Web Moves Blog

Remember those little quizzes you used to see in magazines with headlines like: ‘How Compatible Are You and Your Partner?’ or ‘Are You Dating Mr Wrong?’. Well, we thought it might be fun to create a 5 min quiz for you to test the compatibility of your site with search engines. Your total score will give you an idea of whether your site is destined for a “high ranking honeymoon” in the engines or headed towards separation from the indexes. Pens ready?

Here we go: (more…)

First of all, for beginners, I’ll give a brief definition of a domain name.

Your domain name is the same as “www.yoursitename.com”. It’s also known as your URL or Website Address.

For example, www.webmastercourse.com is my site’s domain name or my web address.

The domain name must be registered and approved before you can call it your own. The reason it works this way is because two websites having the same domain name cannot reside online at the same time. If someone types in www.webmastercourse.com, he/she will go to my website and no one else’s.

Registering your domain name and awaiting approval gives the registration company opportunity to check with every other company around the world to be sure no one else has already applied for your domain name “first.” (more…)

Researching Your Keywords
Once you’ve opened your account, start researching your keywords. You will probably already have several relevant words and phrases in mind. Write them all down and head over to the GoTo Keyword Suggestion Tool with your list.

The Keyword Suggestion Tool tells you how many times in the previous month people have searched for the keyword you input, or any phrase containing it. Results are listed in order, with the most popular searches at the top.

Type your first keyword into the tool’s search box. When the results come up, select “Save As” on your browser, and choose to save as “Text.” This will save your results in a small plain text file that can be opened by any text editor (like NotePad). Use the keyword as the file name. (more…)

Yahoo!

With the new Yahoo! “Pay-For-Review” model it might be relatively easier for sites to get into the directory but getting traffic from your listing is altogether a different story. And now with it’s new annual recurring payment policy you have to be extra careful while submitting your site for a review.
Here are 8 things to keep in mind while submitting your site to Yahoo!

1) Selecting your domain name is the most vital step in getting a top ranking in Yahoo! and also other directories like Dmoz and Looksmart. Make sure your domain name is “Keyword Rich”. You can make your domain keyword rich by simply inserting hyphens to separate words in your domain name. Yahoo! gives more relevance to sites with keywords in their domain name. (more…)

How to Get Search Engine Traffic

Of all the traffic my websites have generated the past few years (literally millions of visitors) ONE traffic source stands head and shoulders above the rest…

Search Engine Traffic.

Specifically, traffic from google.com and yahoo.com – the leaders in finding things on the web.

The traffic is top quality. These people are finding my sites on their own, so they are my best potential customers. And the traffic flows continually regardless of my advertising budget.

Considering the highly targeted nature of this traffic and the fact that it flows to me virtually without cost, search engine traffic simply cannot be beat. (more…)

When We Really Worked For The Money
I remember when a website wanted to be found it had to adhere to the rules and algorithms for Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, Webcrawler, OpenText, Infoseek, Lycos, Yahoo! and Northern Light. An entire industry was born from the need to satisfy the demand to get into those search engines because each had its own algorithms, indexing and ranking criteria.

Someone needed to know how each engine worked, how each directory worked, how to make pages that would be indexed by each of them, where to put them so they were separate from the versions that needed to meet the requirements of another engine, keyword density, how often to submit, how to read search engine logs, how to track indexed pages, how to track visitors, how to build meta tags, how to construct a page so that crawlers could navigate JavaScript, what dynamic links couldn’t be crawled, FLASH workarounds, frames workarounds, MSFrontPage code workarounds and then the killer skill of all, how to get a page to rank well and beat the competition. (more…)

Google Search Engine
In a matter of a couple of short years, the Google.com search engine has become the world’s favorite way to find what they’re looking for online.

Now, most of you who are reading this are saying “Duh”, butlet me ask you this: Do you REALLY know how to use Google and get the most out of this incredible search technology?

Hopefully, these tips will help you find EXACTLY what you want the next time you head on over to “Google Land” and start searching.

To start, unlike most search engines, Google does not care if your search term is in UPPER or lower case. In fact, it can even be MiXeD case and the search results will be identical no matter how you type in your term. (more…)

Google Search Engine
In “Part One” we discussed some of the more basic Google search techniques. (If you missed it you can find it here: How To REALLY Use Google Part Two

As promised, here’s the “juicier stuff”. Google has some advanced search options which come in quite
handy, depending on what items you may be searching.

TITLE SEARCH: Allows you to search for pages and sites that have specific words or phrases in their title. For example:

intitle: “direct response marketing”

This search would only give you results of sites that have that particular phrase in their title.

SITE SEARCH: Gives you the opportunity to search pages ONLY within a specific site or domain (or using the “negative” results technique from Part One you can “exclude” results from a specific domain or site as well). For example:

“lead generation” site:direct-response-marketing.net (more…)

Google Search Engine
In Part One, we covered the basics of searching on Google.com and in Part Two we moved into more advanced search techniques.
In today’s third and final installment we will peer into some ways of using Google you may have never thought of or knew existed.

DATE RANGES: You may limit your search to an exact date of a “range” of dates that a page was indexed by Google. To use Google’s “daterange” function, you will need to express your dates in “Julian” dates. This date format is express as an integer. To convert a common date into Julian format go to:
http://www.24hourtranslations.co.uk/dates.htm

As an example, if I wanted to find pages (about a certain topic) indexed by Google during the month of May 2003, I would type in:

“direct response marketing” daterange: 2452774-2452803

TYPES OF FILES: You can limit your Google search results to specific files ending in a particular extension (.doc, .txt, .rtf, .pdf etc…) (more…)

Many do-it-yourself webmasters and online entrepreneurs have been led to believe that search engine positionining is a black art, and that no mere amateur can hope to compete with the “experts.” If you are among them, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to drive free, targeted traffic to your website.

There are only three steps you need to take, if you want to quickly increase your site’s visibility in the search engines. The three steps are: positioning, optimization, and link building. In this short tutorial, I’ll explain what’s involved in each one, and show you just how easy it can be. If you can give me even 10 minutes of your time today, you’ll be well on your way to top rankings.

If there is one message I’d like to get across to you, it’s “don’t fear the search engines.” Not everything that you have been told about them is true! If you would like to increase the amount of traffic flowing to your website, without spending a dime, I urge you to read this article with an open mind. (more…)