Articles Assembler

by: Gobala Krishnan
Copyright 2005 Gobala Krishnan

Probably the most exciting company to not only survive, but come out strong out of the dot-com crash of the late 90’s is Google Inc (http://www.google.com). Having started out small as a company operated in the garage of a friend and employing a staff of three, Google’s meteoric rise to a top name on the Internet is not really that perplexing when we analyze the core strengths and policies of this company.

I am a super-fan of Google. I am also a fan of studying success so that I can learn from it. Here are a few key points that you, as a home based business entrepreneur, can learn from Google:

1) Capital Isn’t Everything

It may be hard for the newcomer to the home based business scene to swallow this fact. After all, more capital investment would mean more money to spend on advertising and building a home business. Its tempting to think how your business would be right now if you had, say $100,000 to start with, instead of the meager $1000 you scrambled to get from selling things around your home.

But here’s one thing more important than capital - ingenuity. Ingenuity involves making the best of the resources available to you, making every advertising dollar count, and treating every customer or prospect invaluable to your business.

Capital in the wrong hands, in the hands of an inexperienced entrepreneur or marketer, is just a waste of money. Ingenuity, on the other hand, can turn a $1000 capital into a thriving business. And yes, when you get the ingenuity part right, then whatever extra capital you get would be worth so much more.

2) Differentiate and Win - Think Outside the Box

Innovation, ability to think outside the box and a willingness to test ideas and make mistakes is the trademark of any truly successful company, especially in Google’s case. Recently when Google’s Gmail (http://www.gmail.com) was launched, many ISPs and email providers were scrambling to offer more space to their free email accounts, simply because Google offered 1G of space. What they didn’t get, however, was that Gmail was more that just about space.

So how did Google differentiate? They turned what would otherwise been just another email service into something much more. It is, as any user would be able to testify, the best way to store, organize and find information contained in emails. Keeping track of business responses and follow-ups is a breeze with Gmail. Try it yourself if you cannot believe that statement.

Many home based business entrepreneurs, especially the ones involved in network marketing, shiver at the word “saturated”. In a network marketing environment it may dawn upon every person, at one point or another, that there are many others with products and opportunities that are similar to theirs, and the products that they are expected to sell may be in the highly competitive industries. I felt that way once too, but here’s the real question - what can you offer?

Not too long ago a friend of mine, after completing her course on cosmetics, offered free facials and beauty consulting to promote cosmetic products sold by her network marketing company. By doing things most people were not doing at that time, she simple blew the competition away.

So what can you contribute to your home based business to make it different, to make it stand out from the crowd?
3) Give Your Customers Exactly What They Want

The success of Google’s AdWords (http://adwords.google.com) and AdSense (http://adsense.google.com) is due to this simple fact - they gave advertisers exactly what they wanted. Marketers wanted a quick, results based, and dynamic advertising tool, and they got Adwords. Website owners wanted more advertising revenue, but did not want the hassle of maintaining it over the hundreds of pages that they have, and they got Adsense.

Its a pretty simple strategy - understand what your customers want and give it to them!

My ex-sponsor in my old network marketing company used to say that in order for me to move their nutritional supplements, I had to teach people that supplements can prevent many hazardous illnesses. Prevention is better than cure. But here’s what I learned in a few years - the majority of people are looking for cures, not prevention. Most of the people I met in Malaysia are looking for a cure to sleeping disorders, a cure for fatigue, a cure for arthritis, and so on.

Sure, it may be a noble deed to educate people about prevention, but the world does not always work that way. The majority of people look for a home based business only when they get retrenched, when they run out of savings, or when they retire. So why not make your recruitment efforts match this need? Why not develop your niche market based on this category of people?

Instead of teaching them about residual income and the power of duplication which they are not interested in, wouldn’t your message be more effective if you taught them how to earn a comfortable retirement income, or how to replace their current income instead?

The point is this - as a home based entrepreneur you must understand your target market’s need, and serve them well. You should focus on being the best in providing the cure, not the best in preaching about the prevention. Focus on customer needs, and they will flock to you.

4) Are You Having Fun?

Everything about Google spells fun. But don’t get me wrong. They are probably the most innovative company at the moment.

The fact that they can present their complicated technology in such a simple way to end-users is an act that every company can envy. Have you ever heard anyone complain about Google search being too complicated to use? Yet as an Internet marketer I can go crazy trying to understand the complexity behind the simple white page and squiggly logo.

Leave the complexity of a home based or network marketing business behind the scenes. Teach people how to have fun, while achieving goals and building their business. Show them that you are having fun yourself, and they will buy, they will join, or at least tell someone else about you, and your exciting business.

When you’re having fun, it will not seem like work at all. Everyone could use a little fun in their lives, don’t you think?

5) Focus on Your Core Competency

Yes, this is another phrase that is thrown around in the business world, but how many entrepreneurs actually practice it? As a home based entrepreneur, you may find the need to explore other sources of income. There’s nothing wrong in that, but here’s the catch - don’t go where the money is, especially if it’s not related to what you’re doing.

Many people tend to find other sources of income that is totally unrelated to their main home business. As a result of that, they become an expert in nothing, and they become the best in nothing. If you make custom furniture at home, why take a job at a fast food chain to make ends meet, when you can explore other ways to make money out of your core competency? Having woodworking workshops, writing a ‘how to’ book on woodworking, or even a sales job at a furniture outlet can make good sources of additional revenue, while building your name and expertise on your core competency itself.

Starting out as a search engine, Google pretty much maintained their core competency until today. When they explore other sources of revenue or develop new products, you can be pretty sure it’s related to search technology. And the undisputed result of that is that there is simply no other better alternative when it comes to search and information retrieval.

Therefore, we have much to learn from the success story of Google. Just as much as the age old story of entrepreneurs who drop out of school, and go on to develop multi-million dollar businesses armed with nothing more than guts and ingenuity, Google’s success story is inspirational to say the least.

A tale of humble beginnings with extraordinary endings. Maybe that will someday be the story of your life, and your home based business… Read the rest of this entry »

by: Michael Lever
Copyright 2005 Michael Lever

Hi, my name is Michael and I’m about to share an amazing discovery with you.

Don’t bother scrolling down to see the price. There is none. I am giving you this information free. Why? Because as you are about to discover, the strategy I’m going to teach you is dependent on a growing community of participants who partner to derive win-win outcomes. A bit like online dating services, the more members there are the better the results for all. I therefore encourage you to recommend this strategy to relevant friends and colleagues in your circle of contacts.

Before I explain exactly how I got GoogleCash for free, you need to understand the background of what makes this ingenious purchase strategy work.

The strategy is not specific to GoogleCash. I have simply chosen GoogleCash because it is the product in my testimonial. The strategy can be used for any purchase, and you can purchase from any of your favourite online stores that you normally trust to shop at. The benefit is that you will now be subsidised a cash amount so large that it may even surpass the cost of your purchase, making it absolutely free. The fact that you can purchase anywhere is partly what makes the strategy work.

There are three core things you need to understand about the strategy.

Firstly, the websites you are intending to purchase from do not miss out on any payment. You are not breaching any of their agreements, terms or conditions. In fact, from their perspective you’re a 100% normal customer with all the normal privileges. You will even receive a purchase receipt that may contribute to a tax deduction.

Secondly, there are no losers with this strategy. It is 100% legal and does not involve pyramid schemes, purchasing matrix, or anything of that nature. No scams here. Everybody wins.

Thirdly, you are still receiving the product you want direct from the merchant of your choice. So you can expect the same product quality, customer service, and shipping that you are accustomed to. You’re simply getting what you had already decided to purchase at a massive discount.

“So what makes it work?”

The secret ingredient is a process known as ‘customer reciprocation’ facilitated by a ‘customer acquisition exchange’. Customer reciprocation fundamentally relies on the customer acquisition efforts of merchants, primarily through affiliate programs.

“Confused? Don’t worry, I was too.”

Basically, merchants with online stores pay people like you and me sales commission to find them customers. You can join the merchant’s affiliate program generally for free, and commence earning commission as an affiliate marketer immediately. You earn by directing potential customers through a unique web link called a ‘referral URL’. The link identifies you to the merchant so they know that you are the referrer who must be paid commission.

In essence, whenever you are intending to purchase something, there’s an affiliate marketer out there trying to catch your attention and transparently direct you to your chosen merchant through their referral URL. If you purchase something, the affiliate marketer will earn upwards of 50% in commission.

Customer reciprocation is the process of two parties (affiliate marketers) partnering to become each other’s customer. “I’ll be your customer, if you’ll be mine”. When you want to purchase GoogleCash like I did, why not purchase it through an affiliate marketer who is willing to purchase at one of your affiliated merchants?

“Can you see the obvious benefit?”

You will earn an instant commission when your partner purchases from your affiliated merchant. The commission may be more than the cost of GoogleCash or it may be less. But it is beyond doubt an instant subsidy. Your merchants will love you for bringing them a customer, and you’ll have a legally acquired copy of GoogleCash and extra money to use on anything you like.

“So where do you find affiliate marketers ready to shop at your merchant’s online store?”

Affiliate marketers are already seasoned Internet shoppers who’ve overcome the trust hurdle and embraced online purchasing. There are so many around that you need only do a search for anything in Google or MSN to find them fighting over the highest positions in the search results.

The trick is finding someone affiliated with the merchant you intended to shop with, who is intending to purchase from your merchant. (Customer reciprocation).

This is where a “customer acquisition exchange” comes into play. (See the references at the bottom of this article or search for “customer acquisition exchange” in your favourite search engine.).

A customer acquisition exchange allows you to manage your portfolio of referral URLs. I am a member of five different affiliate programs even though I only actively market one of them. Whenever you want to purchase something you simply submit your purchase intention (in the form of the merchants website address) to the customer acquisition exchange.

In my case I wanted to purchase from www.googlecash.com. The system immediately commenced searching for affiliate marketers of GoogleCash who had a purchase intention for one of my merchants. This submission process literally took me less than one minute. I received an email containing my exchange partner’s referral URL and proceeded to click on it and was taken to www.googlecash.com, where I purchased my copy.
When I returned to the customer acquisition exchange I noticed that my portfolio showed a sale at one of my affiliated merchants. “Fantastic”, I thought. My commission report from my affiliated merchant revealed that my exchange partner had indeed purchased something. In fact, the commission I earned from the sale totalled $12 more than what GoogleCash cost me. Meaning I got GoogleCash for free and received $12 for my one-minute effort.

So now that you too know this simple no-risk strategy, I hope that you will use it to your advantage and derive previously unheard of discounts. I trust that you can see the benefit of recommending customer reciprocation to your peers, because as the community grows there will be more participants partnering rather than viciously competing for new customers.

Regards

Read the rest of this entry »

by: Diane Nassy
Despite what you may hear, the Google AdSense program is not for everyone. There are some types of web sites that do poorly no matter how hard the owners try, and there are others that should be doing well but the webmaster simply isn’t putting in the effort to make things happen.
Here are some tips to make AdSense work better for you. If you do them all and you’re still not having any luck, then you just might be running one of those sites that don’t make money

1. Determine if your visitors are “in the mood”

Like I mentioned at the top of this article, some web sites just don’t work with pay-per-click programs.
The best performing sites fall into one of these categories:

• Sites where users go and expect to buy something while they are there. E-commerce sites fit the bill here..
• Sites where users go to find specific information on something that they want to buy now. Music and video review sites, vacation information sites, resume building sites, etc. You don’t have to actually be selling these types of things; your site can just be a mecca for information pertaining to these things. Then, when the visitor comes to read your content, they are more likely to click on your ads.

• Sites where people who have disposable income and a credit card like to visit. This includes sites with money management, investing and lifestyle content.

• Sites that draw a large amount of new users every day. Free coupon sites and “How to” sites are good examples.
• Sites where people go who expect to read ads. Classified ads and shopping comparison sites fit into this category.

2. Make sure that your visitors don’t feel that you just want to grab their money

Give them plenty of relevant and well-written content. If writing isn’t your best skill then hire someone to do it for you. Good content brings steady traffic and steady traffic pays the bills.

3. Play by the rules

Google has some very specific Terms of Service (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) for participating in their AdSense program. Learn those rules and follow them so you don’t lose all of your investment by getting shut out.

4. Use the tools that Google gives you

Google gives you tools for determining the best keywords for your site, measuring ad performance, and setting up different ad “channels” for fine-tuning ad results. These guys and girls are the 800 lb. Gorillas in the Pay-Per-Click market. They didn’t build these tools just to keep their programmers busy. Take advantage of their knowledge for they are very big and you are not!

5. Tweak, fine-tune and then tweak again

You should never be happy with your AdSense performance. If it’s good, then you need to make it great. If it’s great then you need to make it amazing. If it’s amazing then you need to take it to the UPS club. The UPS club? Google sends all checks over $10,000 per month to the webmaster via UPS overnight delivery. Now there’s a club that I wouldn’t mind belonging to.

6. Get more traffic

No matter how much traffic you have, you need more. More eyeballs translate to more clicks. Even if you’re only pulling a 2% click-through. That’s a lot of clicks when you have thousands of visitors each day.

7. Experiment with new keywords

New keywords can bring new ads and new eyeballs along with it. Set up some new pages on your site and experiment with different content. Once you get something that’s working then refer back to Tip # 5.

You can see results in near real time when you use Google’s AdWords. Don’t be afraid to be different. If something that everyone else is doing doesn’t work for you, then invent something that does work and get it on your site. Read the rest of this entry »

by: Tom Worsley
For more than 4 years now I have been modifying my work from home based web sites trying to optimize for the major search engines, Especially Goggle. Today with much disappointment I have come to the realization that search engine traffic alone will not make me rich. Yes my search engine rankings are now worse today than when I started 4 years ago.

Google is constantly changing their algorithms which may or may not benefit your web site. In my case it appears it does not. And then there is Yahoo and MSN search on the horizon. It appears these 2 are beginning to take away valuable customers from Google. Although this is not necassarily a bad thing we now need to optimize for 3 search engines instead of 1. Back in the good old days if you had a number 1 ranking on Google for work from home (the holly grail of search terms) you also had a number 1 on Yahoo and MSN for work from home. Today that is not the case.

I have always been reading other people saying not to place all your chips on Google and expect to make it big time. Today I realize how correct they were. I still optimize for search engines this will never change. But in addition to search engine optimization other advertising methods must be used if you want to make it on the internet big time.

If you have the money paying for placement is not a bad idea. Google has its very popular ad words program which for a price will place your website link in an ad box down the right hand side of the search results. And Yahoo has Overture search results which are placed above the natural search results. But you will need to be in the top 3 for your link to show up because Yahoo only shows 3 sponsored listings on top of the natural listings. You can also use several smaller pay per click engines such as Findwhat, 7Search and Kanoodle to name just a few.

Gaining in popularity and very effective is writing and submitting press releases. If you write a good press release with your target URL in it you could potentially get 1,000’s of visitors from just 1 press release. Press releases are also showing up in the news search results of Yahoo and Google. This can’t hurt your search engine optimization efforts either. The most popular place for information on press releases and getting your release published is http://www.prweb.com . For a small fee of $30 you can guarantee a next day listing and submission of your press release to Yahoo, Google and many other engines.

People have been raving about writing articles for a long time now. Do they work? Of coarse they do. Why do you think I take the time to write articles? It’s difficult at first if you are not into writing, but writing articles can help your search engine rankings if you can incorporate your website URL into the article you are writing and then submit it to as many article directories as you can find. Also make sure you add all your articles to your own web site. This adds content to your site that hopefully you visitors will want to read.

There are literally hundreds more options for you to advertise your website both online and offline that I am not going to get into in this article. The main point is don’t put all your eggs into one basket like I did (GOOGLE) Spread them out advertise everywhere and don’t count on a good search engine ranking. If you do everything else right the search engines will look after your sit for you.

Read the rest of this entry »

by: Kirk Bannerman
By Kirk Bannerman
As a member of several search engine optimization forums, I
have recently noticed (especially since Yahoo recently decided to
try their hand at competing with Google) that the stress level of
many webmasters has gone way up. This applies not only to
webmasters involved in Internet-based home businesses, but to
webmasters in general.

Additionally, it seems that many people that are in the business
of search engine optimization (SEO) are, with good reason, going
completely bonkers. As Google came on the scene in 1998 and
quickly dominated the search business, website optimization
became largely a game of shooting at a single target, namely,
pleasing Google…for all intents and purposes, Google became the
“800 pound gorilla” of the search engine business.

Since the advent of search engines (particularly Google) spawned
the whole SEO business, I guess its only fair that the search
engine industry can once again turn the SEO business on its ear,
and it seems now to be sort of a cat and mouse (not desktop)
relationship that can get really interesting as we move forward.

Not only are there now several viable players (most notably
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask Jeeves) in the search engine
business, but they are all adopting different and frequently
changing algorithms for determining the ranking positions for
websites.

The current game is that webmasters are trying to
figure out how the various search engines perform the rankings
and, on the flip side, the search engines are striving to be
unpredictable to those webmasters and SEO firms.

For those people using websites to promote home-based businesses,
it can be stressful constantly trying to determine “what the
search engines want” and agonizing over every downward
fluctuation in rankings that their website may experience.

Looking forward in time, I think we can expect that rankings will
fluctuate frequently and will not be at all consistent from one
search engine to another. It will be quite common that for a
particular search term a website might suffer a drop in position
ranking for search engine “A” and an increase position ranking
for search engine “B” at essentially the same point in time.

Rather than stressing out over every position ranking “wiggle”, a
better approach might be to just focus on “what do visitors to
my site want?”. The search engines are striving to give their
users a quality (relevant) search experience and if you are
focused in giving visitors to your website what they are looking
for, these paths will meet somewhere down the road.

You can save yourself alot of consternation by focusing upon the
needs of the website visitors you are seeking to attract, rather
than chasing the frequently changing ranking algorithms of
several search engines. Focus on a single target instead of
chasing several moving targets at the same time.

This article pertains to natural searches only, as paid search
engine advertising is a completely different situation.

Read the rest of this entry »

by: Tinu AbayomiPaul
Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

According to Google, Google’s Blog Search is “Google search technology focused on blogs”. It includes search engine results specific to blogs not just in the Blogger.com community, but across the blogosphere at large. You can access it at http://www.blogsearch.google.com/

What the Big Deal Is

A lot of people have probably heard about this extra version of search Google has added and are greeting it with a big yawn, particularly since it’s still in Beta. So what is the big deal, anyway?

The big deal is that the top search engine in the world, which was already paying particular attention to blogs in regular search results, seems to make a subtle statement with the introduction of blog-specific searches.

Blogs are important enough to warrant their own special level of search, and not just as an advanced search option, but in their own search engine.

If search engines are paying attention to blogging that closely, you should be too — if you want better search engine results.

Current fans of blogs will be able to search the freshest results so that they can see what is being discussed right now - information that is often as fresh as the news, and draws upon sources that the media-at-large either doesn’t have ready access to, or interest in.

So to those with even the most obscure interests or hobbies, a blog search powered by a top search engine gives ready access to fresh information on any subject that someone can blog about.

And if a blog doesn’t yet exist on these narrow themes? You can be the one to start the discussion.

Why It Matters to Your Business

Speaking of the media, this is likely to become one of the many tools that a journalist in the know would use in order to research a story, or to find out more information about a company, directly from the people who use its products or services.

Technorati, is at present, arguably a better tool, but it’s just not as well known as the Google brand. If you’re a power searcher, you already know what Technorati is. But the key thing to understand is that most consumers - even B2B consumers - aren’t as deeply involved in the internet.

But even those folks know what Google is.

There’s an even more obvious advantage to this specialized search.

Google Blog search has the unprecedented potential to bring the mainstream surfer into blogging, even more than Yahoo’s RSS Headlines pioneered the start of making RSS mainstream about a year ago. Why?

While many of your clients will fall instantly in love with RSS, it’s more fair to them to present its possibilities in a format that’s easier for them to digest. It’s not as hard to explain a blog - and if you can’t you can simply tell them it’s a more frequently updated part of your existing site.

When Google’s Blog Search is brought more to the front in coming months, if your site gets into position to be visible when more of the internet population becomes blog-happy, then the traffic potential for your site may prove to be enormous.

The proper use of one RSS feed in one of my content management systems doubled my traffic, with most of the new users coming from Yahoo, this time last year. Another feed increased my daily traffic another 75%, and brought me additional return traffic as well.

At the time the margin between Yahoo and Google was wider than it is today — so the potential increase from being in Google boggles the mind.

How to Get Listed

According to the Blog Search Help Page:

“If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven’t picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.”

This means that if you’re already blogging - and responsibly pinging, you’re probably already listed.

If you haven’t been blogging, you’re in luck. This special brand of Google search is still in Beta, so if you get moving now, you still have enough time to start getting into position. And since the search currently seems to be focused on freshness and relevance, if you keep up the blogging once you start, and you keep your theme narrow, you could still dominate your niche.

Do It Today

The mantra for blogging before was that, proper blogging is a sure fire way to increase traffic, as well as build stronger ties to your end users or clients, not to mention that it is the simplest of the many implementations of RSS.

Now, with all three major search engines paying more attention to both RSS and Blogging, you can get spidered more frequently, get more of your pages indexed more deeply, and be included in more searches.

You have absolutely no time to waste - if you’re not blogging already, you need to get started quickly. Many webmasters are hesitating because they haven’t been able to find a blog system that fits well with their site, or find the most popular tools too sophisticated for their needs.

There are literally dozens of free resources to help you decide between the standard systems that were originally built for the personal blogger, and the more robust solutions that are aimed at the medium-sized or corporate company - but that’s another article.

Whatever you chose, the important thing is to get started blogging today. You’ll be missing out on targeted traffic from the most dominant search engine, from the most sophisticated surfers today, and sooner than you know it, the mainstream web.

Read the rest of this entry »

by: Kirk Bannerman
As a member of several search engine optimization forums, I
have frequently noticed (especially since Yahoo recently decided
to try their hand at competing with Google) that the stress level
of many webmasters has gone way up. This condition applies not
only to webmasters involved in Internet-based home businesses,
but to webmasters in general.

Additionally, it seems that many people that are in the business
of search engine optimization (SEO) are, with good reason, going
completely bonkers. As Google came on the scene in 1998 and
quickly dominated the search business, website optimization
became largely a game of shooting at a single target, namely,
pleasing Google…for all intents and purposes, Google became the
“800 pound gorilla” of the search engine business.

Since the advent of search engines (particularly Google) spawned
the whole SEO business, I guess its only fair that the search
engine industry can once again turn the SEO business on its ear,
and it seems now to be sort of a cat and mouse (not desktop)
relationship that can get really interesting as we move forward.

Not only are there now several viable players (most notably
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask Jeeves) in the search engine
business, but they are all adopting different and frequently
changing algorithms for determining the ranking positions for
websites.

The current game is that webmasters are trying to
figure out how the various search engines perform their rankings
and, on the flip side, the search engines are striving to be
quite unpredictable to those webmasters and SEO firms.

For those people using websites to promote home-based businesses,
it can be stressful constantly trying to determine “what the
search engines want” and agonizing over every downward
fluctuation in rankings that their website may experience.

Looking forward in time, I think we can expect that rankings will
fluctuate frequently and will not be at all consistent from one
search engine to another. It will be quite common that for a
particular search term a website might suffer a drop in position
ranking for search engine “A” and an increase position ranking
for search engine “B” at essentially the same point in time.

Rather than stressing out over every position ranking “wiggle”, a
better approach might be to just focus on “what do visitors to
my site want?”. The search engines are striving to give their
users a quality (relevant) search experience and if you are
focused in giving visitors to your website what they are looking
for, these paths will meet somewhere down the road.

You can save yourself alot of consternation by focusing upon the
needs of the website visitors you are seeking to attract, rather
than chasing the frequently changing ranking algorithms of
several search engines. Focus on a single target instead of
chasing several moving targets at the same time.

This article pertains to natural searches only, as paid search
engine advertising is a completely different situation.

Read the rest of this entry »

by: Raamakant S.
When I started my e-business, I ask my web-designer friend to
make a site which is really brainstorming. He did me a great
favor and really made an excellent site. My site’s design is
fabulous, it’s graphics are mind blowing and coding is superb.
But now what? What I seen in the coming days, I am not earning a
single penny because no one is visiting my site.

I think for a while that why all this is happening, then I make a
search on Yahoo and see the first site which is coming on the
top. It doesn’t have a good design like mine but still he is
making good money. Then I came to know that the site’s design is
meaningless if site’s ranking on search engines is not good.

When it comes to search engine every ear just not hears it but
listens it’s every aspect and try to locate it’s presence in his
site. Well why not it be done as it is the place from where all
of us get our business.

Every search engine has it’s own criterion of ranking and it’s
clear from the fact that when you do a search on Yahoo or Google
or any other search engines there results vary. Here is the
listing of some of the Top Search Engines and a few noteworthy
points about all of them. Know which engines get you more bangs
for the buck?

Google

Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several
years. They have gone from beta testing, to becoming the
Internet’s largest index of web pages in a very short time. Their
spider, affectionately named “Googlebot”, crawls the web and
provides updates to Google’s index about once a month.

Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, by far,
has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned from a
result, probably one of the main reasons it has become so popular
over the years. Google has several methods which determine page
rank in returned searches.
Yahoo

Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals on the
Internet today, and the site went live in August of 1994. Yahoo!
is a 100% human edited directory, and provides secondary search
results using Google.

Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around, as
far as web directories and search engines go. Unfortunately,
however, it is also one of the most difficult to get listed in,
unless of course you pay to submit your site. Even if you pay it
doesn’t guarantee you will get listed.

Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is “reviewed” by a Yahoo!
editor, and if approved will appear in the next index update.
AltaVista

Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider named
’scooter’ accessing their pages. Scooter used to be AltaVista’s
robot. However, since the Feb 2001 site update, a newer form of
Scooter is now crawling the web. Whichever spider AltaVista uses,
it is one of the largest search engines on the net today, next to
Google.

It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index your
entire site, although the past few months scooter hasn’t been
deep crawling too well. Unlike Google, AltaVista will only crawl
and index 1 link deep, so it takes a good amount of time to index
your site depending on how large your site is.

AltaVista gets most of its results from its own index, however
they do pull the top 5 results of each search from Overture
(formerly Goto).
Inktomi

Inktomi’s popularity grew several years ago as they powered the
secondary search database that had driven Yahoo. Since then,
Yahoo as switched to using Google as their secondary search and
backend database, however Inktomi is just as popular now, as they
were several years ago, if not more so.

Their spiders are named “Slurp”, and different versions of Slurp
crawls the web many different times throughout the month, as
Inktomi powers many sites search results. There isn’t much more
to Inktomi then that. Slurp puts heavy weight on Title and
description tags, and will rarely deep crawl a site. Slurp
usually only spider’s pages that are submitted to its index.

Inktomi provides results to a number of sites. Some of these are
America Online, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto, CNet,
Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many more.
Lycos

Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internet today,
next to Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider, named “T-Rex”, crawls
the web and provides updates to the Lycos index from time to
time. The FAST crawler provides results for Lycos in addition to
its own database.

The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags too heavily, instead
it relies on its own ranking algorithm to rank pages returned in
results. The URL, META title, text headings, and word frequency
are just a few of the methods Lycos uses to rank pages. Lycos
does support pages with Frame content. However, any page that
isn’t at least 75 words in content is not indexed.
Excite

Excite has been around the web for many years now. Much more of a
portal than just simply a search engine, Excite used to be a
fairly popular search engine, until companies such as Google
seemed to have dominated the search engine market. As of
recently, Excite no longer accepts submissions of URL’s, and
appears to no longer spider. To get into the Excite search
results, you need to be either listed with Overture or Inktomi.
Looksmart

Getting a listed with Looksmart could mean getting a good amount
of traffic to your site. Looksmart’s results appear in many
search engines, including AltaVista, MSN, CNN, and many others.

Looksmart has two options to submit your site. If your site is
generally non-business related, you can submit your site to Zeal
(Looksmart’s sister site), or if you are a business, you can pay
a fee to have your site listed. Either method will get you listed
in Looksmart and its partner sites if you are approved.

Once you have submitted your site, and it is approved for listing
it will take up to about 7 days for your site to be listed on
Looksmart and its partner sites.
AOL Search

America Online signed a multiyear pact with Google for Web search
results and accompanying ad-sponsored links, ending relationships
with pay-for-performance service Overture Services and Inktomi,
its algorithmic search provider of nearly three years.

Ok, now you have got a better understanding of search engine’s
game and finally you come to know which search engine is best for
you and which one is leading in today’s Internet World. In
nutshell, the thing which every e-entrepreneur wants is Top
Search Engine Ranking. Isn’t it right? So take some time to
register with these search engines as soon as possible and watch
the traffic grow.

Read the rest of this entry »

by: Tinu AbayomiPaul
Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

In this three part article, you’ll find many tools that any webmaster can use to monitor your site’s search engine position, and use to increase the visibility of your site in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

URL Trends
http://www.urltrends.com/

Most of the coverage I’ve seen focuses on the ability of UrlTrends to allow you to “View Any URLs Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Popular Search Terms and Incoming Links”.

And that’s a great thing, to be able to see all of that from one place. But one great thing missed about this tool are that you can subscribe to changes to the results via RSS -hands off monitoring of your site.

Fagan Finder’s URL Info
http://www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/

This online gadget is like the Swiss Army knife of site information, giving you one-page access to dozens of pertinent check-ups. But monitoring relevant search engine information like your backlinks, or the cached pages in a search engine are just the tip of the iceberg.

You can use URL Info to check that your HTML code is validated, translate your page, and if you’re a blogger, discover where your site is mentioned in the blogosphere.

Spannerwork’s Spider Simulator
http://www.spannerworks.com/spidersimulator.0.html

Ever wondered what your site looks like to the search engine spiders that crawl the web, looking for information to include in their databases? Go to this page to see what information is seen by the spider and what it skips over.

Spannerworks.com can also help you figure out how to troubleshoot content that seems like it should show up to a spider but doesn’t, with its HTTP viewer. They also have a tool that will analyze your keyword density.

GoRank.com’s Top Ten Comparison
http://www.gorank.com/seotools/

If you’ve been banging your head against the wall in an attempt to figure out why you haven’t hit the top ten results in Google, GoRank.com has a page that can give you important clues to help you figure it out. One of my favorites, the Top Ten comparison report, will scrub the raw data of the top ranking results for a given keyword.

In studying the results, you may find it easier to understand where your own optimization efforts are going wrong. Don’t forget to stop by Google for your API key at http://www.google.com/api as you’ll need it to create your free account.

Search Guild’s Keyword Difficulty Checker
http://searchguild.com/difficulty/

This one’s an old favorite of mine. When you find what you may think is an ideal keyword, before you start tweaking your pages, it’s a good idea to run it through this tester. Using the Google API, it analyzes whether or not a given phrase will be worth your efforts.

You’ll already have to be well-versed in how to find good keywords to plug into the tool, but once you have that nailed, it’s pretty reliable in telling you whether it’s worth your time to target that phrase. If you use flash on your site, check out the flash viewer on their utilities page as well.

In the next article in this series, you can read more about tools specific to Yahoo and Google that will help you track your rankings and study your site.
Read the rest of this entry »

by: Diane Nassy
There are no guarantees in life, so I don’t guarantee that following these tips will bring you more money every time. However, I do guarantee that they will greatly increase your chances of pulling more of the top-paying AdSense ads to your site than if you don’t follow these suggestions.

Enough with the disclaimers, let’s get down to the business of making money. Google lets advertisers bid anywhere from a minimum of .05 per click right up to a whopping $100. It should be pretty obvious that you’re not going to get rich running .05 cent ads on your site, but getting a few $100 ads, or even some $10, $20, or $30 ads can’t be a bad thing, right?

Now the problem is, Google is pretty closed-mouthed about who is paying what for their ads, and there is no real way to determine which words pay the most per AdSense click.

But ah, far away in a parallel universe we find another Pay-Per-Click provider called Overture. It seems that Overture is less sensitive about releasing their top-priced words and anyone who cares to find out what web sites are paying for words and phrases can do so by simply using Overtures tattle-tale special pricing tool (http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/). And it couldn’t be easier to use. You simply type in a key word or phrase and the tool returns a list of advertisers using that word and how much they are paying. It even shows you the actual ad.

Oh what a treasure trove of wealth-grabbing results this can be if you know what can be done with that priceless information.

Consider this possibility

Any key word or phrase that’s worth big bucks on Overture is probably worth big bucks on Google as well, maybe even more, right? So try this experiment:

Enter the phrase “SEO Services” without the quotes in the Overture tool (http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/). When I entered that phrase on the day I wrote this article, I was found a company called SEO Inc. that was willing to pay $8.01 per click, followed by SEO Advantage at $8.00, and Online Web Consultants at $6.50. Other bidders appeared below them in the $3.00 range straight on down to some who wouldn’t pay more than a dime per click.

Now, if a company is willing to pay that much money for a click on Overture, it is probably willing to pay that or more on Google. Even if that particular company isn’t advertising on Google, you can be pretty sure that the same key phrase is drawing near the same bid price from other companies who do advertise on Google. So what that means is there is no way that you can possibly afford NOT to have some web pages posted somewhere that are targeted to those sweet-paying words.

All you have to do is use Overture’s pricing tool to find the highest-paying key words that are related to your site and then optimize those words to start pulling similar ads. If all goes to plan, you can perhaps double, triple, or even quadruple your AdSense revenue without needing any increase in traffic or click-through rate. Read the rest of this entry »