The Alternative Broadcasting Online News Station

The importance to the algorithmic web crawlers that speed throughout the web is crucial to the successful marketing campaign of your site. Your site would simply be a pretty compilation of HTML, XML, Java and the sort if search engine crawlers did not come around and look over your site. These amazing little creatures are absolutely incredible software inventions those only purpose in life is to “crawl” the web.

Jumping from site to site through links, as though in a web, (hence the WWW) these programs evaluate not only the relative importance of your site, but also have the uncanny ability to know whether or not you’ve been updating. Updating your site is one of the most crucial things you can do for your internet marketing. The crawlers love updates, they love fresh new content, and from EnkiTel.com experience, they visit your site much more frequently if you update frequently. They are hungry little fellows, always looking for new relevant information to add to the enormous indexes that Google, MSN, and Yahoo compile day by day every hour, every second.

Checking when a “bot” has been to your page is easy, simply go to the cache hyperlink in the search results for your site keyword. This will tell you when Google last indexed your page along with the relevant changes on the home page. The more often your site is visited the better. Although PR algorithms are a trade secret, it is almost certain that having the Googlebot as a guest as often as possible will increase your relative importance and help drive traffic to you site. And traffic means sales.

Gene Leshinsky
http://www.enkitel.com
EnkiTel Communications provides a cheap alternative to traditional long distance and international calling plans. We strive to identify the best deals on the market and present them to our customers. EnkiTel also runs a blog for starting business, sharing ideas, resources and commentary.

Introduction

Why does a FLASH intro need SEO?
Flash, the great SE killer, is basically nonspiderable, although there are reports
of the opposite. In this way, the intro creates a solid, non-permeable barrier
between the website and the external world. One way around is to place the intro into a frame and connect the other pages via links from the [noframes] tag.
The SE will follow such links, but will not place much weight on the anchor
text or any keywords within the [noframes] tag. In this way,
the index page is practically lost for most SEO purposes.
A tremendous waste, if you consider that, from the SEO viewpoint,
the index is the most valuable page of your entire website.
For example, it is significantly easier to obtain external links pointing to the index page.

Using frames is definitely a very bad option.
The very best action is to talk the website owner into removing the FLASH intro at all.

Even offering a small discount is worth the expenses. But unfortunately, most business ownners are completely fascinated by the idea of their logo bouncing around the screen, changing colors and doing other rather annoying things.
This is where the real SEO comes into the play.

Just to make things clear. I sort of like FLASH. I agree that it is
a killer tool for webdesign - if used properly. But I do not think that
an intro is a proper usage for this technology.

Planning

Traditionally, cloaking is based on simple principles.

1. Identify the visitor on the basis of the user agent or (better) its IP address.
2. Serve different content to SE and human.

Here we will use somehow different and as I believe, more gentle principles:

1. Find if the client accept FLASH (Google does not).
2. Serve the same page to both types of clients. The only difference: the FLASH accepting clients will get the real content of the page overlayed by the FLASH layer. Pressing the STOP button will remove the flash layer, revealing the actual content of the page.

Implementation

You will find a working example at our
webdesign site. There you will also find the links for downloading the source code of index.php, flash intro and switch.php.

index.php

This is the page containing the FLASH intro. The FLASH object is contained within a [div]
tag with a high Z index and will therefore overlay the actual text placed into the underlying [div] tag.

Flash intro itself

The only requirement is that the STOP button points to the page switch.php

switch.php

After the STOP button is pressed the script in switch.php is executed. The script will register a session variable intro ensuring that the intro will not be played again. Calling the script again through the play intro link will reverse the situation.

Problems

• The example above uses sessions for preserving the state information. Sessions are usually stored in cookies. Thus clients with disabled cookies will not be able to escape from the FLASH movie. A simple remedy is to store the state in both a session and _GET variable. You may also consider propagating the session in the url, by setting session.use_trans_sid=1 in the php.ini file. This problem will not affect the SE. They will not be served with the FLASH. Even if they are, they will see the real page content and will not press the STOP button to start the session.
• A minority of FLASH enabled clients will not admit the ability to interpret FLASH in the content of $_SERVER[”HTTP_ACCEPT”] variable and will not see the intro. Not a real tragedy.
  In fact you may decide to serve the FLASH uniformly, to all type of clients. The SE will see the real content immediatelly, the human users after clicking the
  STOP button.

Vaclav Mach is owner of the
Scisoft webdesign
- a website visibility and accessibility oriented company.

You should be. If you have never heard of Google PageRank and
you have established a website, it is high time you learned
about Google PageRank and what it means to you and the success
of your website. Having an excellent Google PageRank can either
make or break a website in terms of overall success. Let’s take
a look at what Google PageRank is and why it is so important to
every website owner.

First, a word about the Google Search engine: Google is one of
the most popular search engines on the Internet. Not only is
Google’s search engine the absolute largest of its kind, the
company focuses on making web information easy to access and
even easier to find. Google has designed a unique system and the
search engine has yet to be surpassed in terms of the
information it provides. Google has grown immensely since its
early beginning in 1996 and it will continue to be a predominant
force on the Internet. Furthermore, because Google offers easy
access to immediate information, they own one of the top
Internet search engines in the world. Thus, it would serve a
webmaster well to become familiar with the Google PageRank
process-the Google PageRank is an algorithm that is based on
inbound links and other factors and will ultimately determine
the location of listing of your website in the Google Search
Engine.

What precisely is Google PageRank?

Google PageRank is a process the search engine’s uses as a way
of selecting sites to answer specific queries. Basically, when
an Internet user submits a query, the Google search engine will
attempt to match websites to the query that has been posed. Yet,
there is a bit more to this simple science than the act of
submitting a query suggests. Rather, behind the scenes, Google
uses specific algorithms to determine if a site specifically
address a web user’s needs by analyzing the content of a site by
keyword and by the number of inbound links associated with the
site-every inbound link is viewed as a vote and the more votes
one has, in conjunction with the more keywords one has, the
higher their Google PageRank is.

Why is Your Google PageRank Significant?

What does it mean to you when your Google PageRank is increased?
Does it really matter what your Google PageRank is at all? You
bet it does-the higher your Google PageRank is the higher on a
search engine’s listing your website will appear. Thus, if you
are looking for top billing, especially in a search engine as
popular as the one Google offers, you will definitely want to
maximize your efforts of getting your website visible and
improving your PageRank is the best way to accomplish such a
task. Moreover, the higher you appear on the search engine
listing offered by Google, or many other search engines, the
easier your website is to find. Essentially this equates to more
web traffic for your website and if you are running an online
business, more web traffic ultimately means more profit for
you.

Making Google PageRank Improvements

If you are looking to improve your Google PageRank you can do so
by starting a link campaign. A link campaign can help you
increase more inbound links to your website and in turn, more
inbound links will increase your Google PageRank. How do you
start a link campaign? Well, you can go the hard route by
scouring the Internet to find websites similar to your own. Or,
you can make your link campaign a far easier process by using
the services afforded to you by PageRank Browser and locate all
of the best, themed websites on the Internet with relative
ease.

Of course, there are few things you must bear in mind when you
begin your link campaign. Google actually rates various links
and holds some links higher than others. In other words, if you
link to 100 less than popular sites you may increase your Google
PageRank. Conversely, if you link to 50 extremely popular sites
and you get inbound links in return, you may significantly
increase your Google PageRank because the most popular sites on
the Internet are linking directly too you. Thus, when you begin
your link campaign, keep this popularity issue in the back of
your mind. Further, know that in using PageRank Browser, you
will be able to locate the popular sites with ease, and thereby
significantly increase your Google PageRank.

About Inbound Links

Quite frankly, some links that you will establish will be better
than others. You goal will be to establish the best links
possible by examining the quality of inbound links. Various
webmaster tools can help you determine the quality of the
reciprocal links you establish. You will want to work hard at
establishing direct inbound links to your site-direct links from
already popular websites. You will also need to establish links
to websites that are similar to yours-remember the search engine
algorithm used by Google to determine your page rank is based on
relevance. You will also find that the location of inbound links
is of significant importance. For example, when you establish
inbound links, those links that are buried deep within a website
will have less influence on the ranking of your website in
Google’s search engine.

What is clear is that your Google PageRank is of significant
importance. Thus, every effort should be used to improve your
Google PageRank-with the use of webmaster tools and the use of
sites like PageRank Browser you should have little difficulty
getting your PageRank right where it should be. Therefore, you
will not only improve your PageRank you will improve the web
traffic you receive by leaps and bounds. Moreover, your improved
PageRank will make you a force on the Internet to be reckoned
with-you will have a highly recognizable website for all your
efforts and you will ultimately improve your online business’
bottom line.

Computers have become a way of life for people around the world. They are used to research term papers, check weather forecasts, track military progress, exchange ideas (blogs and chat) and to find the cheapest price on items etc. It is no surprise that as the computer age takes hold computer usage has increased. The number of websites that are being developed on the World Wide Web is growing at an ever increasing exponential amount. And because we live in a quick-fix society, with limited time on our hands, we need something to make surfing the web a lot easier, something that will sort out all this influx of information into a logical order.

Hence the wonder of search engines, which have transformed the meaning of search and has made our jobs easier. This paper focuses on search engine case studies around the world. Different search engine regions selected for research in this paper were: American, European, Canadian, Australian and the UK.

American Search Engines

Introduction

As of January 1, 2004 the estimated human population of the United States of America was 292,287,428 and there were 164,100,000 computers (1). An estimated 90,000,000 households have access to internet (2). With this many people surfing the web, curiosity might cause one to wonder about the search engines being used in America. Two of the most popular and well known search engines in America are Google and Yahoo. Although most people have a preference to one or the other search engine it is difficult to say one is truly better than the other as the quality of search is similar. According to some users, Google is the most powerful search engine in the world (3). However, others users argue that between the two search engines, “There is an imperceptible difference in the quality and relevancy of results.” (3).

History of Google

Google, www.google.com, was created by two Stanford University students. The original name was BackRub but by 1998 the name had been changed to Google and it became a private company (4). A Googol is (10100), the word Google was created as a variation (5). Some argue that Google is the top search engine in the world and indeed it has become so popular that it is now known as a verb (5).

General Information

Google has grown from indexing 25,000,000 pages in November of 1998 to 4,285,199,774 pages in of June 2004 (6). Google is a crawler based search engine, meaning that the search engine sends out crawlers which automatically visit sites, follow links and create indexes which are then searchable (7). Google is currently in a legal battle with the court systems to keep its name out of the dictionary (5). Google was the first major search engine to index non-HTML web content allowing PDF files to be accessed (8). Google also offers services such as “cached” links that allows a user to view older versions of pages. Other features include spell check, dictionary definitions, integration of stock quotes, street maps, and telephone numbers (4).

Google Homepage

The home page offers a user many convenient features. Google has an easy to use tool bar that users can download onto their personal computers (3). If a user wants to search specifically for pictures the “Images” button will give them access to the entire web but only those results containing images will show up. The “Groups” button allows users to participate in discussions that are taking place on Usenet newsgroups. The “News” button will provide headline news stories and you can have news alerts on specific subjects sent directly to your email.

“Froogle” is a simple, easy way for a user to search for a bargain or even a specific item online. The “more” link provides access to human-compiled information from the “Directory”, allows a user to get travel information or even simply use a calculator. The “Advanced Search” will allow a user to limit a search to PDFs or .edu search results. “Preferences” allows customization of Google services. “Language Tools” will translate any website or article into an understandable language. If you’re curious about Advertising, Business Solutions or about Google, click below the search box on one of the links. The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button will take a user directly to the first page result of their search and not show any other pages. Google lists its sponsored links separately from its general search results.

History of Yahoo

Yahoo, www.yahoo.com, was created in 1994 (4). Most people are familiar with the phrase, “Do You Yahoo?” created as a Yahoo advertising slogan.

General Information

In 2004 Yahoo is believed to be indexing about 3 billion pages (9). Yahoo is the oldest directory, “relying on human editors to organize web sites into categories” however, Yahoo decided to make a giant shift towards crawler based listings in October of 2002 (4). Yahoo previously relied on Google for search results but in February of 2004 Yahoo created its own search technology (4). “It is important to note the new search engine is for web results only. Image search is still powered by Google, and News search is a combination of Yahoo’s own editorial and technological resources.” (10). Yahoo has many of the same features Google provides such as “cashed” links, spell check, dictionary, yellow pages, and mapping programs. Yahoo also provides email services for free as long as the user doesn’t mind sharing the page with advertisements. In fact, Yahoo’s knowledge and experience from the email services are believed to be helpful in providing Yahoo with a deeper understanding of spam and an ability to keep it out of their web page index (10).

Yahoo Homepage

Yahoo’s home page is cluttered compared to the simple format of Google. Yahoo has the typical advanced search options and preferences allowing for customization of features. To the right of the search box is a pull tab that allows a user to limit their search to the web, images, yellow pages, news, or product information. A user can look up movie times, send yahoo greetings, search for a house, or find travel information, just to name a few things. Yahoo’s website directory has sites organized by subjects such as, education, science, health, and government. Towards the bottom of the page is a list of local Yahoo’s. Who knew that there was a Yahoo Singapore let alone a Yahoo Catalan. Like Google, Yahoo lists its sponsored links separately from its general search results.

European Search Engines

Introduction

There are 44 nations in the European region. These countries are home to 567,095,995 people, 9.33% of the world’s population (11). Each of these countries has at least one regional public search engine. Some of them have several (12). Booz-Allen & Hamilton, one of the United States’ older and more respected consulting firms conducted a study which pointed out that “…22% of European households have access to the Internet” and in 2004 it is expected that, “Western Europe should have more than 215,000,000 users on the Internet on at least a quarterly basis (13).”

The countries of Europe have been involved in a long and complex process of European integration. The EU was formed 1 November 1993 and is a union of 25 independent states (Appendix 1) (14). As one of its objectives; the EU has taken on the challenge of integrating member states and surrounding countries to provide them with stable Internet and E-commerce development and growth (15). Alltheweb and Ezilon are two of the many search engine companies that are seeking to capitalize on the opportunity provided by the EU integration.

History of Alltheweb

Fast Search and Transfer (Fast) ASA started business operations in 1997 in Oslo, Norway. In June 2001 they went public. Fast is an outgrowth of academic research and development from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (16). Fast Search and Transfer launched Alltheweb in May 1999 and gave it the brand name of “Fast” until 2001, when the site was redesigned under the “Alltheweb” brand. Alltheweb, www.alltheweb.com, then became a public search engine and technology showcase for the Fast Search Company (17). In February of 2003, Overture announced they would purchase Alltheweb from Fast. The acquisition, coupled with their previous announcement to purchase the AltaVista Company, helped Overture to bolster their leadership in commercial search and aligned the company to create the most comprehensive search capability on the Internet (18). Yahoo! Corporation bought Overture on October 7, 2003 to fortify itself for an eventual showdown with Google and Microsoft (19).

General Information

Alltheweb now has all of the indexing power of Google. Through the acquisition process, Alltheweb has increased its prowess to become a leader in the search engine community throughout Europe (19). Its employees strive to help Yahoo provide the best public search engine not just in Europe, but the world.

Alltheweb Homepage

Pulling up the Alltheweb homepage (20) the user is provided with a simple and easy to navigate site. Alltheweb homepage contains five tabs: web, news, pictures, video and audio. However, the user has to search for a specific topic to find information in these categories rather than information being available for them on the site. All “sponsored links” are viewed to the right of the page where they are available if desired. Only after glancing through all of the paid links does the viewer come to the most relevant search returns. On completion of a search for a topic the user is provided with an option to “Refine your search” which provides further subcategories on the topic. Other features offered on Alltheweb are the ability to filter potential offensive content, restrict the number of results per page, highlight search terms, change text size, and the ability to open search results in a new window. You can select up to 8 preferred languages from a list of 36.

History of Ezilon

Ezilon.com search engine was founded to allow individuals and companies around the world to access information easily, particularly by the EU community. (21) The Ezilon homepage states that Ezilon.com is a European Union International Search Engine and Directory. (22)

General Information

Ezilon search engine provides a searchable directory for European websites ranging from Europe travel links, business, hotels, news and classified ads and most especially links from the Western European countries. They also accept listings for non EU websites, but they must have contents of interest to the EU or general Europe. (23)

Ezilon Homepage

Ezilon homepage has immediately accessible information on it. Unlike other websites which present “Sponsored links” Ezilon provides “Sponsored matches” prior to the search results. Ezilon’s “Sponsored matches” can be viewed to the right of the page.

Ezilon specializes, through the guidance of the EU, in pooling and distributing information for the advancement of a united Europe. Other convenient features available to users are: popular links, weather forecast and headline news. Various categories are available for search e.g., art, science, business, technology etc. Users have an option to search the EU, UK or the World. In addition to all above mentioned features free email is provided to members of Ezilon.

Canadian Search Engines

Introduction

As of July 1, 2004 estimated population of Canada is 32,247,874 with 16,19,000 internet users (24). Canada today stands at the number 7 position among countries with internet users (25). There are 13 provinces and territories in Canada and the usage of search engines varies by these provinces and territories (26). This section will focus on only two of the top five most commonly used Canadian Search Engines: AltaVista Canada and AOL Canada (27). The following sections will provide a brief history, general information and information about the homepages of these two search engines.

History of AltaVista Canada

AltaVista, which means “a view from above,” was inspired by the creation of big ideas from a team of experts with fascination for keeping track of information (28). During the spring of 1995, scientists at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Research lab in Palo Alto, CA, devised a way to store every word of every HTML page on the internet in a fast searchable index (28). This led to AltaVista’s development of the first searchable, full text database on the World Wide Web (28). Compaq became the owner of AltaVista after it purchased Digital in 1998. AltaVista was later spun off into a private company, controlled by CMGI. Overture, purchased the AltaVista in April 2003, eventually Overture became part of Yahoo which led to the ownership transfer of AltaVista to Yahoo (29). AltaVista Canada was launched in January of 1998. Over 1,500,000 unique users visited the site and traffic to the site grew by over 300% within the first year of its launch. AltaVista Canada was a result of an agreement between TELUS advertising Services and Compaq Computer Corp.’s AltaVista Search Service (30).

General Information

AltaVista was the first to deliver internet’s first Web Index in 1995. It was also the first in offering multilingual search capabilities on the internet and to launch image, audio and video search capabilities. It has been awarded 61 search-related patents, more than any other internet search company (28). AltaVista is great for international sites. It will find sites not only in English on a topic, but in just about every language imaginable. In case the user isn’t bilingual, Alta Vista also includes a very handy translation tool (31).

AltaVista Canada Homepage

The homepage of AltaVista offers users various convenient and easy to use features. The homepage houses Canadian web index of more than 14,000,000 pages. It allows you to search worldwide or within Canada. For the convenience of its users, AltaVista Canada provides a feature to select a language in which to present the results of its search. AltaVista provides a toolbar which is free, customizable and gives the user the research tools to perform searches and translations from their own browser anywhere on the web. Popup blocker feature on the toolbar gets rid of annoying pop-ups. The “Web search” searches within all AltaVista indexes, including the best image search on the web. The homepage also provides specific features that help you narrow your search for only images, music files, videos, news and directory based on specific topic. “Advanced search” option provides different features for search options e.g., phrase, keywords, date, file type, location and sites per page option.

History of AOL Canada

AOL Canada Inc. is a leading interactive service company focused on enhancing Canadians online user experience. The company is a strategic alliance between American Online, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner and RBC Royal Bank, the personal and commercial banking division of RBC Financial, one of North America’s leading diversified financial services companies. This alliance took place on July, 1999. The company operates three interactive online services tailored to the Canadian marketplace, AOL English and French services, CompuServe and Netscape Online as well as several leading Internet brands including AOL.CA, AOL Canada Search, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Netscape.ca and MapQuest (32).

General Information

Members of AOL Canada Inc. have an added advantage. In addition to regular Web access, clients may choose to surf inside of the AOL environment, which is only available to AOL Canada Inc. members. Inside the AOL environment, members receive a great deal of Canadian content that has been streamlined to meet their needs. Surfing on the World Wide Web can sometimes be overwhelming and frustrating due to the excessive amount of information available. AOL Canada Inc. has chosen the most popular channels and listed them on the Channel Menu, each channel offering an abundant amount of information provided by AOL Canada Inc. and their partners on that particular topic (33).

Homepage of AOL Canada

AOL Canada’s homepage presents a variety of features to make search and web surfing easier for its users. Some features presented on its main page are: a sign in for AOL instant messenger, mail, parental control, reminders and calendar etc. It has a section for “Shopping online” which gives its users an option to choose the specific item they are shopping for. “Web channels” feature gives users a chance to search the web for careers, auto, entertainment, health news, sports etc. It also contains a section for yellow and white pages search. Users can search for people or places in this section. AOL Canada search, which is powered by Google, gives users a chance to search by topic or key words. The “Advanced search” feature only has options for words and phrases rather than file type or specific sites e.g. .edu or .org. Search results include “Sponsored links” and matching sites. It also has a “devices” tab where AOL offers Palm Organizers. Other information included on the homepage is company information, news, pricing plans, employment and contact information.

Australian Search Engine

Introduction

Although the internet is globally accessible, the majority of its users reside in the more developed nations where computer usage is most common. Australia has a high percentage of computer usage which resulted in increased usage of the internet and development of search engines. The Australian population is currently 20,141,793 (34) with 10,600,000 (35) computer users. Of which 9,240,000 (24) have internet access.

History of Web Wombat

As computers were being integrated into Australian businesses and homes, companies, such as Web Wombat, began to develop search engines to make information more accessible to Australians and the world. As the internet grew and more pages began to be indexed, Web Wombat turned its focus inward on Australia (36). This strategy proved to be very successful as evident by the fact that today Web Wombat’s spiders crawl the web for new sites to add to its already vast cache of 100,000,000 web sites, making it Australia’s leading search engine (37).

Homepage of Web Wombat

Web Wombat indexes and stores a tremendous amount of information and the way in which they chose to present it is slightly different than other search engines. The lay out of Web Wombat’s home page is initially dominated by advertisements. To the left of the home page there is a box titled “Premium links” which are not organized in any specific order. An example of this is the fact that, of the twenty one listings within the box, there are three separate links to car rental sites, two to hotels, and miscellaneous links to things such as online dating. This information would be more useful to consumers if it were categorized in some fashion within a directory or if it were displayed to the side of a related search. Under the “Premium links” box is the “Daily resources box” which provides links ranging from links to world newspapers to Grumpy’s humor. At the top of the page there are a number of headings ranging from careers and education to auctions.

The interesting thing is that when you click on auctions it takes you directly to ebay.com.au. However, the careers and education tab is far more objective. This link provides a menu on the left with a variety of helpful links and then articles with links in the center of the page. The “Search” field is displayed in the center of the page however; it is not very prominent once barraged by ads, premium links and advertisements. The “Advanced search” has an interesting feature which enables people to search by “nice to have words”, “must have words”, “nice to have phrase”, and the ability to eliminate certain words. This feature becomes very convenient when a user wishes to narrow the results to a desired city under “nice to have words”. By focusing the search in such a way, the information delivered is made more relevant without eliminating too many possible matches. Another nice feature is that “Advanced search” enables people to specifically search all Australian pages, Australian government sites, or Australian educational pages.

UK Search Engines

Introduction

The population of UK as of July 2004 is 60,270,708 with 25,000,000 internet users (24). There are approximately 40 top Search engines in the UK; some of them are familiar to the United Stated such as Google, Yahoo and Overture. These search engines are custom suited to have optional searches, whether regional searches within the UK or on the Entire World Wide Web. Some search engines within the UK are more specialized; where you have to pay a subscription to use that particular search engine, for example UK Plus and UK Index. And some search engines like Great British Pages, only search for British websites (39). Being a developed country, it is not surprising that the UK has a large number of search engines. The following section of the paper is focused on UK originated search engines.

History of Excite

Excite was originally formed in 1993 by five Stanford university graduates who called their search engine Architext. This was further developed by students attending Stanford and in 1994 Excite Inc. came about and was launched in 1995. Excite only acquired a web crawler in November 1996 and over the years they added features and software and the option of search on the World Wide Web. Regional search engines such as Excite UK were added to their search engine. Excite has an index of 250,000,000 pages and multimedia items in 2000 and about 19,000,000 monthly users (40).

General Information

Using a specific UK search engine such as Excite UK can be beneficial. Excite UK will limit your search geographically and the users results will come out in a smaller scale providing more relevant results (41). If a user in the UK wants to find out about local news or check the stock of UK companies a regional search engine will provide more relevant information.

Excite Homepage

Features of Excite UK are different compared to the usual “dot com” American search engines. The Excite UK search engine homepage has the search box in a prominent position at the top of the page with options located below to search the World Wide Web or only UK sites. In this respect it is a dual search engine (UK and World Wide Web) (40, 42). Excite UK has a General User Interface (GUI) which is very busy, meaning that it has a lot of information on its homepage ranging from UK news headlines and images, UK stocks, UK online shopping, UK stores, standard horoscopes, local weather, a directory, and various other services targeted for people living in the UK (42). The Excite homepage is also customizable, in that you are able to change the color of the homepage (skins) according to your favorite color or to the colors of your favorite football team. Besides just searching the web on Excite, you can search using “Categories” for images, videos, mp3s, news, and people. The excite UK homepage also has a currency calculator under the “Tools” section. Excite UK displays minimum advertising. When a user clicks on the “More” button different subcategories within a search can be selected (43).

Conclusion

Search engines have become an integral part of internet use for the average computer user. As more information becomes accessible on the internet, the need for credible search engines increases. As Professor Krishnamurthy stated in class, the amount of content available on the internet has grown exponentially in recent years and as it grows people’s search cost will increase unless search technology improves (38). Throughout the world, internet users are provided with various search engines that offer different features depending on their user needs. The fulfillment of these needs result in the success of search engines around the world.

About The Author

Anastacia Chetty, George McNiel, Joel Ennis, Julie Wartes, T.J. Tiwana

University of Washington

In part I - Google Page Rank Is Dead - Or Ist It?

http://web-marketing.smartads.info/2004/august-11.html

I discussed how Google’s Page Ranking System has become obsolete, but at the same time, many business savvy entrepreneurs still give it credit and could possibly discredit or credit your website accordingly to it’s rank.

“Let’s really go in depth to take our 1st steps towards leaving Google’s page ranking behind!”

If you’re like 1000’s of people online, you’ve been following page ranking so close for so long, it can be really though for you to break the habit. “No habit can be completely broken, it must be replaced with another”.

1st Step: Remove Page Rank From Your Google ToolBar

Google probably won’t like me for this one but I recommend clicking on “Options” within your google toolbar, take off “Page Rank”.

Congratulations, you’ve done it. Marketing your website has taken a new turn, a bright road is ahead!!

We can now go back and search online. Before we do, try NOT to think about how a website’s importance was measured by Google’s page rank, instead take a good look at each site that you visit.

Pay special attention to the content, layout, usability, and friendliness. Do you like it? Why do you like it? Right down things, images, layouts, anything that you like from websites that you pass by.

Create a “Favorites Folder” within your browser, call it “Opportunities”. Within this “opportunities” folder, add websites that interest you, or that would interest your visitors.

Combine all these favorite things that you like to form new ventures for your business. Keep GOING BACK to these web resources that you liked and take a look to see if there are any good opportunities for both companies to prosper together.

Web Marketing is never done alone, successful marketing online needs you to create your own “web” to catch visitors with. What better way to do so then by connecting with websites that you like.

Why should we do this?

In order to stay away from Google’s Page Ranking all together, we need to replace it with our own “web measurement system” to determine whether or not our company should recommend, swap ads, or do business with the other.

In the end, we won’t be selecting websites just because they rank well, we will finally be selecting only websites that we all personally like.

Personal resources create a better world for your visitors. Just remember, many of your visitors have no idea about the world of Google Page Ranking and how you may of been addicted to it.

Building A Personal Ranking System:

In order to personally rank websites, there are a few measurements you can take… Ask yourself these questions when browsing…

* What is their alexa ranking? or Rank from Ranking.com?

Does the site seem to be getting matching traffic with yours?

Does the site you are looking at have incoming links from Google in the same industry as yours? Pay close attention to who links to the websites your research.

* Most Important: Do you get a good feeling when you visit their site?

If you don’t, 8 times out of 10, other visitors won’t either. I never recommend a website that doesn’t feel right. 1st impressions mean a lot more than people think. At times, the internet is a sub-conscious activity and many things that we see make us react to it without even knowing it. You want people to like you and trust you enough to do with business with you.

* Last but not least: Will you be happy knowing that the websites you recommend have a personal touch and your visitors will be better off because of it?

Once we all get in a good groove online and start adding complete personal resources on our websites, the internet will be a better place for all our visitors.

Try and let the larger resource directories within your field to list everything possible, the best course of action for your business is to create something with your own personal touch.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this II part series!

About The Author

Martin Lemieux

Smartads - President

Affordable Web Design & Web Site Marketing

http://www.smartads.info & http://www.smartads.ca

Martin’s Weekly Marketing Tips: http://www.smartads.info/newsletter

Daily Web Marketing Tips: http://web-marketing.smartads.info

Entrepreneur Help Site: http://mindpower.smartads.info

Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article within your website and/or newsletter as long as everything remains in tact. Copyright 2004, Martin Lemieux, Smartads.

In a perfect world, everyone would be honest.

In a perfect world, no one would violate search engine policies to try get a better listing.

They’d respect the terms set out by the search engines. It’s not a perfect world. And especially not when it comes to the highly competitive search engine optimization industry. Prime example;

1) Here is a quote taken from a “search engine optimization” website;

“Sophisticated doorway pages (those that contain unique optimized text) are still an excellent way to rank
with the search engines.”

2) Here is a quote taken from Google’s Webmaster Guide;

“Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site…
The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant…”

When I was in the sandbox (and I don’t mean the Google Sandbox) my mother taught me to be sure my information comes
from the horse’s mouth. That’s still good advice today.

Which are lies and which are misconceptions?

Who knows? Did the SEO (search engine optimizer) actually read Google’s Guidelines?
Is it old advice that hasn’t been updated for years?

The truth is, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you need to know the guidelines because
you will be the one to pay the price for anything done on your behalf. They are publicly posted for that reason.
You should read these two;

http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and

http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

I am not an “SEO” - I do not offer SEO services. I’m a website designer that believes designers
should understand search engines since they’re creating the pages that search engines will be indexing. I know that if
a search engine optimizer promises you good ranking and violates search engine policies to get them, it’s your
site that will be removed from Google. Not theirs. You need to know that, too.

Learn from 10 years of experience. Get free help at
WebsiteVoodoo.com

Link Building is vital for a good placement in any search engine
and most website owners are unaware of this or don’t really
understand how it actually works.

Apart from good Keyword research and the right meta tags,
linking building is an absolutely must for the success of any
website and is an on going process, so make sure your put some
time aside for this on a weekly basis or pay some one with
experience to do it for you. Without it your website will
certainly get no traffic.

There are 4 different types of Linking involved and each one is
as important as the other.

If they are done correctly, they most certainly will give you a
good ranking in the search engines.

They are :

Reciprocal Links Oneway Links MultiSite Links Directory Listings

Reciprocal Linking

Quite simply - this is a link from your site to another and they
link back to you. A bit of advise here is to only link to sites
that are relevant to yours. i.e - If you are selling Cars - only
link to Car websites, a link to a Health website will really do
you no justice, and trust me I have seen hundreds of website
owners make this mistake. What’s important here is not number of
the links you have, but the quality and relevancy of the site
your are linking back to. Be Selective and also take a good look
at the sites linking to the site you want to link. It’s really
no good if this Car Site you want to link to has 40 reciprocal
Links from Online Pharmacies.

How to Do this :

1. Pay a SEO Company to do it for you. ( recommended - but can
be quite expensive ) 2. Buy Them 3. Link Exchange Sites. 4.
Search for them on your own

Important : Do not add to many reciprocal links to quickly,
build it up gradually otherwise you will be penalised by the
search engines, as it will be seen as un-natural. A good way to
start is not more than 10 to 20 in one month. As your site gets
older you can start adding more.

One Way Links

This is what the search engines call a natural link, and these
links are given a far better ranking than a reciprocal link. The
easiest way to do this is to write articles on what you are
selling and then submit them to article directories with a link
back to your website. Website owners are always looking for
content for their sites, and Article Directories are the easiest
way for them to get content, with out them having to write them
on their own. There are hundreds of these directories around and
the more you submit to the quicker you will build up your one
way links. It also is less time consuming than reciprocal
linking and you will get far better results.

MultiSite Links

For this to be effective you need at least 3 to 4 websites to be
involved in this. It is also seen as a natural link by the
search engines and can be quite difficult to do if you only have
one website. Although it can be done. You will just need to find
3 other websites that are interested.

How it works is this :

You link to site B, Site B links to site C, Site C links to site
D and site D links back to you. This way all the sites get a
link with out any of them creating a reciprocal link.

Directory Listings

This is also seen as a natural link as most directories don’t
require a link back. It’s very simple and all you need to do is
submit your site to as many directories as possible. There are
thousand’s of them on the Internet, so all it requires is a
little bit of time and hard work. If you make it your goal to
submit to one a day, the process won’t become a tiresome.

Good Luck.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Boost Your Website
Traffic

Search engines bring more than 80 percent of the traffic for
small to medium websites. This tells exactly how important it is
for small and medium websites to optimize their web structure
and pages for search engines. Optimization of your website for
search engine includes many aspects: website content, keywords,
URL, meta-tag, back links, etc. Let’s explain it one by one.

Select the right keywords. You can pay a visit to your
competitors’ websites (only those with top-ranked search engine
placements). Through analyzing their web contents and meta tags,
you can easily find out the keywords they are using. Overture
keywords selection tool can also provide you valuable
information. Open your favorite browser, enter
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/,
type in the search box your keywords or phrases and see how many
times they were searched last month. Select those with high
search frequency. Google also has a similar keyword selection
tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox. You
can have a try of both of them and balance the search results.

Target your web site content at selected keywords. After
finalizing the keywords, you can now build up your web pages
with them. But, be careful, don’t overuse any keywords on your
web pages. Overuse of keywords may make search engine spiders
think you are spamming and get your website banned. How can I
judge overuse or not? Go to http://www.gorank.com/seotools/ to
have a check of your keywords density, make sure it is within a
reasonable range.

Make search engine friendly URLs. Although some of the
search engines can follow all dynamic URLs, like
http://www.scriptmenu.com/detail.php?id=25257, some of them
still prefer static URLs ended with html, htm, etc. To make
search engine friendly URLs, you can create real static pages,
but you don’t have to. The web server URL rewrite engine can
make this job much easier by reinterpreting the URLs before
getting actual pages. If you need more help or tips on how to
implement URL rewrite model, follow the link
http://www.scriptmenu.com/detail_24379.html and get a tutorial.

Get quality backward links to your page. Although
keywords optimization of your web pages can improve
significantly your search engine placement, it is still far from
sufficient to get your pages top ranked. You have to get some
quality backward links to your websites. You need at least 35
quality back links to make google going to your web site and
take a look at you. You can get these quality links by
submitting your site to high-ranked web site directories or by
writing some quality articles and then submitting them to the
high-ranked online article archives. Many other ways exist, but
remember, only backward links from quality web sites count.
Websites poorly indexed or with very low search engine ranking
have no value to you.

Keep on improving your website. By keyword optimization,
URL optimization and quality backward URLs, your website should
have gotten remarkable search engine placement. However, the
placement is not static, you competitors are optimizing their
websites and trying to kick you out of your current position. To
maintain a good search engine ranking, you have to keep on
improving your website. Keep on optimizing your website
navigation, content and structure. Keep on getting more quality
links from top-rated sites…. The battle for top search engine
positions will never end. Good luck,

So you built a website, you have a product, but it’s not selling. What’s your sales message? Does your site scream out to potential customers “BUY ME!!” or does it simply say “Hi, we’re here, we have a product, if you want one…well you could buy it here…or go…YUCK!

Let’s look at a simple way of changing that perspective of using a call to action.

Dr. Jerry Teplitz in one of his lessons at a place I will call IBI. You can look at it as the Free Enterprise Forum through IBI Global, located at IBI GLOBAL described people’s reading habits when reading a webpage as that of looking at a large capital letter “Z”.

Within that letter “Z” are about 5-6 action points or calls to action. At least there should be. Upper left…Subscribe to our newsletter…upper right…BUY our PRODUCT…middle of the page…did you know this?…lower left…join our mailing list…lower right…BUY MORE PRODUCTS.

Question is, does your web page do this? If not, it should. Why? What if I told you that by doing this one simple thing, that you could increase your revenue from your website by as much as 30%! Would you do it then? If you were making $0.00 and you could increase that by 30% I think you might. Or if you were making $1,000.00 per month and you could increase that to $1,300.00 per month..or more. It keeps going up. Best part is 30% is not the limit of the increase. It goes up exponentially.

Granted this will not do it alone. You still need traffic coming that is searching for your product, or your service, and you need an attractive price point to deliver them to your shopping cart. However, this will increase their stay time on your website, and the longer people are there, the more apt they are to buy. This is a proven fact.

Language is key to everything in sales. Positioning of the product, size of images, attractiveness of the image/box, the way you ask someone to buy. The way that you “close” the sale.

Don’t be afraid to ask for the business. Ask for it directly. Offer incentives to customers. Offer a money-back guarantee. All of these things instill confidence in your being the best alternative and make sure that you communicate that they’d be foolish to do business with anyone else but you.

You can be direct in that language “You’d be foolish to buy a product similar to this one”. Or you could say “If I were you, I’d think twice about purchasing a “similar” product. You figure out what works for your buying public, but make the message clear. You want the business, you’re willing to do just about anything to get the business, but you’re the best deal going.

Once you have done that, your sales will increase. Make the message clear, position the product calls to action on your webpages in obvious places and then hire a firm like DocMurdock.com to optimize your website and expose it to your target market with traffic looking to purchase your product or service. Nothing like having a website for auto parts and the visitors who show up are looking for candy and don’t buy anything. I can help you change that. So don’t waste your time and your money. Come to someone who will work with you, examine your expectations, ensure they’re realistic for your website, and help you with consulting for offline as well as online marketing.

After all, just because you built the building, filled it with goods and hung out the sign that says “OPEN FOR BUSINESS” doesn’t mean people will flock in and buy. You still have to market to them, and give them a reason to purchase from nobody else but you.

See you on the web.

Michael Murdock, CEO
DocMurdock.com

Michael Murdock former Macintosh Systems Engineer for PIXAR, and Systems Engineer at SUN Microsystems brings his expertise of the web to SEO. He’s been doing this for more than 8 years and helped many companies gain prominence on the Internet Search Engines. He can be found at http://www.docmurdock.com

SEO training can be overwhelming. There are literally hundreds of factors that go into search engine ranking on today’s major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. When designing a web site or a web page for high search engine ranking,avoid making this one mistake that alone could prevent you from achieving a top ten ranking on your target keywords. What is this one costly mistake? Read on to find out.

Build your site on a good foundation

Your web site structure is the foundation to high search engine ranking. If you build your website with the wrong structure, anything else you do to promote your web site will be crippled from the start. The most costly mistake you could do to cripple your SEO efforts is to build your web site using frames.

Using Frames makes your job so much harder

Using frames on your site makes it much more difficult to achieve high search engine ranking. Does it make it impossible? No, but it does make it much more difficult. With all the competition already our there for achieving high search engine rankings on competitive keywords, why would you want to make your work harder than it has to be?

How do frames prevent high rankings?

If you go to any web site that has frames, right click anywhere on the page, and choose ‘view source’, you’ll notice that the HTML that comes up has nothing to do with the text on the page. The main frameset usually calls the other frames for content and doesn’t contain much relevant content on its own. At best, this hurts the importance placed on your target keywords (known as keyword prominence) and at worst, it prevents your real text from even being seen by the search engine. Either way, these effects are undesirable.

“I have to use frames, is there no hope?”

If you have to use frames, you will want to make sure that your main frameset page is optimized for your target keywords. Make sure it has a relevant title, meta keyword and meta description and that is contains at least a little text on the topic of the keyword.

Avoid Frames at All Cost

The disadvantages of using frames for your web site greatly outweigh any perceived advantage for easier navigation or any desired design effect. I would recommend that you avoid using frames at all costs.

Joe Duchesne is a partner in a web hosting business http://www.yowlingbuilder.com that specializes in offering an easy to use web site builder that even a beginner to the internet can use to create a professional looking web site.