Wednesday, 29 July 2009

America's Sexiest Couple Give Birth To New Search Engine


You read it hear first (or at least this version of the merger) that Carol Bartz and Steve Ballmer, two of the sexiest people in search today had come together to birth a new search engine (or at least Yahoo will now use Bing for search).

What will this new partnership bring? How will it roll out. All we can do is hope that this new baby will be pretty (unlike the potential below):



Official Site News - Microsoft, Yahoo! Change Search Landscape

Monday, 27 July 2009

What Are People Searching For Right Now?


We are all familiar with keyword research tools like - WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, Wordz, Wordpot and so on, but what if you want to know what people are searching on right now? Well many search engines big and small let you peek into what people are typing into their search engines in real-time making for some really interesting insights. Below is a list of engines and their respective offerings:

Google - Google Hot Trends
EntireWeb - SpeedySpy
AOL Search - AOL Hot Searches
InfoTiger - InfoTiger Voyeur
Search.com - Search.com Top Searches
MetaCrawler - MetaCrawler Popular Searches
Search Hippo - Search Hippo Last 15 Queries
Ask - Ask Interesting Queries (Top Searches)
DogPile - Dogpile SearchSpy

While some may call this a voyeuristic activity, others can use the 'research' excuse - either way it is a lot of fun...:-)

Who Links To Me?


WhoLinksToMe.com (beta) is a great new service that offers some interesting and unique webmaster research tools. Here is the explanation from the site:

This first level launch provides free services to bloggers and businesses interested in learning about the strengths and weaknesses of their websites’ linking structure. Unlike current link analysis services, WhoLinksToMe.com reports cover a significantly broader online footprint in near real time, using technology far superior and more secure than previously offered. The services are web-based which removes the risks often associated with such an enormous continuous search, including banned IPs and immense lag time.


Check it out today at - WhoLinksToMe.com

Thursday, 23 July 2009

Great FREE Online SEO Dashboard


MazeCore / Analyze is using a common script, but somehow it appears much cleaner than most installs (maybe because the others have so many ads and this one does not) to create one of my favorite free online SEO dashboards. In this adaptation they are calling it their 'RankMeter' (good name).

In addition, they have created a nice keyword ranking tool that can track a single term against a URL in Yahoo, Google and Bing. While it is limited, it is a nice addition.

Check it out today at - MazeCore / Analyze

Death of an Incredible Search Engine - Goodbye SearchMe



SearchMe, one of my favorite search engines and a real contender is throwing in the towel on Saturday (July 25th, 2009). Apparently their venture capital backers did not find the same value in it that many others did.

What will be interesting to see is what they are going to do with what was created (at 45+ million dollars)? Will another engine buy the technology or interface? Will a smaller (or larger) search engine buy the URL and redirect the traffic (hello InfoSpace and Ask - here is your opportunity)? Who knows, but after Saturday we should find out as the engine is actually slated to go dark.

All I can say is, what a waste. They had a real opportunity and it is all being thrown away.

Check it out one last time before it is gone - SearchMe

Wednesday, 22 July 2009

New Global Search Engine Launch - Meet iCrawl.us


Just got done working on phase one of my new search engine and PPC ad network (ad network not complete yet). Please welcome - iCrawl.us Global Search Engine.

I would love your feedback and input. Please fee free to drop me a comment within this post. otherwise please enjoy!

Thanks in advance....:-)

Tuesday, 21 July 2009

SEO 101 for Bing


What I like about the new MSN Search or Bing team is there open attitude to the SEO/SEM community. The tools and information they are provising are going a long way to endearing them to this community and I hope they keep it up.

Search across their community forum I found a great post on SEO 101 for Bing and thought I would share the highlights with you here and provide a link to the post for additional information. So below are the best practicies for Bing SEO. Good luck!

Title Tag

The key message with the title tag is still the same. The page title is a critical element for helping the search engine bot identify the contents of your page.

When creating the title text, keep the following in mind:

* The closer the word is to the start, the more heavily weighted it is as a keyword. This is true for the bot as well as the reader.
* Keep the title text between 5 and 65 characters in length
* For greatest efficiency and consistency, write titles using this syntax: keyword phrase, category, website title (or brand)
* Make the title text unique on every page
* Don't use any of the following special characters in title text: '"<>{}--()

Meta Description Tag

While search engines reserve the right to use a variety of inputs for filling out site description snippets in their SERPs, webmasters who provide unique, concise, compelling, and keyword-laden descriptions in their meta tags description attribute help guide the development of their websites SERP captions.

When creating the description text, remember the following:

* Create unique descriptions for each page, using keywords specific to that page
* Keep the description text between 25 and 150 characters in length
* Do not copy title tag text content as a description; this is a wasted opportunity to develop more keywords and adds no value
* Make the description text unique on every page

Meta Keyword Tag

The meta tags keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But theres no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low.

When creating keyword text, remember the following:

* Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the title and meta description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure
* Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters
* Don't repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the list

Read more - Head’s up on head tag optimization (SEM 101)