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

For small business owners the Internet has proved to be extremely beneficial. Unlike traditional forms of advertising and marketing the Internet provides several advantages that helps small business to reach more potential customers and also get better value for money. While traditional advertising requires organizations to spend thousands of dollars on branding and promotional activities, with online advertising and effective search engine optimization better results can be achieved at much lower cost. Moreover results achieved in the Internet media offers more lasting benefits than conventional promotions.

Small business owners can reach a large customer base with the help of effective search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) strategies. More than 80% of people searching for goods and services start with Internet to find them. Therefore if a small business can attract even a small part of these potential customers to its website and eventually convert then into actual buyers it can increase its online revenues significantly.

Internet marketing, which includes SEO and SEM, requires formulating and implementing effective strategies to draw more targeted traffic that can eventually be converted into customers. Although every business must consider optimizing their websites in the search engines, for e-commerce website it is an ‘absolute must’.

Small business enterprises engaged in e-commerce face fierce competition nowadays. To stay ahead of the competition they need to be visible to the targeted visitors and quickly draw their attention. Ranking higher in the search engines is the first major task, followed by successful branding campaign.

For a small business owner to achieve their highest and best return on investment, it is crucial to first formulate a strategy before starting an internet marketing campaign. Then you can begin taking advantage of comprehensive SEO tactics involving various proven methods for driving more traffic to your site.

1. Know your Audience
This is the most important task since your entire internet marketing campaign is directed towards your niche audience. If you fail to know your audience you will target the wrong people and subsequently lose business. A little research to identify who are your customers and also to know how they look for goods and services in the search engines will help you make the right strategy.

2. Set a Goal
Unless you have a well-defined goal, you do not have a direction. Therefore it is important to set the right goal. Once you have your goals clear you can use the optimal amount of resources and channelize your efforts in the right direction. The budget for small business marketing can be estimated once the goal is set.

3. Select the right SEO techniques
There are several SEO techniques that will prove helpful for your internet marketing efforts although the amount of benefit you can derive from any single technique can be difficult to ascertain. A mix of various techniques is necessary to have a balanced SEO campaign. Basic SEO will include a balanced combination of Niche Directory Submissions, Social Media Marketing, On page optimization through effective Meta tags, great content, a working internal link structure and a site map to name a few. Other important techniques include link building campaigns and excellent PR and article marketing strategies. Oh, and don’t forget about analyzing your competition! What are they doing differently than you? What’s working and where can you make changes to your strategy to achieve similar results? Use Alexa and other traffic/competitive measurement tools to check up on your competition.

4. Measure the Results
Without measuring the results and properly analyzing how your website is performing you cannot know if the search engine techniques are bringing positive results. However, it generally takes around 3 – 6 months to get tangible results from an organic online advertising and marketing campaign. Measuring the results periodically will help you identify if anything is wrong in your strategy or if you need to intensify your campaign. I strongly recommend incorporating a measurement tool such as Google Analytics to provide the tools necessary to measure your
results.

5. Make proper adjustments
After measuring your results to determine what’s working and what’s not you will need to make adjustments. Internet marketing is a direct response medium and A/B testing is crucial for success.Make changes to improve your results. This will be an ongoing process, not a one time deal. Google, Yahoo and even the smaller search engines continually change their algorithms. So, what worked one month may not work as well the next. Simple testing and making minor adjustments when needed will keep you ahead of the curve.

David Peters is an internet marketing specialist and owner of Net Point Marketing. Specializing in start up consulting and effective SEO and SEM strategies for small and medium sized business, social media marketing, content creation and increasing online visibility. His company can be found at – www.NetPointMarketing.com

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

Obtaining quality one-way links is often cited as the “Holy Grail” of online success. Especially if you take the SEO route for getting high rankings for all your profitable keywords in the search engines. It’s no wonder then, achieving top spots for your valuable and popular keywords should be the ultimate goal of any webmaster or online marketer.

How well you do in this “link quest” will largely determine the success or failure of your site or online business. Assuming of course, you’re going after free organic traffic from the search engines and not using PPC (Pay Per Click) or other means of succeeding online.

Link building and achieving top placements in the search engines (especially Google) has been my main objective for over ten years of online marketing. It has been a constant daily struggle to build those quality one way links and to get those top rankings and keep them.

Over the years, I have tried hundreds, if not thousands of link building methods in order to get those links. I would like to discuss briefly some of these methods and then explain in full detail my four favorite and most effective proven ways to get quality one-way links.

First, some general tips on how you should approach your link building from the get-go. You must realize the web is based on content; web surfers/users are looking for quality content. If you can supply valuable content that the surfers want, you will build your links naturally. People will see your content and want to link to it. This process is often referred to as link baiting – you make your content/offer so irresistible, they will not only want it but they will go out of their way to tell others about your fantastic content.

Quality content is the first key to link building but there are many more. Especially if you take a more “hands-on” approach to actively building your quality one-way links.

Be careful not to link to “spammy” link farms and it’s probably a good idea to always check the Gooogle PageRank PR of any site or page you link to on the web. Many cautious webmasters/marketers won’t link to anything less than a PR3 page but use your own judgment here.

Buying links is frowned upon by Google but many webmasters and marketers do use this method to purchase embedded one-way links with their chosen “anchor text” which is the clickable, underlined part of a link. Actually, over time big business will probably dominate most, if not all of the “profitable keywords” on the entire web. They have the resources to “buy” their way to the top and this process will only accelerate, despite Google’s objection or efforts to stop it. Money talks, morality walks.

In any case, most starting webmasters don’t have the resources to buy links and it’s much more easier to get them through free methods on the web. There are numerous ways of getting quality links:

. place your links in directories – free and paid
. join online forums and place your links
. do recommendations and testimonials
. viral videos with your embedded links
. join social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc.
. use hub traffic sites like Squidoo and Hubpages
. use Google sites like Google News, Google Docs, Google Knol . use Wikipedia to build links
. use Yahoo Answers and those types of sites
. use eBay and sites like Craigslist
. use viral ebooks and software programs

Now, I have used all of the above link building methods and many more over the years but I would like to explain to you my most effective link building techniques since these are the proven methods that have worked for me. For in the end, we can only discuss our own marketing experiences and what has worked for us. No doubt you may have heard of many of these link building methods before… but here goes:

Article Marketing

This is still one of the most effective ways to build good one-way links to your site. I know this is “old school” but it still works. At least for now, there are rumors Google is cracking down on article links but for now links in your article resource boxes are still very effective.

From my own experience, article marketing is my most effective technique at building links. My sites and my online marketing were going nowhere until I started writing articles. Now I do aggressive article marketing using all the major online article directories…

The Top 5 I Use Are:

www.ezinearticles.com www.goarticles.com www.isnare.com www.ideamarketers.com www.buzzle.com

Now just look at my stats from ezinearticles alone and you will know why I use them.

Account Statistics

Articles Views: 421,327 Profile Views: 2,573 Articles Published: 4,787 URL Clicks: 49,480 Emailed: 115 Live Articles: 203

I have roughly 200 articles which have been viewed over 400,000 times which has sent around 50,000 visitors to my sites. Plus, I have around 5,000 places where my articles are published. And this is only for one online article directory – I have my articles in hundreds of them. It all adds up to a lot of links and traffic. For a good popular viral article I can get 2,000 to 3,000 links spread across the web.

Whether you’re just a webmaster or into online marketing you must realize all this stuff is a “numbers” game. The more content you have out there, the more links you have on the web – the more traffic and visitors you get coming to your site. It’s not rocket science, it’s simple math. The more links you have, the higher probability someone will click them and come to your site.

The same goes for high rankings in the search engines, the more good quality links you have, the higher your rankings. Article marketing will give you highly targeted keyword links to your web pages. I also use SubmitYourArticle which will automatically submit my articles for me to many different article directories. I use this service to save time but you can hand-submit your own articles.

One last point about article marketing – you’re not just using articles to build links, you’re also using articles to “pre-sell” yourself, your site and/or your product. It’s a very effective way of funneling interested visitors/buyers to your site. Many of my sales are already made before visitors reach my site.

AddThis Bookmark

Now I am not really into the “social media” sites but that has not stopped me from using them to my advantage. And it would be a BIG mistake not to use these social media sites for your own link building.

Sites like MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Linkedin… and thousands of others are very important for link building. They are becoming even more important as Google moves away from articles and focuses on the “real interactions” taking place on these sites.

Couple of years ago, I added the free AddThis Bookmark to all my sites. This is a simple code which lets your visitors bookmark your site or content in any or all of the major social media sites.

What’s actually happens is that your visitors are building your links for you. I have gotten hundreds of links from these sites just by placing this simple bookmark on my sites. Truth be told, I nearly laughed at this idea at first – sure visitors to my sites would automatically bookmark and build links for me? No way that would happen?

Wrong again!

This really works, so if you want this simple way of building links just use the Addthis.com bookmark to your site or pages.

Link Building via Google Alerts

This method of building good quality one-way links does take a little more work but it is extremely effective, especially for getting high rankings in Google.

Here’s how it works:

You sign-up for Google Alerts for your major keywords that you’re promoting. Google will send you email alerts whenever a new page/site/link is created containing your keywords. You then go to those newly created pages to make a comment and add your link.

Many of these new pages will be on blogs so you can easily add your comment and link. The trick is to add valuable comments/content which the site moderator will approve because it adds to his/her site’s value. Many will also approve your link because your link is related to their site and this is just good SEO practice.

The key here is to put yourself and your site in the whole discussion of related blogs, sites and forums relevant to your content. You want your site in the whole mix of things so that relevant links will flow naturally from the discussion. Now all your links won’t be accepted but you can easily add 2 or 3 links each day with very little time spent on this. Great way to build links, hope you can give it a try.

Press Releases

I am just starting this method of link building, but what I have seen so far tells me this is a very effective way to build links. It’s not cheap – I use PRWeb and I believe it’s $200 for a release. You can get a cheaper price at around $80 but you don’t get the full benefits at this lower price.

Press releases are very effective because you can embed your links with your “anchor text” into the body of your press release. Other sites pick up your release and place it on their site with your keywords/links embedded. This seems more like natural link-building which the search engines loves, especially Google.

With articles you can only place your links at the end. As Google cracks down on article link building (as many experts believe they will) then using something like press releases will become much more important.

Again, depending on your own marketing budget, press releases can be a very effective way of building links. I have noticed sites going from a PR0 to PR4 in less than 6 months using this method and also getting top 5 rankings in Google in the process. Keep in mind, sites/companies displaying press releases are usually already highly ranked in Google so some of their PR juice is passed on to your site.

I hope this article has given you some fresh ways of building your own one-way links. Consistently build these links to your site over an extended period of months or even years and you will succeed online.

Author Bio: … The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Marketing Tools If you liked the article above, why not try this Free 7 Day Traffic Course here: Internet Marketing Tools Copyright – 2009 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.