Why Search Engines Cannot Answer All Your Queries

Writen by Partha Bhattacharya

Do you search with an embedded syntax? If you do, you'll be able to mine valuable information from search engine repositories. Let me take an example. Suppose you're looking for non-reciprocal link-givers for your web pages. What will be your search syntax? It may be something like "Suggest a link" +"keyword". If you are looking for links for the keyword phrase "clay art", your search query will be "Suggest a link" +"clay art".

Now, I am not a search syntax expert. I've learnt the above technique from Bill Hartzer's article here. Bill provides good suggestions on how to look for potential link partners.

What becomes apparent is that if you are not a search expert, you stand to loose out on valuable information from search engines. Many of us suffer from this disadvantage despite search engines' help, such as this one from Google.

While reflecting on this some time back, I started to realize that it is indeed less than often that I am really able to unearth solid relevant information from search engines. There are 2 main issues here. First is our ability or inability to squeeze out information from search engines. The second is search engine's ability or inability to provide relevant information in response to your query. Listed below are some obvious hindrances that I've faced in my 'search experience'. Readers are welcome to offer their experience.

1. Search engines produce results based on search terms. If your search term doesn't match that of a product's website you ought to see, it'll altogether elude your attention.
2. Search results are in fact prioritized web pages. Since a webpage does not describe the full website, it is often possible that though you've arrived at the right website, yet you're unaware that your information is available in another webpage. You may probably give the page a miss.
3. Even if the 'most-suitable' product's webpage does find its way in your search results, it may be embedded deep inside the results that appear. It's hopeless to sift some 260,000 results or more to get your pick.
4. Search engines are constantly in a flux, altering its algorithm now and again to remain in reckoning for maximum usage by surfers, thereby affecting search results. What are there today, are gone tomorrow.
5. Many web pages are not optimized for top search results. After all, how many keywords/keyphrases can one optimize for? And then, once begun, one has to cling on to it, lest others 'snatch' the prized positions. Clearly, for many, such exercise is time-consuming and costly.
6. All search engines are not equally popular everywhere. If Google is numero uno in US, many in continental Europe prefer MSN. Besides, many websites opt for PPC ads or other online ads in various lesser-known search engines and directories. Therefore to find your best deal, you need to extensively search at many places, which clearly is not a practical solution.
7. In places where internet awareness is high, mass emailing, classified ads, press releases, etc. are some of the preferred promotion techniques for many, instead of search engine marketing.
8. To economize cost vis-à-vis quick return, many websites with excellent products prefer offline advertisements to online promotion.
9. In fast-changing web-scenario, if products or brands are sold and/or re-branded, or if the owner-companies loose focus, even best-selling items get heaped at the bottom, though still available online. It's virtually impossible to locate them in search results.
10. Many websites are too large to be fully indexed by search engine crawlers, or may be too slow to obvious discomfort of the crawlers.
11. Just aiming top search ranking simply doesn't ensure a product's usefulness vis-à-vis your need. With proper optimization techniques, it is not difficult for any webpage to come on top in search results. Then again, for many websites, there is a mistaken priority to rank high in search results instead of providing quality information to the viewers.

The bottom-line is that unless you plough through your searches with dogged determination and armed with a fine comb, chance is that search engines may not fetch you the answer you want, and want it now! In my experience, on an average, 6 times out of 10, I don't get the *ONE* I want.

And then consider the time it takes. Not many of us can or will spend an entire evening or two for just one nagging query. Also, few searchers are able to query intelligently since searching with requisite syntax is a specialization itself. To add to woe, this varies from one search engine to another. No wonder, even Google charges you for specific searches.

In an extension of this article, I plan to next look at the various options that are now available to get information on the web.

Partha Bhattacharya is an experienced web content provider. Partha's blog on web marketing is a big help for small website owners.

Is Content Really King The Power Of Links

Writen by Kurt Noer

On-page content and optimization by itself is no longer enough. Unfortunately, link popularity has become a dominant factor in deciding who ranks the highest within the major search engines, especially within Google. If a competitor of yours is both optimized for the same target search terms and has a higher quantity and/or higher quality of back links, they are going to outrank you: period. Even if your website is perfectly optimized for an extremely niche search term and no other site in the world even mentions your exact phrase, you may still have trouble finding your website if you do not have at least a few back links to "validate" your website.

If it came down to a contest between on-page optimization efforts against link building efforts, links would win hands down. You may find it shocking to hear a President of an optimization firm saying such a thing, but its true. I would challenge anyone to outrank a website that has a massive number of quality back links by using on-page optimization efforts alone with zero link building efforts. Whereas, you can easily outrank a website that is extremely well optimized by focusing heavily on link building efforts. An interesting example is Apple.com. One of the most important elements of optimization is to place the target key phrase within the meta title tag. However, search for the word "computers" on Google and you will find Apple.com on the first page of results. Apple does not even mention the word computers in their meta title tag. How is this possible when there are literally millions of competing websites that are aggressively trying to show up for this term by applying various optimization efforts? The answer is that Apple.com has a superior volume of back links (over 70,000 in Google alone). And a large percentage of these links include the word computers within the anchor text (i.e. Apple Computers, Mac Computers, etc.).

Does this mean Optimization is dead?

The answer of course, is no. Search engines still love websites that have tons of fresh and relevant content. It is the basis of what search engine results are all about. Copywriting fees are worth every penny when it comes to adding well written descriptions of your products and services onto your website. Professional optimization companies still flourish because of the success they bring to their clients through increased rankings and traffic. For optimum results, you need both optimization and links to succeed today.

It's not just the quantity of incoming links, but the quality and relevance of the websites from which they come, as well as what words are used within the visible text portion of the hyperlinks, i.e. "anchor text." Reciprocated links have less value than they use to and can potentially hurt your rankings if you are exchanging with too many unrelated websites, i.e. bad neighborhoods. One-way links are the best links.

During the last few Search Engine Strategies conferences, I could not help but notice an increasing number of link-related workshops, including a class dedicated to purchasing text links. Matt Cutts, official spokesman and software engineer for Google shared how he personally believes that buying links is like a politician buying votes and that incoming links should only grow naturally. He shared that the best way to receive incoming text links was to offer something truly helpful and/or unique and interesting to the public and that this would generate free unsolicited, incoming links without even asking. He offered some extreme examples of very creative websites, which caused a national media stir. Within minutes frustrated attendees spoke up about how the search engines started this whole thing by giving too much criteria to links in the first place, and that buying links on other sites (be it through banners or text links) has been a conventional form of advertising well before Google even existed.

Some commented that if Google was considering penalization for sites that buy or sell links, they should start with Yahoo, since Yahoo earns a good portion of their income from selling paid text links (i.e. $299/year directory listings). Interesting enough, Google actually recommends on their website that you submit to directories such as Yahoo.

I am sure that a majority of website owners today would love to come up with creative ideas that would generate a ton of unsolicited media attention. The truth is that coming up with something exciting to say about reverse vacuum pumps, or single-mode fiber optic tool kits, or Batesville real estate is easier said than done. Most of the clients we work with offer clear and simple information about their products and services. Waiting around for other websites to give them free, one-way text links may very well result in additional years of continual poor search engine rankings and a lack of sales.

So how do you build back links? Below is a short list of some of the most common ways to increase your back links:

- Offer something truly helpful that may inspire others to link to you without even asking.

- Hire a website positioning firm to help you write and distribute press releases and articles to thousands of sites.

- Ask business partners, vendors, distributors, family members, golf partners, etc. to link to you.

- Ask non-profit organizations if they would post a "contributor" link to you in exchange for a small donation.

- Offer quotes and testimonials to sites you are comfortable with in exchange for a direct link to your site.

- Exchange links with websites (but stay within your industry and away from automated programs).

- Purchase text link ads (costly, typically $20/month each and up – but may be worth it for the right industry).

- Submit to quality directories whose listings are known to show up as valid back links (excellent value).

Do you need thousands of links? Not necessarily. You may not even need hundreds. Everyday, we perform competitive back-link research and people are often shocked at how little it would take to rise above their competitors. Even if you are in a fairly competitive industry, there are often select search terms that may be far less competitive than others. This is why it is helpful to partner with an experienced search engine positioning company who can aid you in strategic decisions.

Kurt Noer is the President of a search engine positioning company called Customer Magnetism. They also provide link building services. Visit http://www.customermagnetism.com

How And When Should I Submit My Website To Google

Writen by Glenn Murray

As soon as you register your domain name, submit it to Google!

Even if you haven't built your site, or written an copy, or even thought about your content, submit your domain name to Google. In fact, even if you haven't fully articulated your business plan and marketing plan, submit your domain name to Google.

Don't wait!

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, getting on the search engines has always taken a long time for a new site. Even assuming you do everything right, it takes months before your site is even indexed, and more months before it starts to rank well. As a rule of thumb, never expect to rank highly within 6 months of submitting your site to Google.

The second reason is a recent phenomenon called 'Google Sandbox'. Many SEO experts believe that Google 'sandboxes' new websites. Whenever it detects a new website, it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine, credible, long term site. It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site).

By submitting your domain name to Google as soon as you register it, you're establishing a site history even if the site has no content. By the time you've built your site, written your copy, and developed the rest of your content (and written your business and marketing plans), Google will probably see no need to sandbox you.

If you wait until launch day to submit your site, you'll spend a month or two (maybe more) sitting in the sandbox watching potential customers spend their money elsewhere.

How to submit your site to Google

Don't waste money by paying someone else to submit your site to Google. It's easy!

Simply go to http://www.google.com.au/addurl.html, enter your URL (domain name) and a few comments or keywords to describe your site. Then click 'Submit'. That's all there is to it. You only have to do it once, and only for your top level page (i.e. Home page).

Google's robots will then crawl your website the next time they're out and about. Of course, they don't guarantee that you'll be included in their results.

IMPORTANT: As mentioned above, it takes quite a while for your site to appear in the search engines. This is partly because the search engines are big and slow – especially when it comes to new sites. It will take a minimum of 6-8 weeks before your site is indexed.

How to submit your site to other search engines

There are hundreds of search engines on the Internet. It's a lucrative business, after all! But don't panic; studies suggest that the top 11 search engines account for about 90% of web traffic. In other words, if you have the top 11 covered, there's no need to submit to the rest.

What's more, at the time of writing, most of the top 11 don't actually accept submissions. The only ones that do are Google (described above), Yahoo, and MSN. Here's a list of the available submit pages.

• Yahoo – http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html (offers free submission)
• MSN – http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2 (offers free submission)
• Alta Vista – covered by Yahoo submission
• Netscape – covered by Google submission
• Fast / All the Web – covered by Yahoo submission
• Ask Jeeves / Teoma – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• Hotbot – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• Lycos – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• AOL – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• Looksmart – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions

TIP: My SEO copywriting and advertising copywriting website, http://www.divinewrite.com, reached page 1 of Google.com for my primary keyword, "copywriter", without a dollar being spent on search engine submission. I only ever submitted my site to the engines that offer free submission.

Do I need to submit my site to other search engines?

As a rule, no.

With an estimated 8.8 billion pages indexed (approximately 76% of the Internet), Google is number 1 when it comes to search engines. It's argued that once Google has indexed your site, the other search engines will follow. Theoretically, you don't actually need to submit your site to Google either because it's always on the lookout for new content and will eventually find your site of its own accord. Google actually states, "Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it's likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form." ("Google Information for Webmasters" - http://www.google.com.au/webmasters/1.html#A1) Personally, I wouldn't like to take the risk.)

Having said that, it certainly doesn't hurt to submit your site to other search engines (especially if you haven't developed any content for it yet).

Conclusion

You don't need to be an SEO expert or an SEO copywriter to submit your site to Google and the other search engines. And you don't need to pay anything to do it. You just need to do it. And if your domain name is new, you need to do it NOW!

Happy submitting!

You're welcome to publish this article free of charge provided:

- you include the byline

- byline includes a functioning link to http://www.divinewrite.com

- you don't change the article in any way

- you provide a courtesy copy once published

- in doing so you agree to indemnify Divine Write and its directors, officers, employees and agents from and against all losses, claims, damages and liabilities which arise out of its use

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit www.DivineWrite.com or www.ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.

Domain And Page Naming Tricks For Better Seo Results

Writen by Lawrence Andrews

The importance of domain and page naming is obvious, but you might not have realized the connection to SEO. We all know that unless our domain name is highly recognizable and memorable then we won't get many customers, but good domain names also matter when it comes to search engine rankings – the more relevant your domain is to your keywords, the higher it will be ranked.

Domain names are not that difficult to come by at this point. Godaddy.com puts out some great prices and they run all sorts of specials once you become a customer. The more domains that you buy the more that they like you. The basic concept here is that people who buy a few domain names are probably going to become pretty big on the internet. The more that you own the more powerful you are. Domain names are like land in the early eighteenth century. They are valuable and the owners become a sort of elite class on the internet.

The value of domains is difficult to determine until you have purchased one and worked with it for a while. The difference between owning your own domain name and hosting your site on a sub domain or in a subdirectory of a domain is huge. The impact on your ability to perform SEO operations increases drastically simply by the ease of clarifying your URL for the search engines and directories that you submit to.

There are even directories out there that do not except anything except for domains. These are the kind of elitist sites that I described earlier. Domain names are the only way to go if you want to have a seriously successful website that becomes a household name. Directories that do not allow non-domain names are there to protect an investment. If you have spent money on purchasing and hosting a domain name you probably aren't to excited about seeing sites that haven't dropped a dime on investment being rated above you. This is a sort of aristecratic mind set, but it is a natural tendency of the mind. There are plenty of directories out there that everybody is able to access, but there are some out there that are only for the elite sites of the internet.

This elitist attitude towards domain names is beneficial to your sites because it allows you to get an edge on other sites simply by buying a domain name. This investment is the most crucial SEO investment that you can make. There are very few sites around that get huge numbers of hits (10,000+ per month) without having their own domain name.

So what do you need to do to get these good rankings? Start off by choosing a domain that matches your website well, and you're killing two birds with one stone. Your domain name and URL should reflect what you're trying to accomplish from your site. For example: calling your website 'thewebcorporation.com' isn't much good if it sells hot sauce. For hot sauce, deserthotsauce.com would be a better name – the desert's hot, like the sauce! Don't settle for anything that won't make people want to come to your site. Using the name of your company for your domain name is also a good way to go. This is the fastest way of providing a good, quality description of what the visitor is going to. Many visitors will actually consider your domain name the name of your company anyway so you might as well name yourself something that you want to be called.

Most webmasters settle for safe, can't-go-wrong www.myname.com domains, because it takes time to be creative and think up good names that contain your keywords. You might consider getting some help from the people around you, as you never know what they might be thinking that could be great. You need to come up with a few ideas in case some are taken – you'll be surprised just how many domains have gone.

Everyone always wants a .com, but you shouldn't rule out .net, .org, .us and the rest. For example, if deserthotsauce.com is taken, you might find that people like deserthotsauce.us just as much.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

Search Engine Spiders Lost Without Guidance Post This Sign

Writen by Mike Valentine

The robots.txt file is an exclusion standard required by all web crawlers/robots to tell them what files and directories that you want them to stay OUT of on your site. Not all crawlers/bots follow the exclusion standard and will continue crawling your site anyway. I like to call them "Bad Bots" or trespassers. We block them by IP exclusion which is another story entirely.

This is a very simple overview of robots.txt basics for webmasters. For a complete and thorough lesson, visit http://www.robotstxt.org/

To see the proper format for a somewhat standard robots.txt file look directly below. That file should be at the root of the domain because that is where the crawlers expect it to be, not in some secondary directory.

Below is the proper format for a robots.txt file ----->

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /group/

User-agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: Teoma
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: aipbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: BecomeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /

--------> End of robots.txt file

This tiny text file is saved as a plain text document and ALWAYS with the name "robots.txt" in the root of your domain.

A quick review of the listed information from the robots.txt file above follows. The "User Agent: MSNbot" is from MSN, Slurp is from Yahoo and Teoma is from AskJeeves. The others listed are "Bad" bots that crawl very fast and to nobody's benefit but their own, so we ask them to stay out entirely. The * asterisk is a wild card that means "All" crawlers/spiders/bots should stay out of that group of files or directories listed.

The bots given the instruction "Disallow: /" means they should stay out entirely and those with "Crawl-delay: 10" are those that crawled our site too quickly and caused it to bog down and overuse the server resources. Google crawls more slowly than the others and doesn't require that instruction, so is not specifically listed in the above robots.txt file. Crawl-delay instruction is only needed on very large sites with hundreds or thousands of pages. The wildcard asterisk * applies to all crawlers, bots and spiders, including Googlebot.

Those we provided that "Crawl-delay: 10" instruction to were requesting as many as 7 pages every second and so we asked them to slow down. The number you see is seconds and you can change it to suit your server capacity, based on their crawling rate. Ten seconds between page requests is far more leisurely and stops them from asking for more pages than your server can dish up.

(You can discover how fast robots and spiders are crawling by looking at your raw server logs - which show pages requested by precise times to within a hundredth of a second - available from your web host or ask your web or IT person. Your server logs can be found in the root directory if you have server access, you can usually download compressed server log files by calendar day right off your server. You'll need a utility that can expand compressed files to open and read those plain text raw server log files.)

To see the contents of any robots.txt file just type robots.txt after any domain name. If they have that file up, you will see it displayed as a text file in your web browser. Click on the link below to see that file for Amazon.com

http://www.Amazon.com/robots.txt

You can see the contents of any website robots.txt file that way.

The robots.txt shown above is what we currently use at Publish101 Web Content Distributor, just launched in May of 2005. We did an extensive case study and published a series of articles on crawler behavior and indexing delays known as the Google Sandbox. That Google Sandbox Case Study is highly instructive on many levels for webmasters everywhere about the importance of this often ignored little text file.

One thing we didn't expect to glean from the research involved in indexing delays (known as the Google Sandbox) was the importance of robots.txt files to quick and efficient crawling by the spiders from the major search engines and the number of heavy crawls from bots that will do no earthly good to the site owner, yet crawl most sites extensively and heavily, straining servers to the breaking point with requests for pages coming as fast as 7 pages per second.

We discovered in our launch of the new site that Google and Yahoo will crawl the site whether or not you use a robots.txt file, but MSN seems to REQUIRE it before they will begin crawling at all. All of the search engine robots seem to request the file on a regular basis to verify that it hasn't changed.

Then when you DO change it, they will stop crawling for brief periods and repeatedly ask for that robots.txt file during that time without crawling any additional pages. (Perhaps they had a list of pages to visit that included the directory or files you have instructed them to stay out of and must now adjust their crawling schedule to eliminate those files from their list.)

Most webmasters instruct the bots to stay out of "image" directories and the "cgi-bin" directory as well as any directories containing private or proprietary files intended only for users of an intranet or password protected sections of your site. Clearly, you should direct the bots to stay out of any private areas that you don't want indexed by the search engines.

The importance of robots.txt is rarely discussed by average webmasters and I've even had some of my client business' webmasters ask me what it is and how to implement it when I tell them how important it is to both site security and efficient crawling by the search engines. This should be standard knowledge by webmasters at substantial companies, but this illustrates how little attention is paid to use of robots.txt.

The search engine spiders really do want your guidance and this tiny text file is the best way to provide crawlers and bots a clear signpost to warn off trespassers and protect private property - and to warmly welcome invited guests, such as the big three search engines while asking them nicely to stay out of private areas.

Copyright © August 17, 2005 by Mike Banks Valentine

Google Sandbox Case Study http://publish101.com/Sandbox2 Mike Banks Valentine operates http://Publish101.com Free Web Content Distribution for Article Marketers and Provides content aggregation, press release optimization and custom web content for Search Engine Positioning http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm