It is no secret that Google and Yahoo are on a continuous battle to win our hearts and get everyone to convert, but is converting someone really a matter of the quantity or the quality?
Let’s take a look at some top key searches and compare them with some search engines online. I will outline a few things for each search result:
1) Search Engine
2) Number of results found
3) Quality & content of the top 10 sites
4) What you find going beyond the first 10 pages
Each section will get ranked out of 10 points for quality (information taken on August 26,2005).
Starting with my all-time favorite search term: “INTERNET MARKETING”
Google.com
- 99,000,000 results
- 10/10 on quality
- 10/10 Past 10 pages still delivers top quality results
Yahoo.com
- 281,000,000 results
- 7/10 on quality. There’s no reason to list a “Hotel Marketing Firm” & “Building websites”. The #1 spot was reserved for Yahoo marketing.
- 9/10 Past 10 pages, it is very generic for business, not specific.
MSN.com
- 93,661,176 results
- 10/10 on quality
- 10/10 Past 10 pages still delivers high quality results. I am surprised and give MSN two thumbs up for their attention to detail.
Moving onto the search term for “BUSINESS NEWS”
Google.com
- 627,000,000 results
- 10/10 on quality
- 10/10 Beyond 10 pages delivers high quality & local news centers.
Yahoo.com
- 1,260,000,000 results (wow)
- 10/10 on quality
- 9/10 Beyond 10 pages. There are still some sites that should never be there.
MSN.com
- 381,631,054 results
- 8/10 on quality - Some aren’t related at all and brand new sites as well.
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. Their results seem to tighten up and get better.
Let’s now take some more “local” search results to see deeper and more targeted results…
Moving on to the search term for “WASHINGTON UNIVERSITIES”.
I hope to find the “University of Washington” come up #1 or thereabouts.
Google.com
- 22,700,000
- 10/10 on quality (www.washington.edu is #1)
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. The results still deliver “university” topics.
Yahoo.com
- 143,000,000 results
- 9/10 on quality - The top spot is reserved for Yahoo on Washington University in St. Louis. There seems to be a strong battle going on here on which university to list.
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. Content is specific and relevant.
MSN.com
- 34,442,536 results
- 9/10 on quality - Again another battle going on and washington.edu is #10 tilting on the verge of page 2.
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. All related to Washington & University living
Let’s now get even more specific than that… For this search term I will be using something very local that I can relate to and give a better analysis.
Moving on to the search term for “HAMILTON ONTARIO CANADA”.
Google.com
- 3,700,000 results
- 10/10 on quality - Great job
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages - Anything goes but is directly related to Hamilton.
Yahoo.com
- 14,900,000 results
- 10/10 on quality - Almost the same as Google but a couple of different choices.
- 9/10 on quality - Some results are found by keyword stuffing their pages.
MSN Local *New (http://search.msn.com/local/)
- 1,280,405 results
- 9/10 on quality - Getting some random placements & keyword stuffing
- 10/10+ beyond 10 pages - Many local companies well listed in the results.
Let’s now take a look at these results as a total. Out of a possible score of 80 points, here are the total scores for each:
Google - 80 points
MSN - 76 points
Yahoo - 73 points
Total search results delivered:
Google - 752,400,000
Yahoo - 1,698,900,000
MSN - 511,015,171
And people wonder why Google is the king of searching?! But wait, without even noticing the results, as I totaled the final point standings, MSN came up in second place! In my study, I tried to be as neutral as possible.
How is it that Msn & Google have 50% the amount of results shown in Yahoo, but outrank Yahoo in quality?
In conclusion:
Even though Yahoo delivered a report stating that it has over 19 billion search items, what does it matter when you’re still trying to figure out how to deliver all that content? MSN & Google seem to know exactly what to do with their results. They don’t seem “off the wall” at all. If Yahoo is to step up and be crowned the search king, I really think that they need to refine the amount of search terms they have, to match the quality of search results as well.
Yahoo has major potential to outreach Google but they still have a lot of work ahead of them and by the time they figure things out, Google may even step up their game even further and wow us all on some other search plateau.
About The Author:
Martin Lemieux is the president of the Smartads Advertising Network. Smartads is dedicated to helping you expose your business online and offline.
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Copyright ?2005 Smartads Advertising Network - Reprints Accepted - One link must be active in the bio.
Written by SEO Tipster on May 15th, 2006 with no comments.
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Why not have some fun with the SEO Puzzle game, you can test your understanding of search engine optimization words too 
Play the Game
Written by SEO Tipster on May 15th, 2006 with no comments.
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The most difficult challenge most web designers face is getting traffic to your site. There are plenty of companies who promise to send traffic your way. Sadly, most of this traffic is not qualified. Yes, your hit counter will move higher, however, if its not qualified, you may find you have unhappy visitors to your site. Unhappy visitors will not click on your ads or purchase your products.
Once you have optimized your site, consider submitting it to every search engine. If you want to get spidered quicker in Google, have a web page with a PR of 4 or higher point to your site. Your site will be spidered within a couple of days!
One myth I would like to bust is that PR is a measure of a web site. Its not. I receive countless emails offering a reciprocal link with their PR5 or PR6 site. Unless my link is appearing on the main page, or a page that has PR6, I am not getting a share of PR6. Most likely, my link will appear on a page that has a PR2!
Page rank is Google’s ranking of that specific page’s relevance. Just because the main page has a PR of 4, does not make every page on the site a PR4. Beware of sites who claim that they will exchange links with you and its to your benefit since they have a PR5 or PR6. Where is your link appearing? If its on a page that has a PR of 4 or 5 or 6, great!
Reciprocal linking, if done properly, will ensure that your keywords are at the top of the search engine. If you have a popular keyword, youll need to have more back links. Pick your link partners properly, and ensure that they are linking to your keyword.
For example: if your site is www.joesdinner.com, consider sending out requests to relevant higher ranking pages to start with, followed by lower ranking pages and ask web designers to link back in the following manner:
< a xhref="http://www.joesdinner.com" mce_href="http://www.joesdinner.com" >best dining in new york - joes dinner is the only place to eat when you’re staying in New York.
Presuming their keyword is “best dining in new york”, having links pointing to your site with an anchor tag incorporating your keywords will improve your search engine rankings dramatically.
Once you have established a collection of sites pointing to your site using your keywords, you will start receiving reciprocal link exchanges from other sites. This is where you can start to be particular.
If you want to maintain an effective PR and attract better sites for linking, follow these tips:
a) Is it indexed?
While their site may be indexed, the page where they are placing your link, is it at least indexed by google? If you type in allinurl:www.sitename.com/links/right_here.html and there are no results, consider declining their offer. If the page your link appears on has not been indexed, there is no benefit whatsoever to you. If your pages have PR, they may consider placing your link on another page. If the page your link appears on is indexed, but does not have PR, consider accepting their offer. While the page today may not have PR, it will in time.
b) How many neighbours?
The value of the page rank is shared with each of the links on that page. If you are splitting that PR with several other sites, your share of PR will be small, which doesnt help you. Reconsider accepting any link exchanges if your site is 1 of more than 30 - 40 sites that will appear on that page, unless its a very high PR. Further, if there are too many links on that page, Google may consider the page to be part of a link farm, which may end up penalizing your site.
c) Is it relevant?
Google is big on relavancy. Ensure your links pages are relevant. If you operate a site about golf, having links from cooking sites will not help you establish your page rank. It may cost you more than you get in return.
How to Find Good PR sites:
a) Do a search for them by typing in your keyword and start asking for reciprocal link exchanges. Take a look at their PR and go from there. Remember, its the number of sites that backlink to you that matters, not strictly the PR of the page. I would rather have 50 pages that have a PR1 pointing to my site, than to have 5 sites that have a PR5. Of course, if you can get 50 pages that have a PR5 pointing to your site, you are laughing!
b) Take a look at your existing link partners and check out their links pages. Its clear the people appearing on those links pages are interested in reciprocating.
c) Purchase software that will help find quality link partners.
It is important to attract higher PR sites when you are on a reciprocal link campaign. However, its not the most important thing when it comes to search engine rankings. Its the backlinks that point back at you that are key. The more of those, the better off you will be for your keyword.
Remember: every page starts off as a PR0. Just because its new doesnt mean it wont get a higher PR once google gets around to assessing a score. If the page your site appears on is indexed, and its a relevant site of quality, consider exchanging links. You’ll grow a large list of link partners in a short period of time, and increase your search engine rankings in the process.
Christopher Smith has been helping people make money through Google Adsense by providing them with the Top Paying Adsense Keywords for his visitors to Adsense Heaven. http://www.adsenseheaven.com
Written by SEO Tipster on May 14th, 2006 with no comments.
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In very simple words, the link popularity of your site means the amount of links coming to you from another sites.
Every major search engine heavily weighs the link popularity of sites when ranking sites. Some engines even claims they won’t index sites that don’t have at least one link pointing to them from another site.
Why they are doing that ? Just because zero popularity means that nobody has an interest related to your site content. Since nobody is interested, why search engines should consider it ? From their point of view zero popularity is a time wasting.
Under the above circumstances, the link popularity of your site becomes very important to you, especially if you aim to earn traffic by indexing your site in search engines directories.
Let’s see what you can do in order to increase the link popularity of your site. First of all you should concentrate on finding sites having a similar content to yours. This is the most important point of your campaign because all those links incoming from sites with similar theme will reinforce the credibility of your site.
Then you should act on the following three ways:
Link exchanging.
Contact the owners asking for a link exchange.
Sign in guestbooks. Many website are inviting visitors to sign in guestbooks. Go there and leave an appropriate comment and do not forget to add the link to your site. Take care what email address you’ll provide, as many spammers are scroling guestbooks to collect addresses.
Post in forums or message boards. A lot of webmasters have developed forums and message boards on their site. First read the terms of use. Most of the times you have to sign in and to provide an available email address. Then watch the sense of discussion and post an appropriate comment together with your link. Some forums do not accept links inside of your message but they accept signature files.Valerian Dinca is the owner of the newest online business tutorial. Everything you need when you need it.
Written by SEO Tipster on May 14th, 2006 with no comments.
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This is the first lesson out of 6 that teaches you the most important elements of search engine optimization. You should read one of these 6 courses EVERY day so that you can have enough time to “digest” all the information and put them to the test. Now today is DAY #1 and I will start with the first course on the list:
Choosing “THE” keywords to optimize for
1) The first step in search engine optimization is choosing the right keywords that you want to rank well for on the search engines. This is very easy to do nonetheless many webmasters FAIL HERE! Ok for this course I will be using a website about “jokes” as an example. First you need to use the very powerful keyword tool that Overture offers, you can see it here: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
2) Now the second step is to put “jokes” and search for it in the overture keyword tool. The results that I received are shown here:
Count Search Term
927525 joke
116589 funny joke
65099 blonde joke
60135 dirty joke
47577 joke of the day
38086 good joke
37347 yo mama joke
35360 joke online prank
30615 clean funny joke
As you can see there are thousands of searches done monthly using these keywords and by ranking well in search engines you can get all these visitors for FREE! Wait don’t get too excited and DONT try to rank for the keyword “joke” because if you search in Google for that keyword you will find out that there are more than 15 MILLION pages competing for that specific keyword! So what do you do? Well start small and target less competitive keywords to get some good traffic to begin with and then target the “BIG FISH”! Alright for example you can target the keyword “yo mama joke” which is searched for approximately 37347 times every month and YET there are only 310,000 pages competing for it! You CAN rank very well for this keyword and be on the FIRST page to receive more than 30,000 hits to your website every month. That’s 1000 visitors everyday for one keyword FREE!
3) We have chosen a keyword that is not very competitive but gets quite a lot of searches and it is “yo mama jokes”. You can choose a few other keywords like “blonde joke” which has less than 1 million pages competing. And “joke online prank” with only 200,000 competitors.
4) Now take a few minutes to think of a keyword that is related to your website and repeat steps 1 to 3. It’s easy and wont take more than a few minutes. Choose the right keywords and wait for lesson two!
WOW I must have you thinking now, what if you start competing for the more competitive keywords later and get even more visitors! Well you can once you master this and you will hit the million page views mark in no time. This won’t happen overnight nor will it happen in days. This will take weeks of hard work but the end result is EXPLOSIVE LASER TARGETED TRAFFIC for FREE.
“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” - Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway’s Billionaire Chairman)
Take a few minutes everyday to read the courses and try them on your website. All this information is FREE so why not spend some time and learn it? You have nothing to lose.
If you would like to contact me anytime and either complain (why would you!) or give me your testimonial then feel free to do so anytime. I’m there if you need any more help also.
Ahmed Omran is an experienced webmaster and marketer who owns Virtual Design - custom Webdesign and Home Based Business Revo
Written by SEO Tipster on May 14th, 2006 with no comments.
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Ever wanted to know which out bound link on your site is banned on Google?
If the answer is yes, here is a tool which may help you find out more about it.
Google Ban Checker
Written by SEO Tipster on May 13th, 2006 with no comments.
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Ever wondered how well linked is your site on the engines and in which area is your site lacking in? Now you can check it here at Link Popularity
. This is quite a good site, as they provide you with suggestions on where you should improve on for your site to be better.
“Link Popularity Checker and Link Quality Assessment
Links play a vital role in good organic search engine rankings. Not only is Link Popularity important, the quality of those links is also very important. Use the free Link Popularity Checker and Link Quality Checker tool to find out the necessary statistics on your links and your competitor’s links.”
Written by SEO Tipster on May 12th, 2006 with no comments.
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Would you like a checklist of the important steps to take in optimizing a web site? Well, here it is:
1. Use a keyword research tool to find profitable phrases (i.e. those that are actually being searched for).
2. Build each page optimized for a single keyword phrase. Also sprinkle in some secondary keywords relevant to the main keyword.
3. Link your web site together so that all pages are only a couple of clicks away from the homepage.
4. Use text links instead of fancy graphics or buttons to link to your pages.
5. When you add a link to a page where the main keyword phrase for that page is “blue widgets”, make sure the links to that page include the phrase “blue widgets”.
6. Build a sitemap.
7. Add articles / Content to your web site and add links from these articles to your important pages.
8. Get quality link partners.
Once you have completed these 8 steps, repeat steps 7 & 8 over and over again. I would say that 80% of your time on a new site should be steps 7 and 8. Add content & find link partners. A great way of getting links into your site is writing and publishing articles on article submission sites. When webmasters take up your article and publish it on their site, you get an incoming link to yours.
As your site climbs in the search engine rankings, you can decide when you are happy with your rankings and reduce the amount of time spent on 7 & 8.
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Andy Williams is author of the free, ezSEO internet marketing newsletter, offering subscribers up-to-date information on all aspects of internet marketing. His search engine optimization website offers unique, no BS information, for free.
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Written by SEO Tipster on May 6th, 2006 with no comments.
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Does Creating a Google Site Map and Telling Google About it get your Work at Home Business Web Page Indexed Faster? Google Visited My Home Based Business Web Page the Same Day I Uploaded my Site Map. It stands to reason anything you can do make it easier for Google to Index your Work at Home Business Online Business get a Google Ranking. For sure if you don’t get indexed you won’t get ranked.
To show you how serious Google is about using Sitemaps. Google Sitemaps now come with an extra added bonus. After you upload your Sitemap to Google and they crawl your site Google will actually tell you any problems it encountered with your web page and suggestions on how to fix them.
In Order to take advantage of this New feature the first thing you need to do is create a Google Sitemap
Creating a Google Sitemap is really easy very briefly here is all you need to do
Create a free Google Sitemap Accounts
google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login
Create a Free Google Sitemap only at www.sitemapspal.com or you can follow Google’s instructions and create a Text Sitemap: www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/other.html
Upload your Sitemap to your web page
Login to your Google Sitemap account and tell Google the URL of your SitemapAfter you have created and uploaded your Google Sitemap all you need to do is be patient for about 24 Hours (sometimes less) until Google Crawls your web page. After Google Crawls your web page you will see a verify link next to your Sitemap name. Click the link and Google will instruct you to create a blank file and place it on your Web Page, Once you have done that Google will tell you any problems it encountered crawling your Page. Now fix the problems tell Google to recrawl your page and your are done
About The Author:
Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001 When he Built an Organization of over 100,000 Members
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Copyright ?2005-2006 Mike Makler the Coolest Guy in the Universe
Written by SEO Tipster on May 1st, 2006 with no comments.
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While it is okay to admire and envy all those sites enjoy top ranking with leading search engines like Google, it is much more important to study these sites closely. You will definitely end up learning a lot that will prove to be very useful in helping you take your own site to the top of Google rankings. Topping the search engines will mean huge volumes of traffic on a daily basis without you having to do anything. Healthy traffic, as you know almost automatically translates itself to healthy revenue for the site. And when you consider that over 75 per cent of the traffic that finds its’ way to websites comes from search engines, you quickly realize how important and crucial top rankings in search engines are to any online business.
So what will you be looking for when closely studying some of the top ranking sites? The answer is in the fact these sites have done something right and have certain strengths which millions of other sites all over the world do not have. It will be even more useful if you can find a common thread that links all the top sites.
In this article we will look at two that this writer noticed recently when studying top ranked Google sites.
Very well written, quality, targeted, content
With the hundreds of small details that a webmaster usually has to take care of, it is very easy to forget or downplay the importance of well written quality content. All the handful of top Google sites that I took a closer look at had exceptionally well-written, targeted, quality content. No visible typos or grammatical errors. It is clear that at least Google take into account the quality of writing when ranking websites. This simple observation means that if you make efforts to sustain a high standard in the quality of content on your site, you are already on the right path to higher search engine rankings.
Good quality content will not only bring back your site visitors again and again, but will also trigger word of mouth, and even more important, quality links pointing to your site which are bound to bring loads of traffic.
A Marketing Plan To Get Traffic To Their Websites
All the top ranked Google sites that I studied all had elaborate marketing plans for generating constant and increased traffic to their sites. The majority had affiliate programs. In the offline hey days I remember people used to say that without marketing it did not matter how good your product was, your business would die. The same is very true for any online enterprise today.
Take the time to take a closer look at top ranking websites, study their history and find the secrets they used that you too can apply to your online business.
Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for http://www.websitesource.com and http://www.lowpricedomains.com with experience in the website hosting industry.
Written by SEO Tipster on May 1st, 2006 with no comments.
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