Traffic Flow SEO

I have been secretly working on a small network of search engines that includes a proprietary ad network shared across all engines. Look-Find.Info is one of the first to work it's way out of beta and is officially live. There will be 9 additional engines coming out of beta over the next week as we work out minor bugs here and there. You can see the entire list here - The Search Engine Network

In the meantime check out Look-Find.Info and tell me what you think!

Also, if you are interested in increasing the traffic to your website and also the SEO value of your website to the major search engines, be sure to check out our Rapid Inclusion Program that gets you indexed in all 10 search engines within The Search Engine Network within 72 hours and also provides 10 backlinks from within each search engine's web directory section to your website. It is a win-win opportunity for a one-time $39 fee. Check it out now here - Rapid Inclusion Program

I recently had some problems with one of my hosting providers which saw one of my websites down more than up. This concerned me as the hosting company really did not want to provide me with any stats of how often I am down and/or let me know when there was a problem (whether they fixed if before I saw it or I found it and alerted them to it). This became very frustrating quickly, so I started looking around the Web for a FREE website uptime monitoring service and quickly found something pretty awesome.

What I found was Uptime Robot. Probably the coolest and most feature rich FREE website uptime monitors around. Below are some of the features (remember all this is FREE):
- Monitor up to 50 sites per account
- 5 minute pings
- Instant alerts via email, SMS, RSS and soon Twitter
- Ajax interface for ease of use
- http:// and https:// support
- Multiple contact alerts
- Multi-location monitoring
- Keyword checking (haven't quite figured this one out yet, but it sounds cool)



Check it out today for free at - Uptime Robot

I have seen a lot of free online keyword tools, but this one is very unique in that it offers an easy to use interface and can kick-out engine specific keyword lists.

Here is the short description from the website:

BulkWords is a free web application that lets you generate search phrases for use in your SEO and online advertising campaigns such as Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter.

Below is an instruction video that can explain the tool far better then me:

BulkWords, a webapp by RevenApps from revenapps on Vimeo.

For a little change of pace, your host and blog moderator Chris Westmeyer has given me this opportunity to share with you some information on the future of online content, and a discussion of some important points to understanding its future significance. Hope you enjoy!

When talking about content, the first premise to consider is that for most companies, competing online via “new technology” has become more and more difficult. The truth is, regardless of company size, there can only be a select few winners in the contest to be the best “technology-driven” business online.

True, the technological lead sometimes changes hands, like it did away from AOL and MySpace to the current leaders in their respective fields. But those occurrences are becoming rare. Companies such as Google have gained so much mass, brand equity and momentum that it may be years before they are supplanted in any meaningful way. They won’t be handing off their lead in many categories anytime soon.

No, the way to compete today is by becoming a purveyor of content. Drive traffic to your website, platform or service by creating and sharing valuable information to your target audiences. Fill a niche market. Find a group or segment with unmet needs, and fulfill them.

And this is exactly what AOL and MySpace have done. AOL bought the blog network Weblogs, home to many popular blogs, such as Engadget and Joystiq; and they now employ over 3,000 freelance writers and more than 150 full-time journalists. And the AOL portal is still popular, and drives traffic to their many in-house publications.

MySpace decided to become a home for music and celebrity content. The platform is no longer about networking with friends, passing that baton to Facebook some time ago.

So, MySpace is now focused on a wide variety of entertainment channels, and features a huge supply of new music and music videos. Their plans to offer Facebook Connect functionality clearly show how re-focused their business plan has become. They couldn’t beat Facebook in social networking technology, so they shifted to becoming a content provider.

So becoming a “destination” is the key to competing online, for almost every small and mid-sized business, and even for most large corporations. It should also be noted that we’re obviously talking about a continual and ongoing process for creating content, not a singular campaign or event.

And when analyzing the examples above, it’s easy to understand why content must also be “fresh.” Ask yourself the question: Would you read the exact same newspaper two or more days in a row? Probably not. You need to view your web content in the same manner.

Without ongoing content being added to your website, readers have no incentive to return. And though your website may be highly-ranked today, without fresh content being added the search engines will (eventually) simply move on to sites with newer information.

Ideally, this means you’ll have new content every time the search engine crawler (for SEO newbies, an automated program used to review websites) visits. You need to show the engines that your site is being actively monitored and managed, obviously a good thing in their eyes. This ensures the crawler always has fresh content to index, and new links to explore. It won’t ever see your site as “stale”, and decide to drop it in the rankings.

So, think about your web content as accomplishing two equally important goals:

1. The first is to provide clear, compelling information about your brand, products and services, to influence the buying behavior of visitors.

2. The second goal is to attract (and keep) the attention of the search engines, to build your potential audience and prospective business going forward.

Knowing exactly what keywords to focus on within your content is a conversation for another day, but SEO pros can analyze your business and let you know which words are the ones you should include in your content. But, once these keywords have been established, where can you find source material that can assist you in writing your web copy?

There are a number of effective strategies that you can use to generate your content. First, look around your desk or office, and you’ll probably see some marketing materials or sales tools that you have used to educate and solicit new business. This is an excellent place to start. If you send an email newsletter, or print and distribute a traditional version, that information should be shared on your website as well. Writing and distributing press releases online is another good strategy.

After you have found source materials, how do you share your content? Creating standard web pages is obviously one possibility. Starting your own blog and either writing it yourself, or hiring a freelance writer to assist you, is another winning strategy. A well-written blog can establish you as an expert within your business category; a “trusted advisor” that readers will consult with before making purchasing decisions. And having your own blog provides you with an open forum to share new developments and news items, sales, discounts and special promotions with your readership.

A blog also allows you to receive comments from your readership, which creates a more collaborative and interactive environment. This type of feedback is vital to understanding the changing wants and needs of your customer base, and responding appropriately.

Of course, we cannot ignore the massive amounts of new content generated on social media, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These networks also allow for a back and forth conversation with your most loyal customers and biggest brand champions, as well as your prospects. Your content communicates directly with your network, providing the opportunity for feedback, and also the opportunity for current customers to spread the message about your business with their other connections.

Hopefully this post helps to explain the vital importance of your web content now, and going forward. In future posts, we will explore some winning tactics that you can use to successfully create and share what you have created.

Jim


Jim Haynes is the owner of Hat Trick Associates (HTA), a firm specializing in the creation of online content. HTA designs, writes and distributes completely custom email newsletters, writes professional blogs for companies, and also sets up and manages social networking accounts for businesses. His team can assist you with any writing or online content needs, and can be visited online at: www.hattrickassociates.com.

Google officially announces that page load time does directly affect (admittedly it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page, but its does matter) rankings on their Google Webmaster Central Blog. They say this has actually been going on for a few weeks and that currently it is only affecting about 1% of US-based websites.

So, what does this mean to you? It is basically telling you that if you want to increase your chances of ranking well within Google search results, then increase your page load times.



Below are some tools provided by the search engines for download:
Free Google tool
Free Yahoo tool

But, to be honest I hate installing software (even from the major search engines) and love free online solutions, so below are two of the best:
WebPagetest
Octogate Site Timer

Also, if you need to compress some images you may want to check out the free (very robust and easy to use) online image editor Piknik which was recently bought by.......drum roll please......Google (who did you really expect).

Just in case you care - Entireweb is launching it's new (updated) search engine tomorrow (countdown timer available on their website at www.entireweb.com).

Entireweb at a glance (from the website):

Entireweb's goal is to be a leading supplier of search technology solutions. The international Web search engine www.entireweb.com is not only a highly popular general purpose search engine used by millions of people around the world - it is also a showcase of our search technology and our expertise in the field of ultra-high-performance information retrieval from huge unstructured data sources.

Entireweb currently handles over 100 million searches every month, and is a trusted partner of internationally acclaimed meta search engines such as Mamma and IxQuick, who rely on Entireweb to provide world-class search results.

The new search engine promises to be much more robust with a deeper index in order to better compete against Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com. Recent announcements from their blog highlight that the new engine will pull real-time data from OneRiot and image data from picsearch. Ads will be pulled from their SpeedyAds program and their is a new mobile interface available.

You can check it all out at the links below:
Entireweb Search Engine homepage
Entireweb Search Engine updates (via blog)
Add URL for FREE to Entireweb

This is just wrong, Tom has gone too far (but I could not stop watching)

I just had to share this as it was really well done (a bit older, but still funny). Hope you enjoy...:-)

Google recently introduced a new and cool web presence for their newest ad innovations (and analytics information) called none other than - 'Google Ad Innovations'.

So far it includes 4 sections broken out as such:

Search:
* Product Listing Ads
* Search Funnels
* Location Extensions with Multiple Addresses

Display:
* Remarketing
* YouTube Video Targeting Tool
* Above the Fold Advertising
* YouTube Insights for Audience

Mobile:
* Click to Call Phone Extensions

Analytics:
* Search Funnels
* Analytics Intelligence

Check it out for FREE at - Google Ad Innovations