Archive for July, 2008

Get Real About Your Niche – Become An Online Authority

Friday, July 25th, 2008

You have completed your niche research, you have your keyword optimized pages – now what?

Become an authority on the subject.

The choice you now need to make is to either join the trash site brigade who have been earning good incomes with thousands of trashy adsense sites or do you develop a business. Low level sites are gradually, but surely getting tossed off the Net. Search engine savvy is working its magic and building a great basis for quality sites to shine through in the long term. You may not have the instant cash, but you will have the long term consistent income.

So the choice is yours – be brave, and become an online authority. Once you have gained a core knowledge in your subject, you can very quickly become a center of authority. Don’t be shy about speaking loudly on your opinions. Sometimes you have to be a little bit provocative to get noticed – entice debate. Google loves comments on blogs, so get to it!

Find other people who are an authority on the subject. Not only will you learn more, but you can challenge some of their thinking, respectfully. Remember the aim is to become an authority, not a heckler. The Internet is a great place for raw debate. So just be yourself, be authentic, be professional and share your opinions. You will also learn about the opinions of others visiting that site. If they like the way you think, they will seek you out on your own site. Try to relate to what these other visitors are looking for and deliver to their needs.

Think of your interaction on the Internet just as you do with everyday business offline. It’s all about relating to the market and building relationships. And if you are not comfortable doing it by sending out emails every second day boring people with what you did every hour, build them through genuine interest in mutual areas of interest.

Happy Hunting!

Visual Search – It’s Finally Here!

Friday, July 18th, 2008

The current search engines used by Google, Yahoo, MSN etc are text-based search engine. They rely on searchers visually checking every link to check to see if the result is what they are really looking for.

SearchMe.com has recently launched a beta version of its exciting new visual search. Simply download a plugin for Internet explorer to search web pages, images and videos. Using this search option, enter your keywords as normal and then select the sub search from: business books, search engines, business news, advertising and marketing, software and all.

Now this is where the big difference comes in – the results, rather than being listed in text format are in visual representations of the media, presented in a Windows Vista style format. This lets you instantly check the quality of the site without wasting time clicking through text links.

In addition, it highlights the search terms on the pages of the visualisations to give you an indication of the relevancy of the page to your search query.

This is really cool stuff, so check it out yourself – there is a lot more to this visual search than I have told you here.

Beware of Data on Google Keyword Tool

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

There is a lot of chatter this month on blogs about Google releasing search data in it free Keyword Tool – in addition to the traditional green bar graph. It gives actual volume data on searches for the previous month as well as average monthly searches. This is a welcome replacement for Yahoo’s Inventory Overture.com keyword tool – which was pretty unreliable. But beware – the current reliability of this Google version is not much better at present. But I will hold out hope for good things to come. So I still think its workth taking a quick look at a few of its features

Have a look here

Rather than being totally inaccurate in its numbers, it may be more in the use of the tool – how you interpret what you see.

For example the search volumes for the default setting “Broad” search, does not give you the results you want for basic keyword research for website planning or content writing. However by using the drop-down box you can use to refine your search and get average monthly searches for either:

  • Broad
  • Phrase
  • Exact
  • Exact [by Location]

The Broad and Phrase options can also include variations of your phrase. Help with these additional features can be gained by clicking on the question marks inside the tool and follow the links for detailed explanations.

One annoying thing I find with many Google tools today is that regardless of the zone I set as my default, it defaults to my home country. Since my business is set up in the US, but I may be logging in from London, Melbourne, Auckland or any other country, it defaults results to the country of IP origin.

However, it is very useful to be able to refine results based on a particular country or “All Countries and Territories”. Further – and this a great feature – if you access the Keyword Tool from within one of your AdWords ad group, the search traffic statistics will factor in your campaign’s country and language targeting.

Now this is where the current bugs come in. With some searches zoned to Australia, the results were the same as the results for International. Not very likely! I have redone this search several times over the past few days, and still get the same issue.

Google’s Keyword Tool

How to use the Google Keyword Tool

More About Keyword Tool’s Search Volume Statistics