Have you ever wanted to search multiple search engines at the same time? I am sure you can imagine the time it would save if you were able to use one search bar to pull data from popular search engines, social networks, and blogs. Now you can with a site called Addict-o-matic.

Addict-o-matic is a site that pulls data from multiple sources online to help users find the information they desire. Simply use the Addict-o-matic search bar to find what you want and then filtered results from popular sites such as Google, Digg, and Twitter will appear.

Imagine being able to search for something in popular search engines, social networks, and blogs all at the same time. Doing so would save you a lot of time. Addict-o-matic does just that. When you do a search, Addict-o-matic scans 25 popular sites to help you find the information you need. These sources include: Google News, YouTube, Twitter, Bing, FriendFeed, Popular Blogs, Technorati, Flickr, Digg, WordPress, Yahoo! News, and more.

In order to see how Addict-o-matic can help you, let’s assume that you’re in the market for a new laptop computer and have been hearing some great things about Apple’s new 13 Inch MacBook Pro. Doing a simple search for 13 Inch MacBook Pro is an excellent example to see how Addict-o-matic shines. The results produced are outstanding, especially considering the fact we’re trying to gather information about this computer so that a wise decision can be made about possibly purchasing it.

Immediately, Addict-o-matic has produced results from Twitter, Bing News, Google Blog Search, YouTube, Digg and quite a few more sites. What makes this situation beneficial is that finding consumer information about the 13 Inch MacBook Pro comes very real. You’re tapped into Twitter, which we all know, people love to rant and rave on Twitter. Both excellent and poor experiences are communicated on Twitter. And that includes the experiences with the 13 Inch MacBook Pro.

Having Bing News results will give you more official news and press release information. Google Blog Search will give you similar data to Twitter, but the difference is that you’ll find lengthy descriptions of positive or negative experiences. With YouTube and even Digg, you can expect to find excellent reviews on the laptop.

As you can see, Addict-o-matic is very useful in many ways. With me being a professional blogger and freelance writer, it’s important that I have access to multiple resources for article research. Another way Addict-o-matic is useful is it allows bloggers, such as myself, an easy way to research and drill down into topics needed to complete writing tasks. If I happen to be covering a story about airplanes, I can easily use Addict-o-matic to find information, specification, news, reports, and even pictures and videos of the specific airplane I need.

What are some other sites that you use to search multiple sources at once? Are there sites similar to Addict-o-matic that you like to use? Leave a comment and share this information with others below.

I don’t know if many people remember this, but there was some drama a year ago with the launch of a new search engine called Cuil (pronounced cool… like cool beans!). The search engine was created by a former employee of Google, Anna Patterson and her husband, Tom Costello. When I used Cuil for the first time, I really didn’t think it was all that cool. To me, it seemed like a dark color spin off version of Google. (Go figure, right?)

Many years ago when Google took search by storm, I believe that they too also recognized the fact that “search” really isn’t the most important thing to people who use the Internet. Personalization and communication were vital too. While indeed there was a huge buzz about Google, many people just couldn’t make that official “switch” from setting their home page set from places such as Yahoo over to them. Reason being, Google didn’t provide everything an Internet user needed in order to be called home.

Google didn’t have email, they didn’t have forums and groups and they didn’t have news. Over the years Google has been quick to recognize this and has made efforts towards providing Internet users with these personalized features so that they indeed can called “Home”. Many people now set Google to their browsers home page. Granted, I don’t think Google does a very good job letting people know about their services, but at least they try. Cuil.com right now is what I would a black sheep duplicate of Google five years ago. Cuil.com’s home page is black with a search bar, while Google’s home page was — five years ago — white with a search bar.

So here we are, one year later, and what has Cuil done since then? I haven’t really heard any news about them other than the celebration of their first year anniversary and some more recent news that have rubbed a few people the wrong way. As it seems, Cuil decided to write a review and provide their opinion about Bing. In their post, they explained about how they performed various tests such as query tests and spam tests and issued out some fancy numbers that apparently is supposed to make Cuil look “Cool.” I am not really buying into it. But, most importantly… their review isn’t going to make me change my homepage from Google to Cuil. Nor would it make me change from Yahoo! or MSN or BING to Cuil. Nor would it even make feel compelled to actually use their search engine.

I have to admit, I’d bet the farm that Bing will find success quicker than Cuil (Actually, they already have.) I mean, really… why would anyone try to duplicate Google. Or, for that matter, why would anyone try to create a new search engine? I have to admire Cuil for trying, but things really don’t look very bright in their future. Perhaps, that is why they decided to use a black background on their site. Maybe Cuil would have a chance if they provided useful things to users. On the surface of things – and I am sure there is plenty below – it seems like Cuil is nothing more than a lower quality copy of Google. Seriously, what does Cuil have that Google, Bing, and Yahoo! don’t? If there is something I am missing, please… I would love to know.

It is interesting to see how much the Internet has changed over the years and amazing to see all of the cool things you can do online. With that said, most everything that users do online can be accessed or performed from their web based start page, or now called a personalized homepage.

The question to ask is who offers the best personalized homepage? Over the last few years, there has been so much focus on who provides the best search (i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN). There doesn’t seem to be much discussion about personalization. In my opinion, I think personalization is very important.

The situation as hand is that each major search engines function quite well. They are all accurate and they are all going to return relevant results. Granted, these results may vary, but honestly… who cares. If you live in Dallas TX and you’re seeking the best deals on a dozen of roses, I am confident that you can use any of the leading search engines to find what you’re looking for.

To me, it’s all about personalization, and which search site can provide the best options. Google does a great job at providing services. The problem with Google is that they don’t do a very good job marketing their services. In other words, not many people know about their services. For example, it took me a few months to discover Google Reader. The only reason why I discovered it was because a friend told me.

As far as personalization goes. Google does provide them, but from what it seems, their definition of personalization more seems to focus on providing uniqueness to end users instead. In other words, Google’s personalization is more about providing results tailored to the end users trends.

Then you have Yahoo!, which, in my opinion, I feel is doing great. Recently, Yahoo! redesigned their homepage and packed in some really amazing features. The key to their update was “personalization” and providing users with new drag and drop modules of some of the more popular web services such as FaceBook.

All in all, I have some concerns with Google. I really feel like their lack of “personalization” in the terms of giving users the ability to be creative in customization may lead to Yahoo! having an increased chance of catching up to them. Of course there is Bing, but I don’t really thing Bing is much of a threat.

My opinion about Bing is that users are confused. Microsoft has rebranded too many times and it is created a lot of confusion among users. MSN.com does provide a lot of personalization, but I really don’t see anything happening anytime soon. And yes, this remains the same even though Microsoft and Yahoo! are migrating a mixture of their services.

So what do you think? What do you look for in a personalized homepage? Do you look to find “Drag and Drop” modules for FaceBook and Twitter and do you like to be shown about new features? Or, do you like to randomly discover new things that aren’t even advertised?

Link building can be a time consuming venture for search engine marketers and webmasters. There is no easy way to go about it, link building is hard work. Google as the search engine leader wants backlinks that are meaningful to the content of the page and on topic. Business profiles can provide a safe backlink to your important web pages.

Business Profiles Equal One-Way Links
Profiles online are a good way to find free links for your website. There are pluses and minuses to profile linking. The main limitation is keyword anchor text, generally the link pointing back to your page from profile websites is a url link to your homepage. Be sure to look carefully through the profile set up when adding in your information. There are times an additional link may be added for other pages of your website, such as in the work experience section.

Watch For Nofollow Links
What is a nofollow link anyway? It can be complicated to explain. The short version is that Google recommends nofollow for paid links such as paid text link ads on websites. Nofollow generally means the link has no value to the search engines, and can also mean a “down vote” for the quality of the link. Unfortunately this practice has become more common place for many websites including websites that feature profiles. Most often this is due to spammers missusing a website to gain an excessive number of links or the website owner fears they may get in trouble from Google and the other search engines for allowing regular links on their website. For your backlink to count for link popularity you must be sure the link is a regular link.

How Do I Identify Nofollow Links?
There are ways to find out if a link is nofollowed or not. A handy tool is the Firefox extension SearchStatus. When you add this toolbar extension to your Firefox browser it highlights any link that is nofollowed making it much easier for you to identify links that are nofollowed. After downloading the tool to your browser choose “all” for the search engines, click on the “q” symbol from your browser and checkmark the “highlight nofollow links” section. You can download this helpful browser tool here:

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

The Benefits Of Business Profile Links
Beyond the links back to your website a business profile tells the visitor about your company. Don’t skimp when it comes to providing information about yourself and your company in your profile. Be sure to provide information on services or products. Careful copywriting can interest website visitors who view your profile.

One thing to watch for is the possibility of your backlinks being nofollowed after you have added your business profile. Sometimes this happens with a website and suddenly the backlink no longer counts. The best you can do in this situation is know there continues to be benefit from visitors seeing your business information online. I know, an old fashioned idea marketing your website online with no links, but prequalified traffic is never a bad thing when it comes to your website.

The Search Engines Require Quality Links
In the long run Google and the other major engines want backlinks to be quality on topic links. A business profile is just that along with the option of sharing information about your business online. Examples of profile business websites include LinkedIn and Spoke as well as many other similar websites.

Using business profiles as part of your link building program will help provide long term quality backlinks to the most important web pages of your website and make your link building work easier in the long run.

There has been a great deal written about link building strategies. It may be difficult to sift through what works and doesn’t work. Whether you have years of experience in SEO link building or are new at link building, you should always think independently when formulating how you will link build.

Link Building Takes Time
There is no two ways about it: link building is time consuming and a great deal of work. Get that squared away before going forward with your link building plans. There are no easy quick answers when it comes to building links. Even paid links you have quickly purchased must be indexed by the search engine spiders in order to count and we all know it takes time for links to take effect. If you provide link building services you must set the correct expectations of link results for your clients.

Social Media’s New Link Territory
In the beginning much of link building had been relegated to submitting to directories, reciprocal links and paid links. This concept has changed in the past few years. With the growth of personalized search and social media link building has become super charged. Before you totally jump on the social media bandwagon take a look at what your client’s website actually needs to produce a solid link building strategy outcome.

Think Through Your Link Strategy
Newer link building methods such as social media websites may be popular now but using old linking techniques and new linking techniques together can work very well for your link building strategy. Eventually all new techniques become old techniques making way for yet more new techniques. We know some human edited directory links still provide good results. Reciprocal links can be dicey compared to one-way links. One-way links on topic still work well.

Articles and press releases work if carefully orchestrated to the right websites. Think quality not quantity links. Paid links can be problematic with Google so use them carefully. Think through your daily types of link building (blogging, digging, stumbling), your well known techniques (directories, articles, press releases) to your long range ideas (product reviews on blogs, creating new blog sites, business profiles, paid links) and on and on. Take a look at the whole picture: short term, long term, in the future…where do you want to be online?

Independent Thought For Link Builders
Quality links is still the name of the game when it comes to long term link building success. Yes there are probably quicker ways to get results and it may at times be worth this type of strategy. Think through what you find effective to build links. Not every technique works in every situation for every client. Instead of going with the popular choices come up with your own independent link plans then see what happens.

Individualized Link Strategies Work
Creating specific, individualized link building programs for each client will give you more ways to provide successful link building results. Combining traditional marketing, social media marketing and traditional link building can be a winning combination in your quest for good links.

Many years ago when the search engine marketing industry began there was no problem with adding a lot of keywords into a web page to help rank in the search engines. In fact it was pretty easy to rank back then in the major search engines. Switch to today and you see three major engines and many safeguards in place by them to catch over-optimization and on or off page techniques used by modern search engine marketers.

Afraid of Search Engine Spiders?
Search engine spiders (aka crawlers, robots) are software programs designed to find links, read through text, follow links from page to page and index the individual web pages of a web site. If you know anything about software you know human beings create them. If you are a software tester then you definitely know how fallible software is. Remember how often your browser or your laptop crashes?

That is human programming for you. As smart as Google is as a company, software is software. It cannot compare to human evaluation. Google tries to use human observation in combination with their search engine spider software but automation is the only way the search engines are able to spot potential problems with so many web pages online. The reality is that there are too many web pages and automation is a must when evaluating content on the web.

Patterns in Optimization
Google is thought to have their search engine robot set to flag certain situations when indexing. One way to work against being caught up in this is by breaking the on page pattern of search engine optimization. Using keywords in your text navigation? Be sure to use some descriptive keyword phrases that make sense for your text navigation.

Do not use all keyword text in your text navigation, this may trigger a spam filter or flag from the search engines. Instead use only a few select keywords or keyword phrases in your text navigation. For Example keep the text link for pages like “Contact Us” and “About Us” text navigation links left intact. Be careful when using too much keyword text in links throughout the content of the page.

“Click here” is not a good choice for a link going to a product, of course you want descriptive text related to the product the page leads to instead. As with other over-optimization situations use this type of keyword text link sparingly through the content of your web pages. Make sure your text on the page is natural for the human visitor.

Patterns in Links and Link Building
If you need to break patterns in optimization code it only makes sense to break the same type of patterns when it comes to link building. If you have an articles page or helpful resource for users be sure to find on topic backlinks for those web pages.

Vary your keyword anchor text when acquiring links. You want a variety of keyword links pointing back to your pages that relate to the content of that web page. Using one url address for all your links? Use your homepage url and also a variety of inner pages to point your backlinks to.

Natural Optimization Is The Way To Go
If you focus on readable, natural looking page of text this will go a long way towards achieving your goal of breaking the patterns search engine spider software can detect in your page content and text links. Search engine spiders focus on text on the page and text links when indexing web pages. Vary your use of keywords and website urls for your backlinks. Provide sensible text navigation and title tags that are not overly optimized. By focusing on what website visitors need you can outsmart the search engines and gain website visitors.

Typically, a splash page is designed to catch the attention of a human visitor through use of a large graphic, a Flash movie, or some other technological item.  While this may indeed attract the attention of your human visitors, visiting search engine spiders won’t be impressed, and ultimately your human visitors will not get all the benefit they could from visiting your site.

Search Engine Spiders and Splash
Search engine spiders rely on text and links to get their work done. In the past when there has been virtually no text on an entry page, images or a Flash movie, the content of the web page has not been read and indexed by the search engine spiders. Graphic images and Flash were lost on the spiders beyond ALT attribute text for the images. Until recently Flash was unreadable to the search engine spiders.

This is now changing as the major search engines are joining together to understand and index the content of Flash movies. While this is a major improvement for search engine indexing of Flash movies in the meantime it is important to provide at minimum a title and meta description as well as a text description of your company on your main entry page using important keyword phrases. A good combination is to embed a Flash movie within a page which also uses keyword optimized text.

To see what the search engine spiders see, go to SEOChat and use their spider simulator tool at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/ and enter your website address. When you run the spider simulator, you will see what the spider sees when it visits web pages to read and index information.

Splash Pages In Search Results
Ever search on the url of a splash page? It can be a real eye opener. Try searching on the url of the web page in Google and most often you will find minimal information about the page in the search results. You can hope that the search engine spiders pick up at least the meta description and title tag as part of the search results. There are times when even this is not available in a splash page and there is no text on the page to index. The search results are what searchers click on to go to your website. If there is no real information about your website chances are slim the searchers will click the search result to find out more about your company. If this is the entry page to your website it is not a good use of your online property.

The Importance Of The Entry Page
While a search engine spider can follow text links into the main content of your website, you are wasting this splash page. To make this page most useful to your visitors and to search engine spiders, you want to put good, keyword-rich text on this (and every) page in the website.  Content is what your visitors, both human and electronic, are really looking for. Rather than having just a page of links, put some real content on the entry splash page. Websites that talk about their companies and their products and services on the entry page tend to catch users’ attention and make them delve deeper into the site to look for more information.

Make The Visitor’s First Visit Memorable
Once a visitor reaches your website you want them to stay and click farther down into your website. You never know what your visitor’s attention span is going to be, so each page on the site needs to stand on its own, and to give the visitor something useful; never waste a page as a “click here to go somewhere else” page. Splash pages are most useful if they provide information about your company to the visitor as well as information that can be indexed by the search engine spiders.

The basis of good web design is also often what makes search engine optimization effective in the ability of the search engine spiders to index web pages.

Follow the Industry Leader
When you are dealing with Google it is important to remember their primary goal is to help the search engine user. Since Google’s search engine is the leader in the search engine industry the other major search engines will follow their lead. When designing your website you want to make the website easy to navigate. Use optimization code that makes sense to the website visitor when they see it used in text on the page and in the title tag.

Optimization Text That Makes Sense
A good way to be sure your website works for your visitors is to read the text aloud after adding in your search engine optimization code. If it sounds stilted start rewriting. Have someone else read over your copy to be sure the optimization words you have added make sense and reads well to the typical website user. You need to capture your audience when they first visit your website. Give them a reason to stay once they arrive.

Inform Your Vistors
If the optimized tags and keyword text benefit the content of the text on the page, being informative on the information or products of the website, it is also beneficial to the human visitor. In this sense search engine robots “read” legitimate text and legitimate tags which help explain the content of the page not only to the human visitor but to the search engine robots as well.

Ease of Website Navigation
You want to have a search engine friendly design focusing on the navigational system you have in place for the website. Having a sitemap in place is helpful especially for those deeper pages of the website that may not be easily accessed by the on page navigation. Search engine spiders need to find those deep page links and you certainly want them to find the links on a page! Human visitors are able to pull down drop down menus or understand the intent of a graphic to travel through the website. As important as this is you must also include methods to make your website search engine friendly. Search engine spiders cannot push a button or use pull down menus. Some robots have difficulty with JavaScript menus. Make sure a sitemap is in place, and easily followed text navigation or graphic navigation is available so your web pages may be able to be followed by the bots. Ideally text navigation should be available with the added advantage of keyword anchor text but there are times design prohibits this choice. By providing easy to use navigation for humans and spiders you increase your chance at visitor retention and maximum indexing of your web page content.

Good Web Design Really Can Get Along With Quality Optimization
Not everyone is an SEO Copywriter. It can be difficult to tie in your search engine optimization text and the intent of the web page for the human visitor. Get creative and always keep in mind your website visitor. Well selected keywords should reflect what the web page is about. Enhance what is already on the page whenever possible. Marketing lingo may be great but sometimes you need to think about a wider audience. Knowing your target audience well will help you find your voice in your design of the website and your search engine optimization copy.

Developing a highly visited website, a “traffic worthy site”, is essential for your web site’s success. While developing the site, however, you need to keep in mind that not only is your site going to be seen by the human eye, but also by the nonhuman eye. How is that? Well, search engines along with their spiders and crawlers, will also be viewing your website. Having a sound web design, therefore, is crucial for bringing traffic to your site. How is this done?

First, you need to know what your company’s keywords are. What words come to your mind when describing your business or interest? These may be your keywords. Do online research to find out how popular they are. There are a variety of keyword selector tools that you can use for no charge. Yahoo’s Overture is a good one, another is Word Tracker. Once you have access to these keyword selector tools, simply type in what words are important to you and results will be displayed regarding their popularity. The results can also help you decide which words are most important and will bring the most visitors to your site.

Secondly, you need to know how to optimize your keywords to your advantage. This is known as keyword optimization. Your website must have good keyword optimization if it is to perform to its best advantage and bring you success from it. Keyword optimization is part of search engine optimization (SEO). You want, and need, to know how the search engines will notice your website. Also, each time a person searches for something online (search utilization) they type in the words that are important to them. Hence, they type in their keywords. Sites will pop up containing those keywords and offer the viewer a chance to visit the site which matches their needs. It is important to note that about 85% of humans arrive at websites via search engines. That is a large amount. See the importance of both knowing what your keywords are and how to optimize them to get the most success from the search engines? Search engine optimization is highly important to the success of your website.

The best part of keyword and search engine optimization is the fact that the results will send you targeted potential, prequalified customers. This is due to the fact that the person performing the search is specifically looking for what you offer. They are using your keywords.

Also remember that when developing your website, do not use a word processor. Word processing software is well known for containing a variety of sloppy, hidden codes which are not search engine friendly.

These are just a few things to take into consideration while developing a website that receives a high traffic volume. Use them and you can only benefit.

]]> http://www.seohosting.com/blog/seo-basics/some-things-to-know-about-developing-a-traffic-worthy-site/feed/ 0 http://www.seohosting.com/blog/seo-tips/seo-essentials-keywords-in-title-tags/ http://www.seohosting.com/blog/seo-tips/seo-essentials-keywords-in-title-tags/#comments Wed, 28 May 2008 01:29:08 +0000 Eric Odom http://www.seohosting.com/blog/?p=15

There are many factors that go into good SEO, but probably one of the most important things you can do is create good titles. Not only are you doing this to help search engines find the topic of your page content, you’re also doing it to help brand your page and let visitors know where they’re going.

The two major benefits of using good keywords in title tags are:

1: Branding Your Page
If you’re like me, you’ve chosen a search result based on the title used for that particular site. If you searched for “Using Keywords in Title Tags” and one of the results popped up with the title “SEO Essentials: Keywords in Title Tags”, the odds are higher that you’ll find that result fitting to your information needs.

Your audience might not realize it, but most of us DO actually look at the titles and URLs in search results and use that information to formulate a decision on which result to click. This factor might be sub-conscious on many cases, but it certainly plays a role more times than not.

You can also use your titles to brand content. In the example listed here, and in the title of this post, you’ll see that I’ve added “SEO Essentials”. This tells readers that they will not only find information on keywords in title tags, but they will also know that the content is written from an SEO angle.

So, as you can see, I’m saying a lot through only six words. I’m explaining what the content is about, and for what purpose it is written.

2: Search Engine Optimization
Search Engines can and do use these tags. In almost every case the search engines have taken title tags, URL keywords, and headline keywords and they’ve used them in the results. And not just in the results, but also in the algorithm.

It has been proven time and time again that by using a consistent set of keywords in the title tag, the URL, and the page headline, the page has moved up in rank and enjoyed a higher click through rate in the search results pages.

What is the best way to use keywords in title tags?

-Understand searchers intent
-Use keyphrases when possible
-Use similar or same keywords and keyphrases in headline (h1) tags
-Use similar or same keywords and keyphrases in URL (permalink)
-Keep length to 65 characters or less (to ensure it all fits in the search engine results)

If you take these simple steps over time, you should eventually begin seeing cleaner results and a higher click through rate.