiders and bots will recognize it and possibly flag it as something to be wary of.

Take a look at this lovely piece of copy I found while surfing just the other day. Ive replaced the keyphrases used in the original copy with the word "wherever" so as not to embarrass the site owner.

Wherever Holiday Rentals

Holiday rentals in Wherever for holidays in Wherever

Wherever holiday rentals directly from the owners. Rent a holiday villa in Wherever or perhaps a 2-6 bedroom apartment in Wherever. Wherever vacation rentals for holidays in Wherever are easily located by searching the Wherever Holiday website. Wherever Holiday Rentals offer holiday apartments in Wherever and holiday villas.

Find accommodation in Wherever by clicking on the Wherever map or the active links. You will then see holiday rental apartments, villas and townhouses in stunning Wherever accommodation.

Lets suppose someone walked into your travel agency and asked for help. You would most likely ask what they were looking for. They would reply, "Holiday rentals in Wherever. What can you show me" Would you honestly take off on the spiel above Can you see yourself talking to a real client face-to-face and saying, "We offer Wherever holiday rentals in Wherever and can find you many apartments, villas, and houses in Wherever" I dont think so.

Tips for Writing In Natural Language

1 Vary your keywords/phrases. For example, if a keyphrase you particularly want to target is "14k gold jewelry" consider also using keyphrases like "14k gold watches" or "gold wedding bands" or others along those lines. This will give you a variety of phrases within your copy.

2 Read it out loud. When you read your copy out loud youll get a better sense of whether it sounds unnatural. If you wouldnt say, "We make 14k gold jewelry and have made 14k gold jewelry for 10 years. If you need 14k gold jewelry just view our catalog" out loud, then dont put it in your copy, either.

3 Break up keyphrases. As searchers get more knowledgeable about finding what they want in the engines, they use longer and longer search queries some of which just dont make any sense. For instance, I recently had to use the phrase "real estate Pittsburg downtown" when writing a page of SEO copy. Since this search string was not easily worked in as that exact phrase, I broke it up. One sentence I used it in said: "When looking for commercial real estate in Pittsburg check the downtown listings first for exceptional locations and prices." The words are still in the same order with minor breaks in between. When you cant use a phrase "as is" this is a very viable alternative.

Keep in mind the direction search engine optimization is taking. The closer you can get to writing in natural language, the better off youll be. It only makes sense to create a site now that will last through the long haul. Especially when that site will have a better chance of favorably appealing to the engines and your visitors.

by Karon Thackston © 2004 http://www.copywritingcourse.com/keyword

About The Author

Karon is author of “How To Increase Keyword Saturation Without Destroying the Flow of Your Copy.” Discover the secrets to creating SEO copy with a perfect balance between keywords and natural language. http://www.copywritingcourse.com/keyword

IF PUBLISHING ON A WEBSITE, USE THIS RESOURCE BOX:

Karon is author of “How To Increase Keyword Saturation Without Destroying the Flow of Your Copy.” Discover the secrets to creating SEO copy with a perfect balance between keywords and natural language with this insightful e-report.

The first meeting I went to for the day was Organic Listing Forum at Search Engine Strategies. Bruce Clay, President of Bruce Clay, LLC and Mike Grehan, CEO of Smart Interactive and Author of Search Engine Marketing: The Essential Best Practice Guide were the speakers. Detlev Johnson, President of Technology, SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, moderated the Forum.

Each speaker gave a presentation for a few minutes and then they went to questions. Here are some of the questions and answers that were given they are not word for word.

Question: Is it okay to use cloaking technology

Answer: Yes as long as it is using the same information from your website. But don’t use it to spam keywords.

Question: Which is better to use when naming files or folders, hyphen or underscore

Answer: All panel members recommended using hyphens not underscores. They said search engines have confirmed that they recognize hyphens as spaces. Underscores are not seen as spaces, the words will be joined to form one word.

Question: How many hyphens are to many hyphens

Answer: You shouldn’t use more than 2-3. Preferable you shouldn’t use more than 2. Bruce Clay mentioned that he rarely uses them except for words that need to be separated, his example was mensexchange, which he used a hyphen like this mens-exchange. so nobody would see it as men sex change.

Question: What type of redirect should I use

Answer: 301 is the only good redirect.

Question: Can older domains be in the sandbox Sandbox: newer sites may face the sandbox, which means they are delayed on showing up in the search engine results.

Answer: Domains well-established or older domains do not usually have sandbox.

Tanya’s Tips:

1. For those who have many older domains that you started, but never finished, these would be good domains to use now. If you had some content and it was indexed, it is better than buying a new domain.

2. Preplan your sites. Put as much basic information on a new domain as soon as you can. Let it get indexed, build a few links and then move on to something else. Go back to it in 3-6 months and finish it off and link build some more.

Question: What is the longest filename you should use

Answer: 12 characters for filenames.

Question: Should I use keyword Meta tags

Answer: Yahoo still uses keyword Meta tags.

Notes: The following sites were mentioned during this session:

1. IP-Delivery.com, which was mentioned during discussions about domain hijackings.

2. cmsmatrix.com, which was mentioned during discussions on CMS systems, were able to be spidered. This site will let you know if your CMS can be spidered.

About The Author

Tanya Martin, Director of Internet Marketing at Over The Mark, LLC - http://www.overthemark.com has been involved in Internet Marketing for 7 years and who publishes a daily seo blog at http://www.overthemark.com/seoblog/ and has a Online Forum at http://www.dmof.com

tanya@overthemark.com

The next session that I enjoyed was Shopping Search Tatics at Search Engine Strategies. Chris Bowler, Media Director and Search Practice Lead at Itraffic.com, Laura Thieme, President and Founder of Bizresearch and Craig Snyder EVP of Marchex were the speakers. Detlev Johnson, President of Technology, SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, moderated the Forum.

I have chosen to go over Mr. Bowler’s part of the session. This was by far one of the best speakers I had heard all day. Probably because it wasn’t as much theory, it was based on a client case. He gave detailed enough facts that you could understand and grasp the shopping engines potential.

Chris Bowler went over a client case “Barrie Pace”. A little about Barrie Pace: Barrie Pace offers women’s designer and exclusive career, business-casual, and special occasion fashions Sold $23+ Million in apparel online in FY2004

Barrie Pace uses customer email, search engines, online advertising/direct marketing and shopping engines to obtain sales.

Mr. Bowler then went over why you should use shopping engines. This is because you are placing the products in front of shoppers that are already transacting. He also provided this chart on shopping engines:

http://www.tanyamartin.com/shopping-engines-traffic.jpg

Source: Nielsen Netratings, October 2004

So far a pretty convincing case to why you should use shopping engines to promote your products.

Mr. Bowler then discussed the shopping engines that Barrie Pace partnered with. These were Amazon, Altura/Catalog City, Froogle, AOL Shopping and Shopping.com.

Next he went over some tips for the shopping engine newbie, these were: Determine your financials Crawl, Walk, Run! Shopping Programs do not run themselves Adjusting your feed is critical a feed is a data file with your product details, product name, prices, product images all in one file, usually line by line .txt file Store Feedback is invaluable

Determining your financials questions you should ask yourself and analyze:

What’s your overall budget for shopping

For Click-over Shopping Engines pay per click engines: What’s an allowable bid price: By brand By product

For Transactional Shopping Engines engines that you pay per sale or percentage: What’s an allowable commission Including returns Without returns How will returns be handled

During the Crawl, Walk, Run part of the presentation, Mr. Bowler suggested you start with something easy to setup. Shopping.com he said were the easiest to setup, price and manage. Mr. Bowler stated if you can produce a feed quickly that setup could occur in a few weeks.

Mr. Bowler also suggested that Amazon was one of the hardest to setup. They require 29 forms to be filled out before you can begin. He also said it took 2-3 months to setup with Amazon.

Shopping engines do not run themselves Mr. Bowler now went over this giving more details, like if you choose 4-5 shopping engines to partner with it will take 1-2 hours of staff time a day. This is ongoing. Staff in charge of the shopping engines will have to daily go over the following: Monitor feed upload and product display Pull-down Store reviews / feedback Resolve customer problems Track Sales, Fulfillment, Returns

These shopping engines will all need to be monitored and adjustments will need to be made. He gave an example of some items using the same images. When you build a shopping site you can have several choices for size, color, etc. In shopping engines they list the sizes, colors, etc separately. So you have the same image for several items.

Mr. Bowler also provided a snapshot of feedback on Amazon. He stated feedback is invaluable and someone should be reviewing feedback often.

Mr. Bowler ended by giving some tips for succeeding: Track results at the product level Take advantage of operational and customer service emails Shopping sites will buy your brand keywords in search – beware! Advertising – more visibility Partner with the newer engines

Notes: The following is a list of shopping engines that were mentioned during this session: Yahoo Shopping Shopping.com Amazon.com MSN Shopping Froogle MySimon Nextag Dealtime PriceGrabber.com AOL Shopping Altura InStore

Also mentioned were:

Bizrate.com and Resellerratings.com

About The Author

Tanya Martin, Director of Internet Marketing at Over The Mark, LLC - http://www.overthemark.com has been involved in Internet Marketing for 7 years and who publishes a daily seo blog at http://www.overthemark.com/seoblog/ and has a Online Forum at http://www.dmof.com

tanya@overthemark.com

According to research done by Elizabeth Sproles and George Sproles 1990 in the Journal of Consumer Affairs, there is a significant link between peoples learning styles and their “consumer styles”.

The perfectionist consumer style, which describes a consumer that searches carefully and systematically for the best quality in products tend to learn through serious, analysis and through both active and observation oriented learning. These types of consumers are highly goal oriented.

The brand conscious, price equals quality consumer tends to be oriented toward buying the more expensive, well known brands tend to find choosing known brands an expedient strategy that replaces thinking and learning in their consumer choices.

The novelty and fashion conscious consumer seems to line new and innovative products and gains excitement from seeking out new things. This consumer tends to not be concerned with the implications or consequences of purchasing new or innovative products and services.

The recreational shopping consumer finds shopping a pleasant activity and engages in it because it’s fun. This consumer engages in shopping as a social experience or because they like to be involved in their shopping.

The price value consumer tends to focus on sales and lower prices balanced against quality. This consumer tends to focus on active, fact acquisition. This consumer tends to shop the market in-depth and do many comparisons to find the proper balance of low price and quality.

The impulsive consumer buys at the spur of the moment and are unconcerned with how much is spent. This consumer does not want to be bothered with new information or learning about products or services..

The confused-by-overchoice consumer perceives too many brands and stores and experiences information overload in the market. This person is overly detailed and fact oriented in their consumer process and becomes mentally overloaded, especially in a complex multichoice market.

The habitual, brand loyal consumer repetitively chooses the same brands and stores. This consumer engages in a serious learning process to find products and services that provide them with positive experiences and then stick with them.

Research Implications

Know thy consumer. This research indicates how important it is to develop a psychological profile of your ideal consumer. You need to know what consumer frequents your market and from this you can begin to develop, first intuitively, then through ongoing research, a profile of your target customer’s consumer style.

For instance if you sell your product or service over the internet you can be pretty sure that you are marketing to people who operate out of a limited number of consumer styles such as the perfectionistic; the novelty/fashion; and

the price conscious consumers. These are all information oriented consumers who engage in seeking information before they purchase.

If you are marketing to other businesses then you’re once again probably going to need to market with an orientation to providing sound information coupled with powerful and relevant benefits because you’ll be dealing with perfectionist and price conscious consumers.

Also, realize that with this information you can work to turn people from one style to another. For instance you may be able to convert a price conscious consumer to one who is brand loyal by providing consistent quality for a lower price. You may be able to convert the confused-by-overchoice consumer into a brand loyal consumer by providing simple, straight forward information combined with quality that cuts through the information overload.

Conclusions

Study your target market and actively work to know how they think and this will open up new marketing creatives that will better target their particular consumer style. This should prove to increase your bottom line if done thoughtfully and consistently.

Sproles, Elizabeth & Sproles, George 1990. Consumer Decision-Making Styles as a Function of Individual Learning Styles. The Journal of Consumer Affairs. Vol. 24. Issue 1.

About The Author

Darrin F. Coe, MA holds a master’s degree in professional psychology and specializes in consumer thinking. His latest report, “The Internet Consumer Exposed” is packed with eye-opening insights about the psychology of the internet consumer at http://consumer-thinking.com/exposed1.

coe@ris.net

Common mistakes and misconceptions about search optimization and marketing

There is so much misinformation floating through the internet regarding search engine marketing and optimization that it’s important to shed some light on a few common errors and misconceptions. The following list highlights some of the most critical issues involved in determining the success or failure of a web site’s search engine optimization and marketing strategies.

1. Lack of "Search Friendly" Content.

Every week I review web sites with no real search engine indexable content. Web pages composed mostly of graphics, flash and other bells and whistle are commonly over-looked by the search engines. Search engines determine what content is of value per web page based on the text used on that page. A truly optimized site should contain at least 200 words of keyword-dense text. There is some debate among experts on exactly how many words should be used, but generally 200 words will suffice. As a point of reference this paragraph contains about 200 words. It is equally important for text content to contain keywords that match the page titles. For example, a site selling peanut butter owned by a company called "ACME Foods" might have a title of "Acme Foods, Inc. Wholesale Food Products". We have to consider how many people are likely to search for the term "Acme Foods, Inc. Wholesale Food Products" it is much more likely that people will search for the term "peanut butter". Knowing this, we can say with confidence that it would be a wiser choice to title a page, "Peanut Butter, ACME Foods" and the page content should reflect this same keyword strategy.

2. Insufficient Link Popularity.

Search engines make every attempt to qualify the results which are displayed in search results. One of the ways that they do this is by tracking the number and quality of the incoming links to a web site. A site with a large number of incoming links from quality sites is given a higher ranking in search results. This is an important consideration that is sometimes over-looked by those attempting to market web sites. Services that promise to link your site to thousands of other sites are far from productive; in fact they can sometimes do more harm than good. Most search engines these days consider services like this to be spam, so called "link farming" and often give sites with these types of links a low ranking or drop them all-together from the search results. Incoming links to a site that compliment it and are relevant to the site contents are golden and can greatly boost a sites ranking. Googles page ranking system is a good example. A site with a page rank of 1 if given a link from a site with a page rank of 8 can see its page rank boost to 4! Link popularity is one of the most time consuming and difficult aspects of search engine optimization. Its no wonder that many of the search engines give so much importance to this web site measurement.

3. Lack of Keyword Research And Updates

So, you have a web site. Do you know what pages in your web site are generating the most interest Do you know what terms people are searching for that result in them finding your site Probably not. Let’s use the peanut butter analogy again. You own a web site that sells peanut butter. You spend some money on paid search advertising, logically; you assume that the key phrase "peanut butter" is a prime candidate to target. What happens usually one of two things, one, the term peanut butter is such a popular search term that thirty million other web sites are competing for the same key phrase. Two, the term peanut butter is so unpopular that it’s unlikely that its searched for more than once in this lifetime. Proper keyword research can solve these problems. Let’s say for the sake of argument that keyword research is performed and that it is determined that a significant number of people are searching for "organic peanut butter". It just so happens that our peanut butter company manufactures a whole line of organic, all natural peanut butter. We have discovered a niche. The right amount of people searching for the specific product that we want to sell. Its the perfect match. So, what must be done to capitalize on our findings First we optimize our web pages for our target keyword, we change the title, and the content so that they include the term "organic peanut butter", then we scrap all of the paid search advertising that wasnt working and focus on targeting our "organic peanut butter" market. The point is, successful search engine marketing relies on constant research and updates the internet is fluid and evolving. What works today might not work tomorrow, we have to be able to identify strengths and weaknesses in our internet marketing campaigns and must be prepared to research, update and adapt.

4. Designing First, Optimizing Later

I have seen this mistake repeated hundreds of times. Even experienced web designers fail to consider the results of design decisions on search optimization until it’s too late. What is the point of spending thousands of dollars for a well "designed" web site if nobody ever sees it Consult a search engine specialist early in the design process. Even if your web site marketing strategy relies heavily on paid search advertising a consultation with a professional optimization expert may expose flaws in your sites layout. Points in the flow of information that tend to cause users to lose interest or become confused may become apparent, better to address these issues early on.

5. Relying Too Heavily On Paid Search Advertising

This is a mistake made by Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike. The fact is that most businesses, small and large arent getting it right.

The rationale is that since search advertising can be purchased it isnt necessary to focus on search optimization techniques. On the surface this might make some sense, you can buy certain keyword phrases that people are searching for, so why bother optimizing your site for the search engines For a company with a huge internet advertising budget this means spending huge amounts of money to drive traffic to their sites, when, if their site had been properly optimized from the beginning, these costs might be half as much for the same amount of viewers. For many smaller businesses trying to compete in the internet marketplace simply becomes overwhelming. While paid search advertising is a highly effective means of targeting an audience, organic search optimization greatly increases the chances of success for any web site. Make sure that the site you are advertising is one that people can find easily without the assistance of a paid search campaign.

6. Not Supporting the Conversion Process

A few weeks ago my wife decided that she wanted to buy some Australian made baby clothes that we cant find here in the states. So being the internet savvy father to be, I decided to have a look on the internet for the particular brand she was interested in. I surf to a search engine and type in the brand name. A few seconds later Im greeted with a list of web sites that supposedly have what Im looking for. I click on the first site in the list. I find myself at the site of a clothing importer based out of California. There are links to several categories of clothing, none of which seem to have anything to do with babies, eventually after a lot of searching I find a link on the childrens clothing page for infant garments. The infant garments page has a few images of clothing but not the brand Im looking for. I look to see if there is way to search for clothing by brand name. There isnt. I look to see if there is a list somewhere on the site of brand names carried by this distributor. There isnt. I look to see if there is a toll free number to call. There isnt. The internet optimization part of my brain is boiling by this point, so to add insult to injury I go back to the childrens garments section of the site. I click on a link to purchase a bright green jacket. I’m confronted with a page that is requiring me to fill in a bunch of personal details. Ok, so I fill in the details and click submit. Now I find myself back at the bright green jacket page. Apparently now Im qualified to purchase something. I click the "check out" button. The web page goes blank. I know that this is the result of bad programming. I know whats going to happen next. "Error 404 page not found". Has this type of thing happened to you If you have ever tried to purchase something on the internet, Im sure it has. This is an illustration of a web site that is well ranked in the search engines but has not taken the time to create a site that is designed for its users. I was forced to hunt through the web site to try and find what I was looking for. The flow of information was counter-intuitive. There was no online support. All-in-all the whole site was a joke. I would be surprised to learn that the site in question made any sales at all, ever. There were several points in this online experience that I felt like giving up. In the industry this is known as ”abandonment", This is a critical point in what is known as the "conversion process", the act of turning web site viewers into online purchasers. This is an issue that should never be underestimated. In fact it is the number one factor that determines a web sites success or failure. A web site with a million dollar marketing budget and millions of visitors will not succeed unless it serves to understand its user’s needs and anticipate its viewer’s questions.

7. Graphics Used For Text Links.

Web designers often use graphics to represent a link in a web site. There are many reasons for this choice. Unfortunately for web designers, the major internet browsers display web pages in different ways. Since fonts display differently on individual computers and in different browsers, it is a much simpler proposition for designers to create graphic links than it is to attempt to create cross-browser text links. The downside to this work-around is that search engines have no idea if a graphic link relates to a specific web page or a link to download the latest Britney Spears MP3. For search engines to understand what a link is truly representing, they need to find words in plain, good old fashioned text. If a web site must use graphics for navigation it is important to include a set of plain text links somewhere on the web page, usually at the bottom of the page.

8. Use of Frames.

Search engines have a hard time indexing sites that are created in frames. Framed sites use several html files to display one page. Search engines are often confused by the frames method of creating web sites, usually only indexing the first html file within the framPages that arent indexed will never show up in search engine results. Also, many people that use the internet regularly for research and purchases, so called "power users", tend to avoid sites built with frames, especially those sites which require the user to scroll content in separate frames. Simply put, frames are bad.

9. Splash Pages.

Entry pages that instruct the user to "Enter", usually decorated with a large graphic or a flash animation. The index page of a web site is the one that search engines read first. More often than not the only readable content on this type of page is a link that says, “skip intro" Splash pages lack indexable content, usually contain no links and often contain a "redirect" to the real home page. Search engines do not like redirects, they want the real thing. Avoid splash pages unless you arent serious about being found by search engines.

10. Submitting To 10,000 Search Engines

I sometimes have a difficult time believing that these services are still making money, more importantly that people still think that they work. The fact is that a handful of search engines account for about 90% of all the web traffic generated and the rest comes from people typing in a web sites URL indirectly into their browsers address bar. The amount of viewers generated from these Mega-Search Submittal services is so negligible that its hardly worth consideration. Dont waste your time or your money.

11. Not Clearly Defining Action Points

Another mistake that is repeated quite is often is the failure to clearly define what the objectives of a web site are. What are the main goals of a site Who will the primary audience be What actions are desired of the site’s visitors If these questions aren’t answered prior to designing a site they will reflect a poor user experience in the final result. Action points or calls to action are a terminology handed down from the traditional marketing world. They serve to define a desired action and are often supported by persuasive sales copy. Though the basic concepts are the same as traditional marketing, calls to action can take many different forms on the internet. Often they appear as links or as part of a shopping cart. The nature of a web site determines its type of action point. The most important thing to consider is that without them, viewers have little or no idea what the purpose of your site is. Imagine an infomercial running a half hour long advertisement on television, yet the commentator says nothing during the whole ad, just stands there holding a cardboard box, you are left trying to guess what’s inside, the advertisement offers no explanations or means of contacting the company involved. Pointless isn’t it This is exactly what a web site without clearly defined points of action accomplishes; nothing. It’s an exercise in futility.

About The Author

Jeff Palmer is a search engine optimization specialist and senior interactive designer for Openvision an Internet marketing company located in Hilton Head Island South Carolina.

www.openvision.com

email - succeed@openvision.com

jeff@openvision.com

What it is and why it’s so important.

Search engine optimization can be broken down into two separate yet intertwined categories. Non-organic or paid search optimization and organic, or unpaid search optimization. Paid search advertising relies on purchased search phrases to drive visitors to a website, while organic search optimization focuses on developing web sites that are naturally search engine friendly and appear in the unpaid or "organic" search engine results pages. SERPS

Successful organic optimization combines technical know-how with persuasive marketing.

Organically optimized web sites contain content that visitors find informative and relevant to their searches. Content is further optimized for search engines by incorporating relevant key phrases or words into the sites literature.

Organic optimization is holistic in approach. Every aspect of a web site is analysed for its level of search friendliness. Aspects like the sites title, meta-tags, editorial copy, structure and design, usability and function are all taken into consideration. These aspects and many others are equally considered when optimizing a web site. There are, however four main points of interest:

1. Key Phrases:

One of the first steps in organic optimization is determining which key phrases are to be targeted. This is determined by researching which words or phrases a target audience is most likely to search for. These target keywords are then incorporated into the title, description and content of a web site.

It is important to note that the overuse of keywords in a web site can result in a search engine’s indexing software to considering a site as abusing or spamming the search engine and can result in that site being removed from the search index.

Generally a key word should appear five to eight times within a site’s editorial content and content should consist of between 200 and 400 words.

2. Site Structure

Search engines are somewhat limited in the way they can index a web site. Search engine robots or spiders are chiefly concerned with determining two things, what is this web site all about and where should this site show up in the search