Last year, we informed you about the start of Nutch, an open source search engine project that tries to compete with the major players in the search engines market. What has happened since then? It's time to take a look if the efforts to build an open source search engine have led to results.
One of my favorite subjects to teach on at our live SEO Mastery Workshops is that of keyword research and the behavior of a specific target audience using my all time favorite research tool, Wordtracker.
For those who have not heard of, Wordtracker it is a Web based service that will help you discover which keywords and phrases will be most effective for attracting the right audience to your Web site. Not only that, but the service also tells you how competitive your keywords are (or how many other competing Web pages have been optimized with those keywords in mind) plus how many people have actually searched for those keywords in the past within the last 60 days on the major search engines.
Wordtracker can be used for even more powerful things than just "researching keywords." I'll be revealing much more in the future about the impact of researching "visitor behavior" vs. keywords.
Sometimes questions will arise around the subject of gateway information pages or doorway pages. People have heard that "doorway pages" are BAD and some have stated that search engines "hate doorway pages".
For clarification on these type of issues, let's start by explaining some simple ground rules looking beyond the jargon and terminology.
Demystifying The Radically Different Keyword Results Provided By Overture and Wordtracker...because your online success depends on getting accurate keyword counts! Part 1
by Robin Nobles
The root of all success in search engine marketing begins with keywords. Period. Get them wrong and virtually everything about your online endeavor will fail. Only by targeting the right keywords can one expect to ride that exhilarating magic carpet to online prosperity.
Stating the obvious you say? ...well, if so, then why is it that virtually everyone - professional and amateur alike - is oblivious to the fact they are selecting, and frequently buying, keywords based on highly skewed numbers?
The fact is that very few online marketers understand the results supplied by the two most basic keyword selection tools. These are the very same tools being used globally to hone keyword choices into supposedly laser sharp focus in an effort to keep pace with the challenges of increasingly keen competition and ever-rising keyword pay-per-click costs.
By now you have probably heard about the new MSN search look. Launched July 1 of this year, MSN appears to have reworked their ranking algorithms somewhat so that results are displayed in a different manner.
Also, they have changed the appearance of the site, more closely matching Google and Yahoo! with their colored ad boxes and similar fonts.
One would hope that this is merely the beginning of what is supposed to be an impressive search engine.
Do you want to be automatically informed by email when Google's spider visits your web site?
A search engine spider is an automated software program that locates and collects data from web pages for inclusion in a search engine's database. The name of Google's spider is "Googlebot".
If you have a web site that allows you to use PHP code then your web pages can inform you when Google's spider has indexed them.
I read an interesting article the other day in which they interviewed one of the chief IT people at Google and a point was made which I hadn't really considered. They were talking about managing the cluster of servers that is Google, and how much work it must be. This IT person went on to say that they had developed their own custom patch management system in house to manage the changes required to their software.
That got me to thinking. Estimates have put the Google cluster at anywhere between 10,000 and 80,000 servers, working in tandem, to ultimately produce that search box you see when you go to Google.com.
By now I am sure you have heard that Ask Jeeves bought a small unknown company called Tukaroo. What you may not know is that Tukaroo was in the business to build a search application which could search both your desktop and the web in a seamless "end-to-end" search experience.
Desktop search is the new buzzword these days, with both Microsoft and Google developing these types of applications. It is kind of surprising to me to see Ask wading into this market. At least until you consider what the outcome could be.
Of course if you take MSN, Google and Yahoo! out of the mix for a while, it does make sense. With the recent acquisition of IWon, Excite and Myway and of course the purchase of Tukaroo, Ask is trying to set itself up as a legitimate alternate to the big 3.