Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally. Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.
This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.
Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage.
In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It’s the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.
Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes - many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking - your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch “the market” closely.
Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn’t become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.
You must also deal with your competition - a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor’s position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor’s position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.
Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.
This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present! People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html for a current list of website favorites.
Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations - this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things.
It all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders - those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions - have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.
Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.
Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.
Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. If costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture - your long-term marketing campaign.
Filomena Serraino - Using one way links for your Web Promotion gets results. WHY? Link popularity is one of the most important factors in search engine performance. Increasing the number of links to your Website will get your site listed higher in search engine results, generating more Website Traffic, increasing your Google PR and improving your site’s overall strength. http://www.seolinkmart.com
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
Monitoring Search Engine Positions
Source:
Monitoring Search Engine Positions
Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally. Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.
This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.
Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage.
In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It’s the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.
Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes - many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking - your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch “the market” closely.
Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn’t become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.
You must also deal with your competition - a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor’s position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor’s position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.
Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.
This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present! People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html for a current list of website favorites.
Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations - this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things.
It all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders - those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions - have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.
Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.
Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.
Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. If costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture - your long-term marketing campaign.
Filomena Serraino - Using one way links for your Web Promotion gets results. WHY? Link popularity is one of the most important factors in search engine performance. Increasing the number of links to your Website will get your site listed higher in search engine results, generating more Website Traffic, increasing your Google PR and improving your site’s overall strength. http://www.seolinkmart.com
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
Monitoring Search Engine Positions
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Monitoring Search Engine Positions
Fortunately, I have been blessed due to the fact that I am in no way a webmaster, but I have been able to achieve high search engine rankings for a number of keyword phrases that I need to dominate in my niche markets. You can get great search engine rankings by following a few simple techniques and then by focusing on creating your site for real people. I share this information with you today because I constantly see programs that will help improve your search engine rankings, but I honestly believe that most of them aren’t very effective.
One example of the programs in which I don’t waste my time is the many link building programs across the web. Even though link building can be very important, my suggestion is that you just let inbound links come naturally. If you have a good website, then people will link to you. Also, if you get the chance to set up a simple affiliate program, then even more people will link to you.
I recently read an article that said that some websites with Google page ranks of 7 or higher will actually let you pay them thousands of dollars per month in order for them to link to your website. All I can say is: WOW! You better hope that the search engines don’t find out! If you haven’t heard, there can be some serious consequences for websites that have been discovered buying or selling link placement.
O.K., so I would like to cover a couple of things that you can do to get easy and effective SEO without spending a dime. Also, by following these steps, people will eventually start to naturally link to your website. Let’s start off by further explaining the power of having a blog on your site. A blog is a really easy way in order for you to build tons of good content for your website and to start getting more links. Many bloggers discover that they can get a lot of free exposure to their blogs in a short period of time.
Let me share an example: For one of my sites, I got “slapped” by Google for the critical keyword phrases that I needed to advertise my business. This means that Google wanted to charge me between $5 and $10 per click for those keyword phrases. In an attempt to fix things, I decided that I should add a blog to that same website. After only a few weeks of posting, Google had started ranking my website naturally for the same keyword phrases that they wanted $5 and $10 a click for! Why did Google change their minds? Well, it was due to the simple fact that I started easily creating pages and pages of quality content through the blog that focused directly on those keyword phrases. When it comes to SEO, content is king, and if you can start to grow a nice blog, then you will grow content fast.
At times Google and other search engines will start naturally visiting your website in order to spider, index and rank your pages, but this can sometimes take months to happen unless you follow this next huge tip. This tip is to provide Google and Yahoo with sitemaps to your website. It isn’t very hard to figure out how to do this, and your website will start to get spidered and ranked pretty fast, all for just providing the search engines with a “map” to your website! Just go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools in order to start submitting a sitemap to Google, or for Yahoo you can head on over to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. If you don’t know how to write a sitemap, then there are also programs across the web that will do it for you.
One last piece of simple SEO advice that I have to share with you is that you should still include titles and meta tags in the html of your web pages. You are also going to want to make sure that you “theme” these pages. Even though the search engines don’t rank your websites according to the titles and meta tags like they did in the past, the search engines will still use these titles and tags as a “guide” in order to see what type of content you are providing. When you provide these titles and tags, you will want to make sure you use similar keyword phrases within the body of your web page. For example, if you had a web page on grocery savings, you would want to maybe have the title say “The Grocery Savings Zone.” You would also want to make sure that the content on that page mentioned grocery savings a few times, and you would also want to have your meta tags include phrases similar to grocery savings.
Following these 3 simple techniques for SEO together will prove to be most effective. As you grow your blog, your new posts will be easily spidered, indexed, and ranked because of your sitemap submissions. Also, by providing titles and meta tags on your other web pages, you will easily allow the search engines to discover the main themes for your site. Before you know it, you will see high search engine rankings for a number of your pages all because you followed a few basic and effective techniques.
Daniel Pereira is an expert at driving free traffic to your website. For 2 free eBooks, free weekly conference calls, and a free mini course, just head on over to http://www.TheFreeTrafficFormula.com . You can also visit “The Free Traffic Blog” at http://www.TheFreeTrafficFormula.com/blog
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
The Easiest and Most Effective Ways to Optimize for the Search Engines
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The Easiest and Most Effective Ways to Optimize for the Search Engines
As an article marketer, I say things that I believe will help other people accomplish their goals. As a widely published article writer, I am often criticized for the words I write. 
In July of 2008, I wrote an article about meta-search engines called, “Look Beyond Google: Meta-Search Engines Can Help Online Marketers” (http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2008/jul/23.html) In this article, the basic concept I was trying to share was that Internet Marketers should look beyond the presence of Google, to find more ways to drive traffic to their websites.
The Google Religion
This article apparently struck a chord of truth with a lot of people, as its reprint results are much larger than even I expected.
The article was also reprinted on the Link Referral website by someone who seems to have appreciated the article.
The first response to the post at the Link Referral website read as follows: “Thanks for the useless post. Google is everything. If you cannot be found on Google, pray for MSN and Yahoo. Anything else will give you 1 hit in 100 years. Link exchanging and buying ads would be so much more effective than buying into that article.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not the least bit annoyed that someone criticized my article. The fact that someone criticized the article is only a testimony to the fact that my words touched the nerve of someone who worships the Google religion. I don’t want to offend anyone’s religion… That would be wrong…
Of course, this is not the first time I have offended those who preach the tenets of the Google religion. I also wrote about this subject in an article about Creating Page Rank, which can be read at:
http://www.keywordtext.com/pudding/28.html This article also drew criticism by those who mocked my assertion that people can truly generate substantial traffic from sources other than Google and that Google PageRank is not as important as many claim.
Answering My Critics
I will admit that if a website is not listed in Google, the task of trying to make money online is made more difficult.
But if a website is not ranked in Google, and it is does not possess links to it from anywhere else either, then you might as well be working at McDonald’s for extra money, as opposed to trying to make money online.
Honestly, Google is only “everything” when you have “nothing but Google” on the table.
The Proof Is In The Pudding
This is not just an opinion I hold. I can back up what I am saying with real data, from a real website that does not rely upon Google for its salvation… The statistics shown here are from my primary website: http://thephantomwriters.com
Even though I do not rely on Google for traffic, Google delivers a great deal of traffic to my website. I actually do quite well in the Google game. I get lots of Google Love for my website, which is described on my blog.
Nothing But The Facts
The following data reflects the traffic for The Phantom Writers for both 2007 and 2008 (through Aug 15th):
Total Unique Visitors
Total Page Views
Unique Clicks from All Search Engines (59 in 2007; 58 in 2008)
Unique Clicks from Google
Unique Clicks from Yahoo, Windows Live, Ask, and MSN Search
Unique Clicks from Other 54/53 Search Engines
Important Data Analysis
In 2007, with 244,000+ total visitors and 61,923 visitors from Google, I would have had to turn away 182,077 visitors or 74.6% of my traffic in 2007, if I had relied solely upon Google to drive traffic to my website.
In 2008, with 169,000+ total visitors and only 75,750 of those visitors coming from Google, I would have had to turn away 93,250 visitors or 55% of my traffic, if I relied solely upon Google to deliver visitors to my website.
With 61,923 visitors from Google in 2007 and 93,250 visitors from Google so far in 2008, it is sure that Google is important.
I wonder how many of my critics are actually seeing 61,923 visitors per year? I suspect that many of those who claim that my advice is bad would be tickled pink to see my Google traffic to their websites. And I bet they would be shocked to realize that non-Google sources account for more traffic for my website than their Google God does.
Beyond Google
In 2007, my website received 119,309 total visitors from all of the search engines combined, but only 61,923 of those people came from Google. That leaves 57,386 people who arrived on my website from the 58 search engines that are not Google. In the search category, Google accounted for only 51.9% of my total search traffic.
The top five search engines accounted for 93.2% of my search traffic.
Had I ignored the those unknown search engines, as my critics suggest others should, I would have been forced to turn away a full 8,095 people or 3% of all of my visitors in 2007. That is a far cry from “one hit in 100 years”.
So far in 2008, Google has accounted for 58% of my total search traffic and only 45% of my global traffic.
The top five search engines have accounted for 95% of my search traffic. Those itty-bitty search engines have delivered 3,851 visitors to my website so far this year, accounting for 2.96% of all of my gross traffic in ‘08.
Itty-bitty is historically worth at least 3% of my yearly traffic. If you want to ignore that 3%, then that is your business. But myself, I am happy to receive traffic from anywhere that I can gain that traffic.
Beyond The Search Engines
As the owner of a professional article marketing company, who practices what he preaches, 90% of my advertising budget is spent on article marketing alone.
This is where the following two pieces of data comes into play:
Unique Non-Search URL’s Sending Traffic
Unique Visitors from Non-Search URL’s
The remainder of my website’s traffic comes from articles published in newsletters and on other websites, recommendations by other websites, bookmarks and name recognition.
In 2007, my website received 27,397 visitors from 9,036 verifiable links to my website from articles that we wrote or from recommendations people made for my website. Of course, I am willing to bet that many of the 97,294 visitors who were untrackable in 2007 were the result of the many articles of mine that were published in newsletters.
In 2008, my website has so far pulled 23,907 visitors from 5,811 verifiable external URLs. There have so far been another 15,344 visitors that I received from untrackable sources, many of which were probably from the articles that we have successfully had published in newsletters.
The article marketing that we do provides a lot of verifiable traffic to our website, and potentially a lot of our untrackable traffic was also derived from the article marketing we do.
In the end, we credit article marketing for our great search engine placement, for hundreds of keywords, and our substantial search traffic as well.
One Quarter Million Reasons Why Google Is Not God
If I believed the poster who said that “Google is everything”, and I had followed his advice for the last several years, then I would have had to turn away 275,327 additional visitors to my website in the past 20 months!
OMG!!! To think that I could have turned away a quarter million visitors or 67% of all of my websites’ traffic, if I had simply followed the advice of my critics.
Wow! Some of my critics are absolute idiots!
Yes, Google is important. But, is Google really “everything”? Only if you want to fail…
As the owner of http://www.thephantomwriters.com, Bill Platt has been providing article ghost writing and article distribution services since 2001. In recent weeks, Bill overhauled his website format, in a way that improved navigation and simplified the process of finding the highest ranked authors and most popular articles on his website. You will also find a lot of great information in Bill’s article marketing blog, which can be seen at: http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
Google Is Everything! Or Is It?
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Google Is Everything! Or Is It?
With the ever-expanding enormity of the Internet, desirable search engine results are more important than ever before. Search engines are generally an efficient way to narrow down the millions of pages of information available, to a few relevant results.
Advanced Search Features
The relevancy of results can depend on several factors. For one, the search terms used make a difference. Boolean search rules are probably the best-known and most widely used. These consist of separating specific terms with AND, OR, or NOT, to include or exclude results. To get an overview of the Advanced Search Features available in a number of search engines, check out this chart: http://www.mlb.ilstu.edu/ressubj/subject/intrnt/srcheng.htm
One rule to remember is that the more specific your search terms are, the better your results will be. For example, instead of searching for “dogs”, try searching for “terriers”.
Another rule is that less is more. Be concise with the search terms you pick - putting too many search words into the engine can result in confusing or too few results. In fact, most search engines limit the number of words that can be used in a search request to ten words.
Finally, you can also add filters to whatever you are searching. For example, if you are searching full text files, you can enter title:oxygen to find only files with the word “oxygen” in the title. The same can be done for URLs. If you know “oxygen” is part of the URL you’re looking for, you would enter inurl:oxygen. I use this tool all of the time to find information provided on a government website by adding inurl:gov to my search criteria.
Organic and Paid Search Results
If you’ve ever used more than one search engine, you’ll quickly realize that not every search engine returns the same results or links. There will be similarities and differences across most search engines, especially the “Big Three”: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
The Big Three search engines tend to include sponsored results (basically, results that somehow fit the search term as defined by the advertiser, and which appear above the real search results). Usually the sponsored results will note that they are “sponsored” results somewhere, so as not to be confused with the “real” results. Except, the search engine companies actually hope - that you’ll click on the paid results instead of the real results, so the search companies can get paid for you visiting their clients’ websites.
The results from the different search engines can actually overlap. If you want to have a wide variety of relevant links, you may spend time typing the same words into different engines, only to come up with mostly the same search results.
There is a tool that makes the similarities between the search engines abundantly clear; although this search tool is not good for much other than to show you how similar search results can be between Yahoo and Google: http://www.langreiter.com/exec/yahoo-vs-google.html
A variation on this theme can be seen here: http://ranking.thumbshots.com/
Meta Search Engines Combine Results From Many Search Engines
Instead of relying on the Big Three search engines alone, don’t be afraid to try some different search engines. Meta search engines are a good way to be more efficient with your searches, and they will help you to get a much more diverse set of relevant search results. Meta search engines, such as http://www.Clusty.com and http://www.Widow.com are both good at returning a wide variety of results.
For demonstration purposes, let’s take a look at some different search terms in each of five different search engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN, Clusty and Widow. The three search terms used for this unscientific experiment are: unemployment, weather, and Myanmar.
Test Search: Unemployment
For “unemployment”, Google, Yahoo and Clusty first returned sponsored links. MSN and Widow both returned online encyclopedia results - MSN using Encarta’s encyclopedia; Widow returning Wikipedia.org results. Wikipedia also showed up in the other three search engines, as well, but further down in the results lists.
A similarity between all of the search engine results was they each turned up specific states’ unemployment links in the first page - primarily California, New York, and Ohio. Google and Yahoo also brought up current news items related to unemployment.
Widow.com (the meta search engine) provides additional tools in the left sidebar for related-keywords and clustered search options. For the search term “unemployment”, the clustered results offered: insurance, compensation, unemployed, rate, workforce development, benefits eligible workers, information employers, data, individuals, and welcome Ohio. All of these additional search terms are just a click away.
Test Search: Weather
The next term is “weather.” In this search, only Google and Clusty returned a sponsored result at the top. The top result for the other three engines was weather.com. The secondary results in each of the engines included, in varying order, Yahoo weather, and NOAA’s National Weather Service website.
Differences for the term of “weather” included MSN showing MSN weather in their results, as well as a UK weather website on Widow.com. Again, I was impressed by the optional clustered search engine results on Widow.com. These included options for city searches, Doppler, and the latest weather news.
Test Search: Myanmar
The final search word for the five search engines was Myanmar, to test the relevance of findings for a region that’s received a lot of media attention in the last few months since the Myanmar Cyclone. The results on Google started with several colorful maps of the area, a feature that really stood out for me.
As for similarities, each of the five search engines contained one or more Wikipedia results. The search engines also included current news links and some tourism links. Once again, many of the clustered search results on Widow.com caught my eye: travel, Burma (Myanmar’s previous name), culture, cyclone, statistics, politics, government, and tours.
Search Lessons Learned
What are we to learn from this little search engine experiment? There are several things that you can take away from this. For starters, the Big Three search engines tend to have pretty similar results. Occasionally there are differences, but not anything spectacularly different.
Another conclusion that can be drawn is that you are more likely to get sponsored results when you use more general terms (unemployment, weather), as many advertisers can link their products to a wide variety of general terms.
The most pleasant feature is the availability of diverse range of clustered and related terms, available with a single click of the mouse, on Widow.com.
The potential for Meta search engines to cut down on multiple searches is there, if users are willing to break out of their typical searching habits, to uncover jewels of information within the existing data.
The Widow.com Meta search engine goes above and beyond what I have experienced with other Meta search engines. The Clusty.com Meta search engine also offers clustered search terms, but for some search terms, some of its offerings are simply nonsensical.
How I Discovered Meta Search Engines
In the course of my own work, I spend a lot of time searching on the web for information on a variety of topics. As a ghostwriter, I frequently write on topics that I know little about ahead of time, so I do loads of research to help me cover the topics I write about in a much more logical and educated manner.
I used to use Google almost exclusively. But, one day I was researching an article topic that I had written about previously. Imagine my aggravation when the only material that Google would show me on the topic was material I had written myself!
While I had written about that topic previously, I was not an expert on the subject. I did not want to simply rehash what I had written before; I wanted to write on the topic in a new and different way.
I tried Yahoo and MSN and met the same disappointment with the search results. Then I went to http://www.DogPile.com. I thought their results were awful, but I liked the concept of the Meta Search Engine.
I tried many Meta Search Engines, and then I came across the Widow Search Engine. I liked it so much that I made it one of the default search engines in the article search tools on my website. The thing I like about Widow best is the Clustered Search Listings. With Clustered Search, Widow brainstorms the keyword variations for me, so that I don’t have to figure out the related search terms on my own. As they say in the MasterCard commercials - this is priceless!
In the end, this article is not about which search engine will send the most traffic to a website you own. Instead, this article is about which search engine will give you the best information to help you find the answers you want and need.
Good luck and happy searching.
Bill Platt is the owner of http://www.thephantomwriters.com article ghost writing and article distribution services. He has been helping small business owners promote their online businesses, using reprint articles, since 2001. In 2007, Bill wrote an ebook titled, “Article Marketing For Traffic, Sales And Profit”. You can get Bill Platt’s ebook here.
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Break Your Search Engines Habits To Get Better Information