Hey I know this is old news but I have been using Google alerts for some time now to see what Google sees with keywords. So every time Google finds a site with your chosen keyword it will email you a list of websites that use it. You can add as many keywords as you like. It really helps.
Example: My keyword is "Definitive Labs" I get an email from Google showing me the sites that have "Definitive Labs" on it.
Prase is a new Page Rank assitanted search engine that uses Google, Yahoo and MSN to search. Its results show what pagerank the site is and other information.
Jizo is looking like a very promising e-commerce solution. The information I have it will be fully optimised for the search engines, made to be accessible, uses the latest technologies like Ajax and to be very user friendly.
Their website is still in development but they are looking for beta testers to test the product once it goes live. Beta testers will receive a discount when the product is live and also have a chance to earn money through their affiliates and 3rd party modules section. It will be made in PHP and MySQL.
This looks like its going to be an awesome ecommerce solution and cant wait to see it once it is live.
Your search engine optimization campaign is a success, and the increasing number of visitors impress everyone, including your boss. But what if they cannot find what they are looking for? What if they don’t buy your products? What if they never come back? Ugur Akinci has some advice.
By Pandia Guest Writer Ugur Akinci
A recent client request to review their web site usability prompted me to codify some of the rules with which I approach web navigation. These 3 principles work 100% and every deviation from them only brings confusion to the end user and thus lowers the corporate ROI (Return on Investment).
Rule Number 1: Don’t-Make-Me-Think.
Also the title of a best-seller book by Steve Krug, this principle is violated in many web sites because perhaps the developers love their craft so much that they forget what the whole site is for – the end user or a customer who is there to either a) find information on a specific topic, or b) solve a specific problem.
Navigation must be 100% transparent for the user to trust the web content and the business entity behind the web content. If the user starts thinking about the quirks of navigation, you will lose her as a prospect as well.
If your visitors start asking questions or silently chew on statements like the following, it means you have failed in the Don’t-Make-Me-Think test:
“Wow, that’s interesting, why did they put this link here?”
“Oops, what happened to the left sidebar?”
“Oh, great, I have no idea how to get back to that page now…”
“Why does this thing keep blinking?”
“I swear to god it was here just a second ago…”
“Now, why would anyone have a 3-layer drop-down menu with 20 options each?”
“Jeez, this lime-green text on pink background is just killing my eyes!”
The finger that points at the moon must not call attention to itself. If it does, we all start to watch the finger, not the moon. And your customers are lined up to pay for the moon’s beauty, not the up-close anatomy of a finger.
Rule Number 2: Less-Is-More.
A great universal principle that was made famous by the legendary European architect Mies van der Rohe.
Your web site should include only the essentials and nothing else. People are busy, tired and already bombarded with information and infomercials all day long. We have to respect their time.
Eye candy does not respect anybody’s time. It is pure diversion for the aimless. It is great for a few seconds. Then your visitor clicks the mouse and moves on to somewhere else that perhaps does not look as jazzy but has the needed information, right there on the Index page, easily accessible. Case closed. Money lost.
Make sure your links have the minimum possible number of words.
If “Careers” is enough to do the job, do not label your link “Available career opportunities in our company.”
When “About Us” is a simple and well-accepted link label for corporate background information, do not call it “Our Past, Present and Future.”
Make sure your web page content fits a single screen and your visitors would not need to scroll vertically or (God forbid!) horizontally to read your content. Even if they need to scroll down, make sure it would require a minimal effort and not a toilet-paper-roll scroll (unless you own one of those single-product single-page “micro sites” which are anything but “micro”).
Do not include any links, offers, affiliate plug-ins, ads etc. in your web pages if you have less than 5,000 visitors a day (which probably represents over 90% of all the web sites out there). In my personal experience, until and unless you attract 5,000 unique daily visitors, all those links, plug-ins, ads etc. just clutter up your web site with no significant ROI benefits.
Ask yourself if $10, $30 or $50 a month of “ancillary income” is worth diluting your message, distracting your visitors, and losing them by inviting to click on a link that would take them to another site.
Rule Number 3:Mutual Exclusivity.
Make sure all your navigation bars and pages have mutually exclusive content, with two exceptions:
1) The footer links should mirror the header links since in long pages people lose track of the links they’ve seen earlier at the top of the page. It is a great relief to access the same or similar links at the bottom of a long page without having to scroll up to top.
2) When you have a page element that requires action on the part of your visitors and is crucial to your ROI, like a membership form, a product order button, repeating it on different pages is acceptable since some studies have shown that on the average it takes seven exposures before a visitor considers taking action on such an element.
Two major navigation blocks on a great majority of commercial web sites consist of 1) the vertical navigation links on the left sidebar or frame/pane of the page, and 2) horizontal navigation links, tabs (with or without drop-down menus)
The links in these navigation blocks should not be repeated in each other since it creates confusion and needless over-clicking. Anything that causes the user to expand extra energy for the same results would create psychic friction and frustration.
A good rule of thumb is to reserve the vertical navigation links (usually on the left side of the page) to the HOME link (should always be the first on top) and information links such as “Calendar of Events,” “Careers,” “Newsletter,” “Map,” or “Troubleshooting.”
It is important to stick to the very same vertical links in every page to provide a solid perceptual anchor for the visitor. It’s much easier for a visitor to feel “lost” if the vertical links keep shifting and changing.
The horizontal navigation links (usually placed on top of the page, right under the main header/graphics) should point at main sections or pages of the web site that can further serve as a mini-gateway to other related subordinate-level pages.
For example, for a Travel Agency web site, one of the horizontal/header links can take you to the “Bargains.” Once you are in the Bargains page, a second set of dynamically-displayed horizontal links can point at individual travel bargain deals: “Disney,” ” Hawaii,” “Miami,” etc. – without changing the vertical links.
Sticking with these 3 simple rules should solve 90% of all your navigation issues. Let me know how these principles work for you and I’d be happy to share your feedback with my other readers and clients.
LostintheCrowd helps you camouflage your search data using your browser cookie.
By Pandia Guest Writer Lars Våge
A couple of weeks ago an AOL employee released search data for some 650.000 users for research purposes. Or, that was at least the idea. Instead the data found its way to an open web site and bloggers started to circulate the info. This caused quite some consternation as it turned out to be possible to some extent to track who had done which searches.
The end result was that three AOL employees had to leave the company according to AP.
In the wake of this PR disaster the new web service LostintheCrowd.org offers to anonymize your AOL, Google, Ask, MSN Search and Yahoo! searches.
All you have to do is to supply LostintheCrowd a copy of the cookie the search engine is using to keep track of your searches (a cookie is a small text file that the search engine keeps on your computer). LostintheCrowd then regularly searches the Web using this cookie developing a lot of random information or “noise” that drowns out your real searches. The data related to your cookie therefore demonstrate general or average interests.
At LostintheCrowd you first select the search engine you want to use from a menu. You are then asked to bookmark a link that is generated by the service by dragging the link to your toolbar or by right clicking on the link and saving it as a bookmark.
When this is done you go to the selected search engine home page and click on the relevant LostintheCrowd bookmark. You will then get a message “You Are Now Lost in MSN’s Crowd” or something similar.
This is a little cumbersome but much easier than using anonymizing solutions like Privoxy orTor. Privoxy and Tor will make you totally invisible, but by using LostintheCrowd you avoid loosing surfing speed.
LostintheCrowd is launched by Unspam Technologies in Utah, USA.
Fanpop is a network of "social portals" called spots that are created for fans by fans. Share your favorite links and meet fellow fanatics. Find out what other fans are surfing on the web with "social browsing". We think that it should be easier to get to stuff you care about. Because the web should revolve around you. Go pop in and out of a few spots!
Fanpop! is a very useful site in spite of the silly name. It is not essentially a fan site, it is a place where people with special interests gather in groups to share and rate links, participate in discussions, read news headlines and more. It is a typical Web 2.0. invention that might prove to be more than a fad.
Find your fan spot Because of the activities of its members, Fanpop! is actually a steadily increasing collection of portals, called fan spots. Some cover traditional fan site topics, like Tomb Raider and The Beatles. But there is a surprising variety of spots.
You can search for spots related to your interests, or you can browse the fan spot channels — a directory type interface. Browsing the channels, you can see the number of links and fans in the fan spots. They are both good indicators of the activity and consequently the reliability of a spot.
How it works Every fan spot has a links tab where you can add, tag, rate and comment links. You can also report a link as spam, broken, outdated, duplicate or miscategorized.
The links spot might prove to be the most valuable part: In a spot that has been active for a while, you get a collection of highly relevant quality links that can be sorted by date, tags or content type (e.g. article, blog, tool, etc.)
Then there is a tab for headlines, which are taken from sources like Google News, Topix.net, and About.com. There is no way of rating or tagging these.
Each spot has also its own forum tab. However, these forums are not very active — yet.
At the bottom of the page there is a box named “More on the web”. It contains links relevant entries from Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube and Google. There is also a box showing related spots, which aren’t always very relevant. Is it any good? Fanpop! is still in beta, so it is too early to say for certain how useful it will prove to be. There are scores of similar services out there, like Orkut for community and discussion and Digg and Delicious for sharing news and links. Fanpop! has an interesting mix of features, though.
What will make or break it, is the way they handle their users. It seems to me that Fanpop! are acutely aware of this, and they have arranged for different ways to reward active users. Top fans — particularly active users — are paraded on the front page. Fans who contribute a lot to their spots are awarded medals, and with the medals come privileges. If the links you add are highly rated and the forums you start inspire lively discussions, you get access to editing the links and tags in your spot.
This system has the potential to create a top caste of contributors, who gain the trust of their fan spots and boost the quality of the contents. It is early days still, but the spots with a broad fan base and some very active users can prove to be interesting gateways to specialized topics on the web.
Fanpop and SEO Can you use Fanpop to get inbound links? Of course, and a link from Fanpop will probably generate traffic.
Wannabe spammers should note though that Fanpop uses redirects, though. Your real URL is not included in the link on their pages and a link from Fanpop will therefore not increase your pagerank or your search engine rankings.
(Or, to be more precise: Fanpop has included the real URL as a “title” field in the URL tag. You may see it if you hover your mouse over the link. We doubt that the search engine crawlers will follow such links, though, although they may in the future, if they find that Fanpop is able to filter out low quality pages and sites.)
The Webmaster Central is another attempt at improving the communication between the search engine and webmasters looking for ways of improving its standing in search engine results.
The blog says that:
Unfortunately — though we’ve had the pleasure of chatting with many of you in a variety of forums, around the blogosphere, and at many conferences across the world — we simply haven’t been able to interact with every one of you. So we’re excited to announce our new Google Webmaster Central, which enables us to have productive conversations with many more of you, all the time.
Some may question the motivation behind such a move. Does Google try to move the Google related discussion over to its own turf, gaining a better control of it that way?
It is interesting to note that only one day later the Yahoo! Search Blog commented upon its latest search index update, announcing that:
We are trying to connect with you more directly and enrich our interaction even further through Site Explorer. Please authenticate your site in Site Explorer and join the conversation on the Site Explorer forum.
So there you go, not only Google, but Yahoo! as well invites webmasters to discuss the occult art of search engine optimization at their own domains.
Obviously, if Google and Yahoo! employees stop taking part in other search engine forum discussions, like on Webmaster World and Search Engine Watch forums, there would be reason to worry.
Still, we believe these are exactly what the search engines say they are: forums and sites that might bring in additional information of relevance to webmasters.
Here is a short summary of what the two webmaster centrals have to offer:
1. A link to the Yahoo! Search Blog (We guess they have reckoned there is no need for a separate blog for webmasters).
2. Search Help (Like Google, Yahoo! has gathered all relevant help pages in one spot).
3. Search Content Guidelines — in essence a discussion of what Yahoo! considers “good stuff” and what it considers spam.
4. A form for reporting spam. This is how you can bring down your competitor. Report any spammy techniques they may use and see their rankings drop into oblivion. But remember: They can do the same to you!
5. Support Feedback form. This is the form you use when your competitor has arrested you for spam and you have to beg Yahoo! for forgiveness. You may also use it to complain about Yahoo’s spiders, get help in removing pages from their index, copyright issues and more.
6. There is also a separate suggestion form where you can make suggestions for improvement and more.
7. The Yahoo! Site Explorer lets you analyse the standing of your own site (or that of your rivals). This is a popular tool among search engine marketers as it gives a much more accurate picture of your number of back-links than Google. Google’s search engine is totally unreliable in this respect. If you sign in and add a small text file to your site’s server, you may also use this service to find out if Yahoo! is able to find your site. You may also give it the URL of your RSS feed, helping Yahoo’s spiders to index your new pages.
8. And finally, there is a submit page, which gives you information on how to submit your site for free, the pay per click text ad programme and Yahoo’s Search Submit Express (where you can pay Yahoo! to do something they should do for free anyway, namely index your pages).
It should be noted that these are not all new features. However, these search engines are now trying to give the various help pages and webmaster tools a more coherent interface, making it easier for readers to find the relevant information.
MSN and Ask
Moreover, even though MSN and Ask have no similar “webmaster centrals”, they do provide much of the same information.
Google has launched a new set of applications for web site owners. The applications are hosted by Google, but users may customize the user interface with their own logo and color scheme, and — what’s probably even more important — they can use their own domain name.
(As a matter of fact, you have to use your own domain name.)
These services are actually not new. What Google is doing is to offer adapted versions of already existing applications like Gmail (online email service, which — by the way — was available in company versions as early as February), Google Talk instant messaging, the Google Calendar, and the Google Page Creator for web site creation.
Google has set aside 2 gigabytes of email storage for each user.
The idea is clearly to replace locally hosted software with an easy to use Internet based service. This may be interpreted as another skirmish in Google’s battle against Microsoft’s Office supremacy, as this is an offer that might replace Outlook and its various functions (email, calendar etc).
The blog service Blogger and the Writely online word processor are not included, however. We expect them to be soon, as well as other functions like spreadsheets, photo sharing and — maybe — a closed off version of Google’s database tool.
Google says that they over time will offer versions of Google Apps for Your Domain that are oriented toward the needs of a variety of organizations: “from family websites and community groups to non-profits and small businesses, as well as universities, large enterprises, and ISPs.”
A more costly “premium version” is in preparation. It is unclear what this premium version will add.
You will have to apply to use the Google Apps during the beta period. Organizations accepted by Google are eligible for free service for their approved beta users even beyond the end of the beta period.
The service is controlled by using a web browser. The following browsers are supported: - Microsoft IE 5.5+ for Windows, Mozilla Firefox 0.8+ for Windows, Mac and Linux, Safari 1.2.1+ for Mac, and Netscape 7.1+for Windows, Mac and Linux.
ChaCha.com is a new search engine that adds flesh and blood guides to the search process.
The inventors Scott Jones and Brad Bostic are testing a new search engine called ChaCha.com that is powered by — brace yourself — human beings.
Now, what’s new about that, you may ask, even a directory like Dmoz is powered by human beings, as are content sites like About.com.
Well, the main difference is that searchers are to get personal help if needed. That’s right. If the search engine cannot serve you relevant result, it will lead you to a real person — a guide — that will try to answer them for you.
Users may contact the guide by use of instant messenger on the ChaCha home page. The user may then chat with this guide, asking any questions he or she may like.
According to SFGuide the site will have around 3,000 guides when the program is released, many of them college students, retirees and stay-at-home parents.
These guides will also help ChaCha build a database of answers to popular questions, a function that is related to, but not quite like, answer services like Answer.com. As a matter of fact, there is a separate search button for this database on the home page — the so called “ChaCha Search”.
The guides are organised in the ChaCha Underground, a separate site with a directory of all the guides categorized according to interests.
According to Information Week the guides will be paid for the number of hours spent answering queries, from 5 to 10 US$ according to rank.
The main problem will probably be the scale of the venture. If people have to wait to long for a response, they may leave never to come back again.
Secondly, ChaCha has to make sure that the guides are properly trained. They have to be pretty good at using the other search engines and online databases if they are to find relevant high quality information quickly.
There are some 2500 guides working already, so do try the service. Don’t be surprised to find an error message when you visit it, though. The search engine is definitely in its testing phase.
Is is a bit similar to Google Books, which lets you search the text of books scanned by Google.
Google is fetching news data from publishers like Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Guardian and the Washington Post, and from news aggregators like Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale and HighBeam Research.
The idea is to index the full-text of 200 years of news articles, free sources as well as information that requires a fee.
The News Archive Search page has a search form for exploring the historical material. Results from the News Archive may also be included in regular web search results or news search listings.
The advanced search page lets you limit the search to a specific time period, language, source or price. There are also menu based quasi-boolean search options.
You can also limit searches to a specific period or news source by clicking on alternatives listed in the left hand column of search result pages.
Historians will love this feature, as will anyone trying to analyse the causes of current events.
And Google, of course, has made another step towards the ultimate goal: To make all existing information available accessible to their users. Welcome “Big Thought”!
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Hey I know this is old news but I have been using Google alerts for some time now to see what Google sees with keywords. So every time Google finds a site with your chosen keyword it will email you a list of websites that use it. You can add as many keywords as you like. It really helps. 
Your search engine optimization campaign is a success, and the increasing number of visitors impress everyone, including your boss. But what if they cannot find what they are looking for? What if they don’t buy your products? What if they never come back? Ugur Akinci has some advice.
Google and Yahoo! add webmaster support portals, with help files, blogs, discussion forums and tools.
Google has launched 
Is is a bit similar to Google Books, which lets you search the text of books scanned by Google. 
