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Posts Tagged ‘search engines’
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
Are you concerned about search privacy? If so, then you might be interested in two smaller search engines. Google and Bing, the leading competitors in search, store your search data for up to 18 months. But Blekko and DuckDuckGo are banking on you wanting more privacy than that.
Blekko – Blekko stores your search data for 48 hours, and that’s it. But the problem with Blekko is that your searches are confined only to sites that you or your friends tell it to search. The search engine makes use of “slashtags,” which are akin to Twitter’s hashtags. The intent is to cut out spam and undesired results from your searches. This type of search engine can be useful to your business if you can train your customers to use it and add important search terms related to your website as slashtags for their searches. Good luck in that.
DuckDuckGo – DuckDuckGo is more traditional in that they do crawl the Web and return search results based on keyword-related queries. And they do not collect your private information at all. Nada. You can also turn the privacy features off, if you prefer.
DuckDuckGo even refers you to two other search engines (on its privacy page) that do not collect your private information: Ixquick and Scroogle. The latter seems to base its results on Google search results, but it appears to be the only one of the four sites mentioned in this post to do so.
Are these smaller search engines good? Can they be good for your business? You’ll have to test them. I ran a test at both Blekko and DuckDuckGo. I was impressed that SBM was No. 1 at DuckDuckGo for the search phrase “small business marketing minnesota.” Of course, I’m No. 1 in both Google and Bing for the same phrase.
If you train your customers to conduct private searches at these search engines when searching for your business or services that you offer, then you might get some traffic from these sources.
Tags: privacy, search, search engines
Posted in search engines | 3 Comments »
Monday, April 25th, 2011
Are you making the most use of your time as a marketer? I’d be willing to bet that most online marketers are spending too much time on social media or unproductive channels. I have no data to back it up, but I know people and I think I know that most people are going to do what is fun before they do what is profitable and unfun.
Social media is fun. You can chat for hours with your best friend from high school, get stuck playing Cityville, or laugh out loud at the funny jokes your fans are sending your way. But are you getting any work done?
It’s a well known fact that 80%-85% of traffic for almost every website online comes from the search engines. It should seem to reason then that website owners and managers should spend that much time on search engine marketing efforts rather than social media or other forms advertising. Don’t you think?
Let’s say you work 10 hours a day every day. Six hours of that is spent on customer service (fulfilling orders, taking complaints, billing, etc.). That leaves you four hours for other activity. How are you filling that four hours?
In my opinion, you should be spending three hours on search engine marketing activities (blogging, PPC, or content creation) and the remaining one hour on social media and non-SEM activities. If you are spending your time in just the reverse, then I’d say you’ve got it backwards.
Don’t get me wrong. Social media is good. It’s fun. And you can generate traffic and sales from it. But 85% of your traffic is going to come from Google and Bing. So you should probably put your efforts into activities that are going to bring you the most money. That’s SEM. That means writing that daily blog post and spending some time tweaking your landing pages and PPC ads. Are you doing that?
Tags: blogging, content, PPC, search engine marketing, search engines, Social Media
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »
Monday, March 28th, 2011
A lot has been said of Google’s most recent algorithm change, which was designed to kill the content farms. They call it the farmer update. But what started this?
Google has always tried to control the spam. That’s its mission. The sole purpose of the search engine is to help searchers find the best information for their search queries. Spam gets in the way of that.
Consider this: You decide you want to buy a new plasma screen TV. So you go online to search for one. In the No. 1 position is a bullet point list of how to go about buying a plasma screen TV. It’s obviously very low level content. And it doesn’t help you. That’s the kind of content the farmer update was supposed to address.
Whose fault is it that the search engines are full of those types of useless web pages? Some people say it’s Google’s policies that have created the spam market. But I’d argue that the spam market would be a huge market no matter what the search engine policies were.
The reason we all have to fight spam in our daily lives is because there are people who don’t care about business ethics. They are greedy and seeking to make a quick buck and if they can get you to click on a link on their low-level web page so they can earn a .50 commission on that click, well, that’s just business. If they can convince 1,000 people to do it, that’s $500 in their pocket. And if they can make $500 per page on 10,000 pages in six months, that’s not a bad salary.
Once you get a view of the economics of spam, it’s easy to see who is causing the problem. It’s not the search engines. It’s people who can’t, or won’t, create valuable content, but who want to earn a living as if they do. How do you fight it? Don’t click their links.
Tags: search engines, spam
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 19th, 2011
If you are looking for ways to hide your links on your web pages so that you can trick the search engines into giving you credit for anchor text, valuable linking, and increase your search engine rankings, then I’ve got some news for you. Good news, and bad news.
The good news is, I’m about to teach you how to hide your links. There are probably more than 4 ways to do this, but I’m going to show you 4 ways to hide links on your web pages so that your website viewers don’t see them but search engines do.
Now for the bad news. These methods could get your website banned from the search engines.
- Hide your links over an image – A few years ago, webmasters discovered they could hide text over images. Then they discovered they could link that text. This is bad. If the search engines discover you’ve done this, you’ll be banned or penalized.
- Using small font – If you can think you can make your font so small that humans can’t see it while the search engines eat it up, think again. The search engines don’t like it and they’ll de-index you.
- Using small characters – Some webmasters have gotten a little savvy and linked using small characters like periods, commas, semi-colons, hyphens, etc. Again, if the search engines find out, that’s bad news for your website.
- Hide links in CSS – In the last few years, webmasters have been hiding their links within CSS. Yes, this too will get you banned.
Search engine algorithms may or may not find your hidden links, but if they are noticed by savvy web denizens who report you, then Google’s spam team will review your website with human eyes. If they find any of these hidden links on your site, you’ll be penalized.
Do yourself a favor. Don’t risk it.
Tags: hidden links, linking, search engines, SEO
Posted in link building | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
If you had the chance to steal 200 million users from your competition, would you consider that success? Well, Bing recently announced that it has snagged that many users from its strongest competitor, Google.
This is actually pretty significant. I don’t know how much that will affect the total market share of these two search engines, but a few more deals like this one and Bing could gain considerable distance on Google. Trying to win searchers through TV and radio advertising, or word of mouth, could take a very long time. But convert publishers who have an exclusive agreement with your largest competitor and you make good headway.
Look at it this way: Bing just gained on Google by 400 million users. Google lost 200 million and Bing gained 200 million.
What if that happened with 5 other exclusive deals that Google currently has in place? That would be a total shift of 1 billion users from Google to Bing. Do you think that would be noticeable?
I don’t really know how poised Bing is to make that kind of move, but if they did it once, then they could do it again. And Microsoft is just savvy enough to make deals like that. Google has partnerships in place with certain computer manufacturers to have a built-in search feature on computer desktops. A few of those for Bing with large computer manufacturers and we could see some evening of the score. What do you think?
Tags: bing, google, search engines
Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »
Thursday, November 11th, 2010
I seriously haven’t given the keywords meta tag a whole lot of thought lately. But Michael Martine brings up an interesting point.
While his glee seems a little bit over the top, I can actually see him jumping in the air and clicking his heels together, I do see the point. The keywords meta tag is officially dead.
True search marketers have known for several years now that Google stopped relying on the keywords meta tag a long time ago. Bing, too, stopped using it. And that really left Yahoo! and Ask.com. However, Yahoo! bowed out of search and turned its search features over to Bing’s algorithm. There went one half of the reason to still be using the keywords meta tag. Then, Ask.com announced that it was leaving search behind. There went the other half of the reason.
When I wrote my post yesterday about Ask.com getting out of search I hadn’t thought about the keywords meta tag. But thanks to Michael Martine, none of us ever have to think about it again – until some college kid gets the bright idea to start another search engine based on it (hey, it could happen).
So now you have my permission to officially stop using the keywords meta tag on your web pages. You can do it if you want to, but it likely won’t help you anywhere.
Tags: keywords, search engines
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
New search engine Blekko has finally gone live. I’ll let others judge the worth of Blekko as a search engine. I’m more interested in its SEO data.
So what’s so good about Blekko’s SEO data? Glad you asked.
For starters, it has SEO data. On just about any site for which you’d want it. As a sampling, here’s what you can find out about websites you find through Blekko:
- Hostrank
- Number of inbound links
- Site pages
- Crawl stats
- Duplicate content
- Copy of cache
- IP address
- Whois data
- And guess what else …
Blekko will even tell you which other websites your site is cohosted with.
That last one is very important. If you are on a shared hosting plan and can get a look at who your neighbors are then you can improve your hostrank just by switching servers or hosting companies. Follow the links of your hosting neighbors and see what kind of websites they are. If there any link farms, warez sites, or other black hat or spammy sites on your server then you need to ask your host to move you to another server or switch hosting companies.
I, for one, find this information extremely useful – even if I’d rather use Google for search.
Tags: search engines, SEO
Posted in search engines | 5 Comments »
Monday, October 11th, 2010
The majority of websites only have around half of their content indexed by the search engines. It doesn’t matter how good those pages are, if they are not indexed in the search engines database, they won’t appear in search results and they won’t be receiving any traffic. One of the problems with many sites is that they haven’t made life easy for the search engines to find their pages, let alone read them and index them.
It doesn’t have to be that way. There are several things that every web master could do that could lead to a significant number of pages being indexed fairly quickly. The first is fairly standard now – including and XML sitemap on your website and submitting it to the search engines. With Google for example, you can use its Webmaster Tools feature to submit your sitemap. Bing and Yahoo! have similar features. In most cases, you can also track the number of pages that have been indexed.
For some websites, including a user friendly sitemap will also help, especially if it is linked to from the home page. Links are at the heart of page indexation. If a page is quite deep in your site and it takes three or four clicks to get to, then there is a good chance it won’t be indexed. Important pages should be as high as possible in your website’s hierarchy thus making it easier for search engines to find.
One factor that will help search engines find your pages are the external links. The more external links coming into your site, the higher it may rank in search results. Sometimes variety is better than numbers so spreading those external links to important pages may yield better results than just linking to one or two pages all the time.
The more pages a small business has indexed, the better it can compete. Each page may only deliver one extra visitor per day, but if you can get another 50 pages indexed, that’s another 50 visitors each day, perhaps more. Check how many pages your website has, then check to see how many the search engines have indexed. If there is a significant difference, find and why and look to see what you can do to change the situation. You have nothing to lose and plenty to gain.
Tags: google, page indexation, search engines
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 2 Comments »
Saturday, May 8th, 2010
The race has been on to dominate real-time search since Twitter took the world by storm a couple of years ago. OneRiot launched last May and planned to be the first real real-time search engine. It’s done pretty well as far as I can tell.
The search engine has been in beta until now and WebProNews reports that beta testing is done.
The thing that I like about OneRiot, and this is completely new, its its Trending Topics search. You’ll see the latest trending topics in real time scrolling across the screen from left to right. The ticking clock on the left top part of the screen helps you keep track of those topics in real time.
I’ve got to say that this is a much more improved look than the OneRiot of last year. I like the colors and the layout of the home page. It’s easy to navigate, pleasing to the idea and simple. The search feature is prominently displayed at the top of the page and the trending topics scrolling makes it easy to see what’s happening right now.
All of that said, how can this help marketers? Well, you have to be active on the real-time social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Use your keywords in your postings, but don’t be a spammer. And it would help if you made it over to OneRiot every once in a while to see how the search engine actually indexes and ranks websites like yours.
Tags: real-time, search engines
Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »
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