Can any new search engine beat Google, probably not, mainly because Google isn’t going anywhere but up. It is the dominant search engine with around 72 percent of U.S. online searches and its percentages are much higher in other parts of the world. (Source: Hitwise) However, there are some serious new competitors that may just take a bite out of Google’s rosy search numbers. Never know, one or several of them, may just give Google a run for those all important search engine dollars.

Recently, there has been a whole army of new search engines debuting on the web. If you’re a full-time online marketer like me, you really have to keep your eyes open to what is happening on the web, especially relating to search engines which deliver most of your quality traffic. Also keep in mind, this piece may be fairly biased since Google is directly or indirectly responsible for around 80% of my online revenue, so any opinions may be slanted in Google’s favor, not that they need any favors from me or anyone.

But as an online marketer you have to try to remain objective and examine all angles in regards to these new search engines. Despite this, in marketing and webmaster circles, everyone will know even if you have the number one ranking for a certain keyword in all three major engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN – Google supplies the most traffic, hands down.

Despite its obvious dominance, Google is still basically the new kid on the block. We have to remember, there have been many search engines before Google and there will be many more search engines after Google. Every entity has its day and then hands the torch along to whatever comes next. It’s one of those subtle facts of life we all learn eventually.

Everybody has their day – empires, countries, leaders, companies… or even search engines. Are Google’s days as top dog really numbered? Probably not in the immediate future, but there are some new kids on the block that could definitely kick some sand in the face of Google and stir things up, we might even see a few serious squabbles here and there.

In a recent article on CNN, by John D. Sutter, entitled “New Search Engines Aspire To Supplement Google” the author examines some recent new search engines. The author discusses: Twine, Hakia, Searchme, Cuil, Kosmix, Wolfram Alpha, Topsy, TweetMeme and OneRiot. Each of these are different, making your web search more personal, more visual, or connecting your search to new social networks like FaceBook and Twitter.

Some experts say Wolfram Alpha is the most likely candidate to give Google some serious competition because Wolfram can do something Google can’t; it can create information rather than just reading/presenting content already on the web. Will it present a solid threat to Google’s dominance?

Perhaps, a more fitting sparring partner will come from an old rival with very deep, deep pockets. We are talking about the new search engine from Microsoft called Bing, which is very similar to Google in many ways, yet different. Bing’s results are very similar to Google in a lot of ways, yet Bing serves up the results in a very pleasing arrangement, with a nice preview button for each listing and giving you related searches and your search history on the left hand side. Only time will tell if everyone would rather be binging instead of googling. To Bing or not to Bing, that is the question? There’s a very informative article on Bing by Farhad Manjoo on Slate entitled: “Beware Google: Microsoft’s New Search Engine Isn’t Half-bad.” Just Bing or Google to find it!

I personally like this search engine much better than MSN mainly because the home page of Bing is very appealing and only has the search box on it so you’re not distracted with other news listings like on MSN and Yahoo! One of the main reasons for Google’s success, besides the superior search results, has been its simplicity. Keep it simple and you may just be able to compete.

Then again, this is a bit of a biased judgment, since many of my own keywords and sites rank high in Bing; some even higher than they are listed in Google. I routinely monitor countless keyword phrases in all the search engines and lately Google has been favoring big Brand Name listings on their first page results. We are also seeing more Product Listings (Old Froogle), more video and more news listings… competition for Google’s first page has become multi-layered and extremely competitive. What’s a poor small online marketer to do when Google goes corporate?

Actually, Bing is not my favorite search engine of the new ones forcing their way into the spotlight.

For me, the one that shows the most promise and may give Google some competition is Searchme, which is a visual search (much like the iTunes interface) where you can shuffle through screenshots of webpages instead of a list of links. Searchme, which touts itself as the first multimedia search engine, has been around for a few years but is not widely known to web users. Performing a search on Searchme with a 24 inch monitor and 64-bit Windows is a hundred times more enjoyable than using Google Search or Bing for that matter. It is a hundred times faster than Google mainly because you can generally find your information without clicking through to the sites displayed.

Searchme is truly an eye opener but can it give Google some serious competition. The jury is still out, but I believe over time as web users upgrade their computers, operating systems, and their graphics… Searchme will be more accessible to more web users. Never know, with the right backing and marketing, any of these search engines, especially Searchme and Bing could blossom into a formidable opponent even for the mighty Google.

Here’s why: Human Nature!

Whether we admit it or not, most of us (Humans) are lazy, we want the fastest and easiest route to solving any question or problem. Searchme gives us the answer much quicker than Google and in a much nicer way. Mainly because we are also visual creatures, given the choice between receiving pages of text and viewing images of sites/answers, most of us will take the visual route – we will choose TV over radio, music videos over records… video enhanced content over just plain static HTML. As the web turns into more of an interactive multimedia operation; visual search will always win out over text search any day of the year.

Most humans also have a need for speed, in our fast paced life styles, we all want a speedy solution to our problems. Search is no different, we want quick answers now, we want instant solutions and immediate gratification. Nature of the beast. If Searchme, Bing or any of the other search engines becomes faster than Google at giving the right answer, then it’s a whole new ballgame.

Google must obviously know there are challenges to its search engine dominance. Otherwise, why would they be offering many new features in their SERPs; we are seeing more images and videos. Plus, Google has just introduced the “show options” link at the top of their SERPs, which presents their search results in many different ways. They even have introduced the “Wonder Wheel” as another viewing option, which gives a whole new way of using Google’s search results.

Google’s Achilles’ Heel may just be the thing that gives it all its revenue: text ads. There may be a backlash on all those Google ads littered across the web, especially among the younger computer savvy crowd using such sites like the Google owned YouTube, where Google has nearly obliterated the videos with its ads. Everyone dislikes advertising, no matter what form it takes.

However, any news of Google’s demise will be greatly exaggerated, because Google, like any smart company with tons of resources, has kept morphing and changing with the times, quickly adapting to new features as our usage of the web keeps changing. Google has perfected the art of staying one step ahead of the competition. This is one champion that won’t go down without a fight to the finish. Top dogs rarely do.

If they ever present a serious challenge to Google, Searchme, Bing or any of the above search engines, will have a formidable opponent in the opposing corner, one that has gained almost insurmountable prestige and brand recognition around the world. Any major battle will instantly have a “David vs Goliath” scenario attached to it. And we all know how that one played out!

…

The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous
niche sites. These 10 SEO Tactics Bring Me Over 2000 Visitors Daily:
SEO Tips. To learn more Internet Marketing Tactics try:
Marketing Tools. Copyright (c) 2009 Titus Hoskins. http://www.bizwaremagic.com This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Read more articles written by Titus Hoskins

White Hat SEO methods are meant to improve the performance of your organic search engine marketing campaign, while adhering to the terms of service laid out by Google.

What Does the Term ‘White Hat SEO’ Mean?

White Hat SEO is the opposite of Black Hat SEO. Generally, search marketers who practice White Hat SEO (or ethical organic search marketing) techniques try to improve their organic rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), while maintaining the integrity of their website and following Google’s steadfast set of rules.

Some examples of White Hat practices include:

* Offering quality content, products and services
* Using relevant keyword-rich meta tags
* Making your website easy to navigate

Why are Ethical SEO Techniques Important for Good SEO?

In short, engaging in suspicious behavior can get your site banned from Google and other search engines, which should be a big deterrent for any search marketer or Web master. As the undisputed king of the search engines, Google is used by millions of people every day, and each user presents an opportunity for your website to be discovered. That said, Google has the power to drive tons of traffic to your website, so being banned from Google would result in a dramatic drop off in traffic and sales for business websites.

Considering all the work that goes into your website, think about how devastating it would be to get banned from the Internet’s most popular search engine. Adding insult to injury, once you’re banned from Google, it can be impossible to get re-listed again. A lifetime ban from Google would have tremendous consequences for your website, which for many companies could very well put them out of business.

Should You Use White Hat SEO Techniques for Your Website?

Implementing White Hat SEO practices is the most effective means of establishing a principled and successful website and business. In addition, practicing ethical search marketing ensures that your website will have longevity, authority and credibility with the search engines.

Let’s look back at each of the above examples of ethical organic search techniques and go deeper to see how to implement each one.

Offer Quality Content, Products and Services

The key to getting traction in the search engines is to author great content around your quality products and/or services. People like good content and so do search engines because good content makes for a good experience for the user. The better your content the more likely people are to visit and explore your website and buy your products.

Using Relevant, Keyword-Rich Meta Tags

A big part of ethical SEO is the inclusion of meta tags in your “off page” site content. Meta tags include meta descriptions, title tags and to a lesser degree meta keywords. Treat your title tags and meta descriptions like ad copy and include target keywords and a strong call to action. For the record, meta descriptions and title tags are the “ad copy” that displays for your website in the SERPs when users run a search query and can be the difference in whether or not a user chooses to click on your site.

Making Your Website Easy to Navigate

Organizing your website to be user-friendly and search engine-friendly is another important part of ethical SEO. To do this, you should map out your pages ahead of time and create a logical hierarchy, grouping pages in a tree with home page first, followed by top level category pages, then leading down to more specific tertiary product pages as drop downs in the sub navigation. This logical formatting makes is easy for both users and search engine spiders to navigate your site and discover information.

When in Doubt, Play it Safe

White Hat SEO practices produce effective, ongoing and principled enhancements to your website and are always good business practice. Unethical SEO practices may deliver quick results, but the results are short-lived. Plus, getting on Google’s bad side is the equivalent of a death sentence for most websites. By following ethical search marketing practices, you’ll stay in Google’s good graces.

Ken Lyons is a Marketing Manager for WordStream, Inc. WordStream offers a suite of dynamic keyword research tools and AdWords Tools for keyword grouping and keyword suggestion for paid and organic search engine marketing.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

When submitting a site to Google’s spider-based search engine, there are many site elements you should avoid because they can cause problems and diminish your rankings. Site elements such as query strings in your URL, using frames, using cookies, broken links, user input pages, redirected pages, graphic-intensive pages and decreasing keyword keyword weight by including large amounts of code cause problems with the spidering process. Here are elements you should avoid:

Using Frames

Google indexes each element of a frame separately. For this reason, if the content of one element of your frame is indexed, the user will only see that part of the frame and not the entire page. If is desirable to avoid frames altogether. However, if you must use frames, either place a NO FRAMES tag in your code or create a non-frame version of each page to submit to Google. The NO FRAME tag tells the Google spider to avoid indexing the frame and thereby get around the problem of frames. By submitting the non-frames version of a page, you also avoid only displaying part of the page to an Google user.

Requiring Cookies

Google spidering will affect sites attempting to set cookies. Many sites use cookies to track information about their users. Cookies themselves pose no problems to Google; however, the Google spider will not accept cookies as it crawls your site. Therefore, if a cookie must be accepted before the page loads, the spider will not crawl that page or any pages below it in your site. In short, if your determine that you want to serve cookies, make certain that your pages will load without the cookie being accepted or Google will not be able to fully crawl your site.

Broken Links

Broken links provide two problems to Google. Fundamentally, a broken link prevents the spider from crawling parts of your site and indexing that content. Also, a number of broken links is an indication of how credible the site is. For example, if your site has 20 “indexable” pages, but half of them contain broken links, Google will most likely determine that your site is not a valuable resource and will not thoroughly index it. As a result, it is important to make sure you have no broken links.

Redirection

Redirects are not a problem here. Instead of penalizing sites that have redirects, Google follows the links and indexes the page it finds.

Image Maps

Since Google performs deep crawls, image maps would pose a problem here. Search engine spiders do not have the luxury of clicking a link from your image map; they cannot index any pages that are linked to you site by an image map. If you do have an image map, you may want to consider including text-based hyperlinks to those pages as well. If you like, you can include them on the bottom of your page. If will provide the spider a pathway for finding those pages.

The most important factor that would cause a problem in Google would be to have no other sites within the Google index that link to your site. Link popularity is very important in Google’s ranking system, and to not have any relevant links would return a very poor ranking for your Web site.

Author Bio: Upshur Creative builds custom ecommerce websites with drop shipping. All websites are pre-stocked with brand name products from trusted suppliers. Visit UpshurCreative.com at: Home Based Business Opportunity

I was on the phone recently and I told the person just to copy and paste the link I had sent him. He proceeded to tell me that he did not know how to do this and that most people did not.

When I explained that copying and pasting is the mathematical equivalent of 2+2=4 he said, “well all right I’ll Google it then”.  He knows about Google but not how to do the simplest of computer functions.  Good thing they don’t have the TV phone yet because I was shaking my head and rolling my eyes.

Having been born in 1957 I was not raised in a household with a computer (duh).  When I was a child my etch-a–sketch was my laptop.  So unlike my nephew and niece who at birth were given Mac books I had to learn and adapt to computers.

Computers have many functions but for me there greatest function is to be used to market online.   An entire industry has spawned of people working from home and selling goods and services over the internet.  You may ask yourself  “what could I market on the net”?

Well how about an info product?

Do you possess knowledge that others would benefit from?   Look at what a few of the leading info marketing guys like Alex Mandossian, Frank Kern, Armand Moran, to name a few are doing.  They sell millions of dollars in information products per year.

So the question is, why not you?  I’ll bet that the idea of making money from home without the need for physical inventory (or expense) is appealing.  Note that I said “without the need for physical inventory”.  With information products your “inventory” is virtual.

In 2005 I started a company that licensed information products from authors and speakers.  Each time we sold a product the author/speaker earned a royalty.  So what was the cost of my product development?  How about zero.  Then as opposed to shipping CD’s I digitized their product into an electronic file (mp3).   So when a customer made a purchase they instantly received access to the product via the net.

So you have several options to begin your new endeavor.  One is to become an affiliate for someone who has the product and offer all completed.  Usually affiliate programs come with turnkey marketing pieces, landing (also called squeeze page) that has proven conversion numbers, sales letter and on.  Your only task here is to drive traffic to your affiliate site.

Another option is to license existing product and then create your sales system.  There are a number of great info products where the creator simply is not a good marketer.  Here is your opportunity to cash in on their expertise while creating a mutually beneficial relationship.

Then of course your next option is creating your own product.  The benefits of this are many; first of all you own it (duh, again).   This enables you to repurpose the content as you see fit.

Let’s say you have written a book.  Well you can take aspects of the book and create a DVD or CD series; you can create a seminar from its content, perhaps a membership program (online of course), or a coaching/mentor program.   I could keep going but you get the point.  The owner of the content is master of their universe.

Now my question to you is “what if?”  What if there is something I’ve said that sparks your thinking into gear?   If so you’re asking yourself “how do I get started?”   Well grasshopper the answer is simple, start by doing research.  Search the net for info products and see what’s on the market and observe how they are being marketed.  If you decide to create your own product search that topic and see what’s available and how you differ (6 degrees of separation).

Once you have decided on a direction we’ll need to discuss the various marketing methods available to you.  And that my friends will be the subject of my next article.

Till then, let me leave you with this thought from Isaac Newton, “An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to stay in motion.”  In other words get your butt in gear and take action.

Steven Seppinni is the co-founder of Seppinni-Magers Omnimedia (SM), an internet marketing and media company. SM client base ranges from NY Times best selling authors, speakers, nutrition companies and real estate developers.

Find out more about Steven Seppinni at http://www.StevenSeppinni.com

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

I left things yesterday with looking for content for this blog and that’s where I hit problems. I visited my article directory and looked in the Free Tools and Resources category and had a bit of a wake up call.

You see when I started my article directory in July 2007 to get the ball rolling I added a script that would import articles from another company. The next day 47,000 appeared and brought massive problems with them.

Many articles had been submitted to the wrong categories, new categories had been formed which duplicated some of the categories already there, for instance Mortgage and Mortgages, links were stripped from author bios and there were many crap articles that I wouldn’t have accepted.

The script got fixed for link stripping but it didn’t solve the other problems so I stopped using it after a week and just took articles that were manually submitted. I spent a lot of time putting things right but you always miss something.

Last night when I visited the Free Tools and Resources section I found that most of the articles in there were out of category, even one about buying coffins for goodness sake. When I found a suitable article for this blog I discovered that the link was dead. I then checked that authors account and he has over 500 articles on the directory and of the 20 or so articles that I checked all of the links were dead.

Not a good sign for somebody who is offering advice about Internet marketing. Something could have happened in his personal life to end his business, or he just might not have made it as an Internet marketer.  Either is possible but if it’s the latter it indicates just how tough it is to make it in a home business internet or otherwise.

Dead links leave directory owners with a quandary. We know that a lot of dead links might affect a websites status in the search engines so we need to deal with them. Three choices:

1. Find an active link of that author and replace the dead links with it.

2. Delete all of the articles

3. Replace the links with your own active links or those of a charity.

Usually I go for option 1 and then option 2 if I can’t find an active link for that author. I would feel as if it was cheating to go for option 3, though a link to a charity might be a good idea.

Adding Content

Now that I’ve sorted out the article directory and added a few posts from there I’m going to add some of my own fresh content to this blog. The search engines like unique content so I always intersperse my own content amongst other peoples articles.

I make sure that there are some good keywords in the titles and articles but not so many that it doesn’t make sense. I also add my keywords as tags to give my articles a search engine boost.

Thoughts About This Theme

I really like this theme and although currently I haven’t made many of my own changes I can see that it’s easy to do. When I write a new page and publish it the page automatically gets a link at the top of the page. On my other blogs I have to add those links with html.

I did try to add categories for the recommended website links but so far I haven’t managed that, but I’ll figure it out sooner or later.

Hello World

After writing some content I then decided to sort out my Google sitemap. Sitemaps are cool in that they make it easier for the search engines to find and index your web pages. I made my sitemap by easily adding a plugin to the blog and once I had set it up the sitemap notified Google and some other search engines that the blog was up and running. I was then able to indicate how often that I wanted Google to crawl different aspects of this blog.

You might be wondering why I attach so much importance to content, keywords, tags, sitemaps and search engines so I’ll try to explain. If you think of a new website as a shop, but the shop has nothing in the window, no signs and no advertising has been done, then unless somebody stumbles upon it by accident then it won’t have any customers.

The same applies to a website or blog so you need to signal to the search engines that you are up and running and keep them happy enough to send traffic your way.

After submitting the sitemap I placed an advert on a free advertising blog and then checked my other websites and blogs to see if they were linking to this blog. If not I will place a link and instantly have some backlinks.

During the rest of the evening I will be checking free Wordpress widgets and plug ins to see if there is anything that might be useful to me.