seoworld

Making Extra Money - This is How People Succeed

2009-03-16T09:15:00.001-07:00

Many people are now making extra money online through various online programs. Majority of people who start these programs usually fail. You will be able to count yourself amongst the minority who succeed if you decide to do things the way it should be done.

Some people fail even before they start. What I mean by this is that, most people end up doing nothing eventually because of things like doubt, procrastination and information overload. It isn't enough to simply have the desire to make extra money. You need to actually start doing something about that desire immediately.

Nothing happens until you do something. This is the general rule online. Before I started making money online like I do nowadays, I initially allowed the spirit of procrastination prevent me from doing anything. I kept saying I would do something the next day. The next day quickly turned to one week and one week became a month. Time passed by and I did nothing.

Making extra money doesn't have to be difficult if we only do something on time. I allowed doubt limit my success initially. I had doubts about starting anything. I didn't have to posses any advanced computer skills to succeed. What I needed was some good information to show me what to do.

The problem was that, I kept searching for free information to guide me right. That didn't help much because the free information out there lacked deep details and a complete plan to follow. I realized the fact that I needed to invest in some solid information that's already proven to work.

I decided I was going to learn from others who are already doing well. I discovered soon enough that having the right information about online programs that work, is what I needed.

You can start making extra money in the next few hours if you get the right information about proven online money making methods and if you take action today and do something.

Do you want to see the money making method which brings me the most amount of cash everyday? Read about it here: http://www.raljo.com/make-money-review.html and discover all you need to know about making extra money online.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bruce_Edwards

Making Money on the Web - The Simple Things You Need to Do to Succeed

2009-03-16T09:14:00.001-07:00

Making money on the web has become easier and easier over the last couple of the years. However, other things related to this phenomenon have become more difficult. Such things prevent most people from succeeding on the web. Reading this information will help you avoid the pitfalls many people go through in their search for online cash.

Now, let's understand some of the things you need to do to succeed fast online.

Things to do to start making money:

(1) Accurate and adequate information: It's extremely important that you avoid jumping from one online money making money program to another. You won't succeed if you keep jumping around. It didn't work for me and it has never worked for anyone. I train lots of people on how to make a living through the internet, and it's my experience that going from one method to the other too quickly will not help you start making money on the web.

There is so much wrong information out there that you can get drowned by the flood of worthless information available online. You need to stick to what works well. You need to make a decision to acquire any information that would help you achieve your money making goal. Don't be stingy to yourself.

(2) Avoiding doubts: This is one thing which almost ruined everything for me before I even started. I had huge doubts about my ability to learn the methods available. I wasn't sure I could properly implement the ideas. My doubts lead me straight into procrastination. Procrastination prevented me from starting immediately. Don't be afraid. Start doing something today to make money.

Making money on the web requires good information and a strong determination to succeed.

Do you want to see the money making method which brings me the most amount of cash everyday? Read about it here: http://www.raljo.com/make-money-review.html and discover all you need to know about making money on the web.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bruce_Edwards

The Basis of Your Internet Business

2009-03-16T09:13:00.002-07:00

Do not accept your Internet business as your main business. Accept it as a possible additional source. Of course, it can become your main business in time but in the beginning do not count much on it. To gain money is not easy, especially in the net. It will take probably a long tome before you make your very first couple of hundred. Of course, there are exceptions but we all know that exceptions just prove the rule.

You can't get money just like that. You will get money from your clients, subscribers, users of your service or buyers of advertising space on your site. Therefore, in order to have clients, you need to have an audience first. The audience will decide whether to become your client or not. What does audience mean? Your audience is the visitors of your site and your hyperlinks readers. That means you have to create you audience starting with creating your site and hyperlinks (it can be only one in the beginning). The subject of your site and your hyperlinks should meet your audience's demands. Open a site based on the subject you like best. Do it now. Never put off till tomorrow what can be done today. The name of your hyperlink is also very important as well as where you intend to place it (what directory).

At all costs create your own site on your own domain. That is not difficult at all. In this way you are going to have qualitative and fully functional hosting. If you are not satisfied with your hoster, you can change it easily and your domain and hyperlinks are not going to change. The name of the domain should stick to peoples' memory. Any second level domain has more rememberable name than any third level domain. After creating your own site, you should start developing it in order to increase your audience. Then you should write the content, offer interesting ideas to your readers in order to keep the attention of your audience alive. You should be able to recognize some good ideas coming from your readers - knowing what are they looking for you can offer it later. Provide new information on your site every day or at least once in 2 - 3 days.

Even if you don't have any projects in your head now, don't worry, you will have some in time. Set only one goal at a time. Today your goal is to find the subject of your site. The subject should be something that you like very much and you can give a lot of information about it. It doesn't matter what is it. If you like farming, create a site about farming. Your future clients are those people that like farming too. The basis of your business is your audience. Since this is going to be your own home business, do not think about money. Think about your favorite site and you will succeed.

Iavor Angelov is a webmaster, content writer and programmer.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Iavor_Angelov

How to Plan the Running of Your Online Business

2009-03-16T09:13:00.001-07:00

Everybody needs a occupation from which they can earn a living. This is because you all have fundamental needs that you want to provide for and also additional luxuries that you may hope to enjoy. There are restricted job opportunities in the job market these days and thus you must look for alternatives.

One of the ways you can do this is by virtue of starting up your own online business. Those who do not have any kind of standard schooling or credentials and those who need to earn some supplementary cash can launch their own businesses. The chief aim of launching a business, at least for the majority of new business owners, is to generate an income.

This is where a business plan comes in helpful. The initial step to take once you have decided on setting up a business is to pinpoint the type of business format you are likely to go for. While there are various business opportunities that you can launch, not all of them are going be good for you.

The level of success of a your choice of business will achieve will depend on several factors. Selecting a market that you are knowledgeable of is extremely significant as you are likely to knowhow to deal with specific problems and how to tackle various market related challenges and how to escape them in future.

Whether you choose to start either an off-line business or an online business, make sure you choose a market that has a high volume of potential customers. There are tried and tested ways of doing this using market research and in the case of an online business you can use Internet search engines to do this.

As soon as you have identified the choice of market that is more suited to you, you then need to lay out a thorough business plan. This business plan will act as a directive for you when it comes to marketing your goods, identifying the competition, your source of investment and the way you are likely to handle your finances. This plan proves to be critical as soon as you have to ask for financial help from a bank or even an investor.

Some experts claim that one of the most important steps to setting up a business is to get the funds necessary to pay for start-up costs and sustain its day-too-day running. The necessity of raising a large amount of capital to start an online business differs greatly from an off-line one.

The type of market you aim to sell to can be marketed to very inexpensively compared to a high street business and because the Internet is available to you via a computer with a telephone line connected to it, you have the potential to tell the whole world about your business.

If you work from home, there is not the same level of staff if any, or rent or buy a business premise. There after choose an appropriate name for your business, register it with an accountant and get a business bank account. Once you have this in place you can start marketing your goods via your professional looking website.

There are many online services that will do this for you for a reasonable charge. The alternative is of course to start off with affiliate marketing as this does not require you to have your own website or payment facility.

Graham Burt was privately coached by an on-line multi-millionaire via on-line video and discovered how to make six-figures a month on-line. He recommends that you do too.

Visit Maverick Money Makers now to learn how you can start your own home-based business earning multiple streams of income.

Since then he has undertaken specialized training from Global Cash Flow Network on marketing and is a Certified Media Placement Advisor.

Visit Work From Home for more information.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Graham_Burt

Manage and Upload Modified Content

2009-03-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

The large majority of online businesses, if not all of them, rely heavily on content to draw visitors and thus potential clients. Although a lot of them may spend much on advertising through various means, such as banner ads, directories, videos, and the like, the truth of the matter is far simpler. All of these gaudy gimmicks would amount to nothing if there is nothing of real value behind them. That is, a website should be able to offer its visitors genuinely useful and original content, if they are to come back regularly. In fact, a website with real information presented clearly will eventually become much more popular than some other website just relying on clever marketing tricks. Thus, it is important for webmasters to have some reliable system in place to upload modified files.

Many Internet marketers will assert that "content is king". This is because content is what separates a webpage from its many millions of competitors. Humor websites, for example, that offer jokes and articles everyday, prove to be quite popular. Video sites that are updated often are some other examples of websites whose popularity depends rather directly on the quality of content and rate of update.

Keeping a webpage updated is not an easy task and should be undertaken with an organized system. This means that from the start, a webmaster should already put in place a system for easily updating each part of the website. Many administrators would probably be able to speak from experience about the horrors of "taming", so to speak, an unruly mess of a webpage. As they say, prevention is always better than cure and in this case, having a systematic plan is better than trying to impose a system afterwards.

This system could, of course, be implemented manually, with the website's administrator or webmaster coordinating the uploading of modified files himself. This approach has the advantage that it is possible to control the modification of content very closely and in addition, someone is personally responsible for such. However, as websites grow bigger and bigger, the job of maintaining updates also becomes much more tedious. This would entail hiring more administrators just to keep up.

Fortunately, there are publishing tools that can help reduce the amount of labor required. These tools can automate some of the more repetitive and tiresome tasks involved with running a website. Modifying particular pieces of code or text over many different pages in the site? Sure, a find and replace tool would be able to handle that. Uploading many different files all at once? Yes, a publishing tool would be able to keep track of all the files and where they have to go. Restructuring the entire website? There are tools to help with that as well. Basically, it all boils down to using the right tool for the job. With the proper tools, it becomes easy to upload modified content to your website. And with a steady stream of content, it will become much easier to increase traffic and hence, monetize your website much better.

If you are interested in Upload Modified, check this web-site to learn more about upload modified.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sam_Miller

How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Making Money Online

2009-03-13T09:10:00.000-07:00

To make money online most people jump straight in before they are suitably prepared. You understand that to be a teacher, a nurse, a brick layer, a plumber, a joiner, or heavy goods driver, there is a level of training and things you should learn about beforehand. You don't just dive straight in at the deep end.

The very same rules apply to the Internet marketing world even though there are a few unscrupulous people out there who try to lead you up the garden path by declaring that you are going to make money online by just typing a few words and making a few clicks of the mouse. There is no such thing as a get rich quick scheme and those that declare there is are just out to con you. For sure you can make money fast if you are good at learning new subjects quickly.

I admit it is a lot easier in comparison to what you have to endure in a normal working environment, being a skivvy to someone who does not care about your welfare as long as you attend work each day. You still need discipline and the skills necessary to avoid making the numerous classic mistakes that often lead to newbie Internet marketers failing before they get their Internet business off the ground.

The reality of it is that the vast majority of newbie Internet marketers will hardly make a few cents and at best a few extra dollars from online business. There are others who will earn more in a month than the normal working person earns in a whole year of slaving for a boss, but that can take time.

Basically it comes down to the old chicken or egg query, "what comes first the chicken or the egg"? Most people don't have a clue and at the end of the day what does it really matter, it is not going to help you make money.

I do have a clue about one thing and know for certain is that to make money online you must first have some knowledge, interest and belief in the produce or service you intend to promote for your Internet business. Having knowledge, interest and belief in your product or service you expect to make money online from, will naturally reveal itself through the way you speak or write about them.

Believing in and having knowledge of your product or service shows that at one time you have carried out some research into the company products or services. That is why is you will automatically translate that knowledge and belief into the methods you use to promote whatever it is you choose to make money online with.

Established online gurus are so proficient at selling products or services online that they don't need to worry about having much knowledge or belief in what they sell simply because they could sell sand to the Arabs. It goes without saying then that I advise against choosing a product or service that you don't know anything about. In doing so greatly reduces the odds of succeeding in making money online.

I don't want you to think for one minute I am saying that having knowledge and belief in what you choose for you online business is going to result in you making a fortune online. There are a number of other factors such as having a good sales letter on your website, a skill in its own, a good marketing plan so that you know where and when and how you are going to advertise. This is where promoting affiliate products comes into its own, all the research has been carried out, the website and promotion tools have all been already tried and tested leaving you just the marketing costs to pick up. In my humble opinion it is one of the best ways to make extra money when starting out.

Graham Burt was privately coached by an on-line multi-millionaire via on-line video and discovered how to make six-figures a month on-line. He recommends that you do too. Visit Maverick Money Makers now to learn how you can start your own home-based business earning multiple streams of income.

Since then he has undertaken specialized training from Global Cash Flow Network on marketing and is a Certified Media Placement Advisor. Visit Work From Home for more information.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Graham_Burt

Advertising Tips - How to Make a Great Online Ad

2009-03-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

We have all seen online ads a thousand times; sometimes even a thousand times a day. We have become so desensitized to these ads that in order for a business to succeed through online ads, they must find a way to stand out from the rest and grab our attention. So if you are a business owner, or a marketing campaign leader, you may be wondering what you can do to make the best and most effective online ad.

First off, you need to think about the ad itself. Remember that you want to catch the consumer's attention, but you do not want to catch it in a bad way. For this reason, it may be wise to avoid really bright, flashing ads. Those kinds of ads actually tend to annoy potential customers. You want a bright color, but not blindingly so. You will need to have a focal point for your ad, to draw the attention and keep it. For example, if you are running a 20% off sale at your business, 20% should probably be in the largest font, so that it's the first thing the customer sees. Hopefully, they will be interested in knowing what that 20% is for, and read the rest of your ad.

The next tip to remember is placement. While it may seem that the very top of the page is the best place to stick an online ad, it is also the most used, and as a result, we have learned to tune it out. You may even find that the bottom of the page could be the most effective for your business.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lucas_Collingsworth

Easy Ways to Generate Traffic With Banners

2009-03-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

Banner ads are a tremendous tool for your online business and will help you make extra money online quickly if you know the basic tenets for how they operate, how people see them, and how you can format them more effectively. But, they can also be a drain on your budget if you are not careful, so let's take a look at what works and what doesn't work when you start creating new banner ads for your site:

What People Want to See

People want to see things that are going to help them, entertain them, or give them something. A banner ad needs to convey at least one of those three things and if you're really good, it will convey two or three of them.

To make extra money online, you need to showcase in your ad something you think your specific audience will need. Some markets use flash type games, others use free offers, and others still just tell the truth and show them what you're selling. Whatever you do though, you need to be sure that what you showcase in your ad is something that your potential customers will be intrigued enough to click on and read more about.

On the flip side, stay away from cheap tricks to get new visitors. When someone is tricked into clicking something, they are much less willing to give you the benefit of the doubt at your site. Instead, you should create leading ads. Promise something free or entertaining and when they arrive, continue to showcase that promise as you lead them toward your product.

This will ensure that you not only generate new traffic to make extra money online, but that you do not waste that new traffic by scaring away or angering all that new traffic you just paid for.

The Goal to Effective Traffic Boosting

If you want to be effective in boosting your traffic, creating a more pleasing banner ad, and ensuring that they not only click on your ads each time through but that they are not disappointed by what they find, you need to integrate both catchy imagery and unifying text. Together, you will find that these two things will create a symbiotic relationship that will entice hundreds of people to check out your site that might otherwise have passed. You'll make extra money, they'll find a good product and everyone will ultimately be very happy.

Want to learn to create professional looking banners in minutes without graphic design skills? Click Here.

James Walston is a stay-at-home dad and expert online marketer. "Learn How to Have Non Stop Payments Of $540 Coming To You MULTIPLE TIMES, Weekly And Possibly Even Daily! To Learn More, Take a Free Tour at http://www.Infinity800Income.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=James_Walston

2 Ultra Easy Strategies to Dominate Your Niche With Free Traffic - Crush Your Competition Quickly

2009-03-11T09:22:00.000-07:00

In this article we are going to talk about easy strategies to drive boatloads of backsides at your site, service or offer and literally crush your competition, often overnight. Sound a bit over the top and over-hyped? It's not...and in just about every new niche we publish in, we've got the traffic numbers to prove it to boot! The simple truth is that for all of the "gurus" and their odd and exotic strategies for making money online, the very BEST and most profitable path is often free. ( like below) Read on..:-)

Tip #1: Article Marketing Magic

Do you know how often I'll hear friends of mine in the online space roll their eyes and hold their nose when I tell them how many articles I write for my niches? Often. Want to know why? They believe that exotic PPC strategies and other exotic social networking tricks are the keys to making real money online. Think again! Every market I enter I generate at least 40 or 50 articles which guarantees me FREE opt in's, free readers, free fans and easy commissions to boot. Yes it takes a bit of time to write - but I drink a ton of coffee, and sit by the pool while I type, so all for YEARS of ongoing traffic, it isn't too much to complain about for me....and it shouldn't' be for you as well.

Tip #2: Press Releases are Powerful, Too

You can own tens if not hundreds of niche kewyrods simply by utilizing free press releases to advertise each and every development in your burgeoning online business....and you can do the same for affiliate products too! Yes, you should have some "news" angle to incorporate, but more often than not, you're PR will be accepted, and your site will get bombarded with free traffic to boot - often for months after you "broke" the story..:-)

Bonus Tip: Give up on the Gurus! There is NO course, no DVD and no secret seminar that's going to make you successful overnight. Are there strategies that can accelerate ( and accentuate) your efforts? Absolutely. But is any "business in a box" solution going to get you where you want to be by itself? Absolutely not...and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something you DON'T need to get there....I promise.

What We Have: A Brand Spanking New, 28 page Power Packed PDF on Advanced Article and Affiliate Marketing Strategies You Won't Find Anywhere Else for Free.

Who it's For: ANYONE who wants, needs and CRAVES More FREE Traffic, easier sales, better copy and more push button, autopilot online profits.

How To Get It: Simply Click the Article Marketing Manifesto Link and Download it for FREE anytime between now and March 31st 2009.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ian_Ross_Hollander

How to Develop a Strategy in Planning What Keywords to Target

2009-03-11T09:20:00.000-07:00

You can build your online business only if you have enough traffic to your website. Now, you can get traffic from organic searches (the healthy way), from social media networks or from payed methods (PPC, payed links or payed banners). No matter how you do it you need traffic that is relevant and that also converts. This basically means that you need high volume traffic of readers that are actually interested in your products, services, expertise.

Any other type of traffic will only increase the bounce rate and will do you more damage then good.

Choose Wisely: target only keywords that offer decent search volume
How many times you've heard businesses brag about how they are number one in Google for some strange long tail term that has actually under 100 searches per month or almost none? SEO it's not about ranking number one in Google: it's about ranking well for keywords that have a decent search volume per month.

Now, the monthly search volume for a keyword that would interest you depends on your market and your business. You have to realize that the bigger the search volume it's a big chance to meet bigger competition. If the search volume is great and the competition is low the something is wrong: basically means that even thou those keywords can generate traffic will probably have a low conversion rate and that is why to few target them.

When I start creating a strategy and I'm choosing what keywords to target I look at the search volume and the competition. Beginning with keywords that have up to 10,000 searches per month usually leads to a maximum 3 million pages competition. This is the number that I consider to be the first level that you have to pass. Ranking well on keywords that has 3 million competitors on Google represents a good foundation to build on.

Start with long tail keywords
Long tail keywords are phrases made up of 4, 5 or maybe more keywords. These kind of keywords offer less competition and usually it's not so difficult to rank well for. The thing that you'll have to pay attention to is what long tail keywords to target. Why? Unless these terms don't generate a decent search volume it's not worth the effort. Always target only keywords that generate traffic.

You may be wondering how to find long tail keywords that are being searched. I usually start with a very high search volume keyword (mostly made from 2 words) that also has huge competition. I take that phrase and starting to add qualifiers: it can be about the location (where is your business located or where do you deliver), or about pricing (affordable, cheap, low cost, luxury) or any other particular things that the business offers related to that search term(professional, services).

Knowing the business and it's products helps a lot in developing search terms. Long tail keywords are great because it incorporates the high competitive term and also offer low competition and easy ranking. No matter if a search term is highly competitive you have to start using it: in titles, in description metatags in the text of your pages or in long tail keywords. All these actions will count in the big picture in time.

Another thing to take into consideration is on what pages to target long tail keywords. As a rule use those keywords on pages that can be reached from 3 clicks or more. Google weights different your pages depending on how many clicks it take to get to those pages. More clicks means less important and giving the fact that long tail keywords have low competition on Google it's best to use it here.

What kind of keywords you should target on the main page
I've already mentioned above that Google assigns weight values to your pages. This means that some pages are more important for Google then others. The page that plays the main role in your website is your home page. This is the place where you should target the most important keywords for your business or for your website - if you have multiple keywords in mind choose the ones with the highest competition.

To get to a certain page of your website you obviously have to click some links. Try to develop an architecture of links where you don't have to click more then 4 or maximum 5 links to get to a page. 5 it's a lot. Why? Because Google will think that those pages are not that important to you and that is why are not that important to Google.

As a general rule(or tip or advice) is to target the long tail terms on pages that have lower weight. Target the keywords with the highest competition on the pages that have the highest weight on your website. This means pages that are one click away or maximum 2. You'll have to decide how to group keywords depending also on how relevant are to your business - this kind of decisions can really make the difference in SEO.

Check who you are fighting against
Even if the competition is low on a keyword phrase you should check it out on Google. Why I'm advising you to do this: if the first page of Google search results is full with huge websites or with authority blogs in your market then you should reconsider targeting that keyword. At least for a while. Realizing who exactly is your competition is an act of intelligence. This way you can save time that you could invest in developing content to target other keywords.

So, what say you
I would like to hear your ideas on this matter. What are your experiences or advices? How do you target your keywords?

http://www.optimizingtheweb.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Toma_Bonciu

Using Social Bookmarking in SEO

2009-01-27T08:22:00.001-08:00

The first thing to say before we go any further is that we're not suggesting the overuse (A.K.A spam) of social bookmarking as an SEO technique - we would consider this unethical and a poor use of everybody's resources.

Web 2.0 has brought an influx of great link sources for the everyday SEO, but like everything else in life, it's often a case of 'it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it'. By that I mean just because social bookmarking offers a relatively easy method of attracting massive quantities for back-links, it doesn't mean that we should be out there flogging it like a donkey.

As someone who believes in an ethical approach to SEO, I think there are more constructive ways to attract back-links from social bookmarking. The major suggestion I have for doing this is for you to ensure that you always ADD VALUE to a resource instead of just doing the bare minimum to get your link.

By adding value to a resource you're ensuring that it remains of value to the visitor and in turn more valuable to the search engines. In turn, this will have a positive impact on the value of your back-link.

We like to call this 'link karma', treating your link source with respect for the good of its audience and yourself.

So what are we talking about here then? What's acceptable when you're building links via bookmarking?

1 - Don't use automated software - that's just wrong
2 - Don't bookmark pages that you wouldn't want to read yourself
3 - Don't bookmark 1000's of page a day
4 - Do build bookmarking into your daily routine
5 - Do ensure you write descriptive titles and descriptions
6 - Do ensure that you group links by tags

We've got approximately 100 sites that we use for bookmarking on a daily basis. Each is regularly monitored for quality and topic to ensure that we don't post irrelevant sites or articles to them.

After the initial bookmarking process (where every main page is covered once on each relevant site) we only include new articles and news pages in the roster from then on . . . Thus avoiding spamming the main site pages and risking reprisals from the site owners.

The main message I'd like to give here is that social bookmarking can be an extremely quick and effective method of attracting back-links. However, it can also be easily exploited. By finding a balance between the two, you should get the perfect formula.

Blogging - 5 Tips For the Newbie Starting a Blog For Their Online Business

2009-01-27T08:20:00.001-08:00

There are a variety of ways to promote your business and a few of them are with online promotions. One of the most popular ways to is start a blog. But there are a few things that you must do before getting your blog started.

Determine your niche or area of expertise for your internet marketing. What is your product or service that you have to offer? And what type of content will you be writing about on you blogsite. it is important to understand that you should not write abut anything and everything when trying to promote whatever your business is. so make sure the what you are writing about is relevant to you niche.

Find a site that allows you to build your blog and have control over what you put on it and somewhat what you want it to look like. Typepad and Wordpress are two that are popular and are extremely helpful as you are in your learning process. there are free sites available but for the optimum functionability you will probably have to make a small investment for your blog in order to be the most effective.

Make sure that you post regularly. The more you post, the more likely it will be that you will gain traffic and readers to your blog. The posts do not have to be long but you should post a minimum of once a week to get started. The more you post the more exposure you will get online.

Once you have gotten started, you will want to search for other blogs that interest you or support your niche and read what they have to say and how they write their content. If what you read interests you then you will want to comment on their posts and leave your information so that others might go to your blogsite to see what you may have to say or offer. There are trackbacks that can also be used to link you to other bloggers and them to your site as well.

One more thing you can do to establish online exposure and presence is to write about not only your stuff but to write about other people's post and feature them in your post. You do this by using a permalink in your blogpost that goes back to the post that appeared on their blogsite.

There is enough traffic out in cyberspace for everyone and it is not strictly for you geographical area. Your exposure can be global. It is always advisable to network when possible and above all enjoy the community and the journey to success.

Blogging Tips to Keep in Mind

2009-01-27T08:17:00.000-08:00

Online marketers are now investing time, effort, and some money in writing blogs to promote their products or services. Blogs are currently being utilized by almost all online marketers. They write blogs related to the niche they are in and scatter these on the net with links to their own web sites. This marketing method is free that is why online marketers are grabbing this free of charge internet promotional method. To keep up with the competition, online marketers have started to learn valuable blogging tips before they build their blog sites and write web logs. The importance of blogs is highly regarded by internet marketers who have experienced more traffic coming their way since they have gone into blogging.

If you want to write blogs to boost your online business, you need to make it a habit to post your blogs regularly. If you are seriously considering this as part of your marketing methods then you have to start with the right habit. You cannot write today and be gone tomorrow. Your efforts will be put to waste and there will be no effect to your business. Regular and consistent blogs are the ones that generate good results for any business. Success in blogging cannot be felt instantly. It might take some time for your web log to become visible to many internet users.

So, you need to be patient in waiting for results. There are useful blogging tips that you have to keep in mind especially when you are just new to this marketing method. You could learn blogging tips from books related to writing a web log or you can also learn from the experts in this marketing technique. It is important that you prepare yourself to follow and implement the right steps to a successful blog. One great benefit of blogging is that you can attract more internet users to your web site. These internet users could be your potential customers.

Thus, your blog is able to redirect people who could be interested in the products or services that you offer. Marketing through blogs allows you to present the benefits and purposes of your products without directly selling it to your readers. Blogs has a certain feature that makes you write about your niche without appearing to dictate the buying preferences of your readers. You just need to find that style of writing and you are off to a good start. What is good in blogging is that you could have a more targeted marketing. Writing good content related to your niche is one way of catering particularly to your target market.

You could be assured that most likely, the people who will click on your link are those that are really interested in your niche. Otherwise, they won't waste time to browse your web pages. Many online marketers can make money with blogs especially when they start garnering traffic for their web sites. Don't doubt your capacity to write quality web logs. Focus on your niche and think of interesting topics where you can insert the promotion of your own products or services. Continuously search for blogging tips that you may incorporate into your web logs so that you will be updated of the latest tactics in blogging.

The author of this article Menno Spijkstra

Six Tips to Improve Your Website Words

2009-01-23T18:49:00.001-08:00

Good writing consists of good thoughts, clearly expressed. This becomes very important on your website. Consider the following statistics.

A recent Webmarketingezine survey of 327 business sites indicated:

- 96.3% had content nobody appeared to read

- 72.4% never mentioned product or service benefits

- 74.4% used jargon words their own target readers were unlikely to understand

You want your business website to do one, two or all three of the following:

1. Be informational
2. Sell a product or service
3. Capture leads

Good content is the best way for your site to achieve its purpose. Here are six ways to improve your website words and with it, your internet marketing:

Print readers read, web readers scan- This means your copy must be easy to read. Keep your important points in the beginning of paragraphs. Keep your sentences short (less than fifteen words) and paragraphs shorter (no more than seven lines). Use bullet points, numbered lists or underlined beginnings to focus your visitors.

80% of web searches begin with keywords- Develop keywords/phrases that match your business. Then place them on each page of your site. Tools like Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery can help you find which words get searched the most. For example, the top three searched words in 2008 were lyrics, yahoo and my space.

Write to express not impress- As with sentences and paragraphs, shorter words work better. Use car instead of automobile, meet instead of assemble and crook instead of criminal.

You also want to be specific. Use the phrase 200 pound dog rather than large animal. Half carat diamond is better than jewelry and 5701 South Mayfield says more than 57th and Mayfield.

Use one idea per sentence- While writing this, I did a yahoo search for insurance agency. Here is a sentence from the first website I found:

"As an independent agency, we can provide coverage from several different companies which enables us provide you with the right insurance coverage for your needs."

This 25 word sentence contains three separate ideas. This is how that might be rewritten:

We serve you as an independent insurance agency. Being independent means we have access to several top insurance companies. Having multiple choices means your insurance needs will always be met.

Highlight benefits. Not features- You want your site to bring out the benefits of your product or service. Instead, too often, websites feature... well- features.

Below is a sentence from another Google search I just did for consultants.

XXX experienced staff of engineers, planners and environmental scientists understands the issues and challenges of public works projects and expertly solves them to make plans into realities."

Experience, scientists, understands and solves are features of the company, not benefits to the prospect.

If you were to point out benefits, it might read something like this:

At XXX Consultants, 134 years of scientific knowledge will be put to work on your environmental project.

Make sure your copy reads well for your prospect- I just did a search for desks. Can you guess what the words below described?

"The XXX laminate line offers a variety of mix and match modular components constructed of a thermal fused melamine laminate and finished with a 3mm matching PVC edge. All workstations are equipped with grommets and all floor standing units come equipped with leveling glides. All components meet or exceed ANSI/BIFMA standards."

If you guessed reception desk you must be in the office furniture business.

The funny thing is that the words below follow the ones above:

"Greet your visitors properly with the LEGACY reception unit. Providing ample workspace and storage to help enable you to get your work done and a 42 high counter for the convenience of your guests. Give your reception room an extra touch with our lounge area furniture including sofas and wood frame guest chairs."

Now, that works! In fact, I would use these three sentences only (with some simple changes, of course!).
I would label the other words as technical information and put them elsewhere on the site.

According Internet World Stats, in 2008, internet usage penetrated 21.9% of the world population of 6.6 billion.

Now, your business may be as complicated as a rocket engine. But when you put it on the internet, for 21.9% of the world to see-

Simplify, with Benefits.

Steve Wyrostek- Internet Copywriter

Use Blogs To Make Money

2009-01-23T18:48:00.001-08:00

If you want to blog to make money then you must know what you want your blog to be about. Blogging is a wonderful thing that the internet gave to the people so we can all share our ideas and knowledge without having to pay for it.

The first thing you want to know is what topic you want to blog about. It could be anything at all and the more specific it is, the better results you can get. I will explain why in a second. So it would make sense to blog about an interest or passion you have. Maybe you enjoy playing guitar and know how to read tabs so you can setup tab diagrams on your blog to teach people. Trust me it works wonders.

Now once you know your topic you must research to see what the balance of supply and demand is. Meaning how many people want to learn about this topic, and how many websites are providing the information. I find the most efficient way of doing this is to use a keyword tool. You should go to Google and use their AdWords tool. Type in your topic and be specific. Then go down the list of keywords. It makes it so easy a little kid can do it. It is best to pick a keyword that has a lot of people searching for it but not as much competition. That means if you use that keyword that must be relevant to your topic. You can eventually get a lot of those people who want to learn about the topic because you will be one of the few supplying it. Make sense? So use a few keywords that have little competition but a descent amount of people wanting to learn about it. Use them in your title, keywords section, or description.That is what blogging to make money is all about!

So once you have an excellent topic that has a good (we will call it) supply/demand ratio you have got the hard part over with. Now time to blog to make money. Write a lot of rich content about your passion or interest and let your fingers do the typing. Content is King! You also want to make sure you post regularly. Just do at least one post a day.

Now in order to make some money you want to post some ads relevant to your topic. So the easiest ways to do this is to find companies that produce products relevant to your blog. Sign up for their affiliate program and use their banners and the link you get and post on your blog. Also get some AdSense, and do not worry because AdSense automatically has ads relevant to your site. So that is just a simple outline to blog to make money.

More SEO Secrets, Tips and Top SEO Services

2009-01-23T18:46:00.001-08:00

Having someone share their top SEO secrets with you can lead you well on the way to success. Here are a few of my SEO secrets:

1 - Comment Google loves a blog. Sometimes you will find another blog in one of those coveted page 1 positions. Many of those blogs accept comments. So, leave a comment. You know the rules by now. Don't over commercialize, be helpful, be useful, good things will follow. Of course, don't forget to leave a keyword link to your target site by using your keyword as your user name.

2 - Do a search - Search on Google for your target keyword. Visit the top 10 sites with the mindset: "How do I get my link on THIS site?". The answer probably lies above or beneath you. For example, you may often see an article directory, such as Ezine Articles, occupying one of the top spots. Another good tactic is to use an article submission service. So, if you were to write and submit an article, with your target keyword as part of the headline, who knows what might happen? Especially if you submit the RSS feed of all your articles, as outlined in step 1.

3 - Advertise - If all else fails, don't forget you can always advertise. Buy a cheap AdWords campaign and if you cant afford the click costs for your target keyword then focus instead on the long tail keywords that are related to your target keyword (they are a lot cheaper). You can also buy ads on specific sites on a per click or per impression basis. Facebook is also a good, sometimes cheaper, alternative to AdWords. There are other simply amazing advertising opportunities, where it is relatively cheap to advertise on other people's sites and blogs including a number of other excellent options.

Some independent sites also accept banner and link advertising. Some will if you ask them, so if you see a site in that top position and you want to be part of that, send them an email. You will often be pleasantly surprised how little the webmaster will want for a decently placed link or banner.

By the way, you will note that I didn't mention social bookmarking. Now, of course, that's important and you may want to see which of your pages are doing well first and then social bookmark a few of them in some of the more popular social bookmarking sites. Start off at socialmarker, Digg and Stumbleupon from there. But in closing, I think social bookmarking alone will not be enough to get you on page 1.

Now, please prove me wrong and then let me know.

I guess that's the secret really. Don't think of page 1 as hallowed ground. Rather think of it as YOUR territory and you just want to stake your claim. You want your piece of it. Like I said at the start, with a properly thought out SEO campaign, you can own page 1, with your own web-sites, but these 'bullying' strategies are certainly the next best thing and will give you quicker, but often shorter lived results. So,

THE SEXY SEO SECRET IS:

Your Google page 1 link does not have to be to your site. If you 'own' the spot, then that means your competitor does not.

SEO Secrets - Off Page Optimization

2009-01-23T18:45:00.001-08:00

OK, hopefully by now you've now realized how important your organic SEO campaign is to the future of your business. You may also have tried AdWords for a while and after your credit card maxed out at lightning speed, you realized that something had to be done.

Don't get me wrong, AdWords can be a great tool, I use it for testing all the time, but to actually try and make a return on the capital invested is often harder than it seems. Very often, the pricing of each click is based on the LIFETIME value of the potential customer, sometimes even above that, especially when ego or inexperience gets involved.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter how you arrived at the decision to go 'natural' or 'organic', I'm just glad that you did. Because it is absolutely the right thing to do. Organic search results are a terrific bargain, because once you have gained that coveted Google page 1 listing, then all the clicks that you receive from then on are free. You cannot fail to make a profit!

Unless your web-site is so bad that no one signs up or buys anything, but that's another story for another day. Assuming that you're selling something that somebody wants, then you MUST make a profit. BUT, and it is a pretty big but, it all depends on how much it costs you to obtain that page 1 listing in the first place.

Spend your money foolishly, either by trying to do it yourself, when you should be spending your time on other aspects of your business, or even worse, employing someone to do it for you and those people then not knowing what they should be doing.

Even scarier still is that they use some sort of 'black hat' or outlawed SEO tactic and your site simply vanishes from Google, overnight.

It's happened to me and I know just what a horrible moment that is, when it dawns on you that you've been wiped. So, don't let that happen to you. If you're going to do it yourself, don't look for the shortcuts.

If it looks too good to be true, then it probably is. Realistically, unless you are a SEO expert, then I suggest that you either follow the excellent course here or outsource your SEO work, which are two smart things to do. To a trusted, proven party. After all, when my car goes wrong, I don't try and fix it myself, I take it down to my local mechanic.

It's his job to keep up to date with all the latest technologies and remedies. So it is with any SEO expert. It is their job to know what works and what doesn't.

Their job is to invest as little time as possible to get you the best return. They know if what they do works, they will get repeat business.

More keywords, more results, more keywords. A win win situation for all.

I guess I took a long time to get to the subject but I felt it important to paint a decent backdrop. You see, if you think SEO is simply a matter of tweaking a little bit of HTML code on a page then I am sorry, you are sadly mistaken. On page factors, such as the correct H1 and H2 tags, correct meta descriptions and titles and other factors such as on page keyword density account for less than 20% of the overall Google ranking algorithm.

Sure, they are important and can be the difference between you and another site, but if that is all you're changing, then you can tweak until the cows come home, Google will think no more of your site, no matter how good your on page tweaking is.

THE SEXY SEO SECRET IS:

80% off page

Remember that number, it is important

Top SEO Services - How to Get on Page 1 of Google and Receive Massive Web Traffic

2009-01-23T18:44:00.001-08:00

To be honest, I don't think you can beat a good old fashioned SEO campaign, one that is carefully thought out, one that targets your chosen keywords and your carefully designed landing pages.

Simply unbeatable. But all that takes time and there are some times when you just want to 'bully' your way onto page 1 of Google. You might want to test a new product or idea or maybe you've spotted a growing trend and you just want to get on it quick, before the curve has peaked.

Sometimes you might just want to 'bully' your competitors off the page (now you wouldn't want to do that, would you?). Whatever the reason, here are my top 7 ways of getting ahead of the pack and onto page 1 of Google (for your chosen keyword term):

1. RSS Feeds - Google loves RSS Feeds. Google loves RSS aggregators, such as feedagg.com. Give Google Girl what she wants. Create a RSS feed, submit your RSS feed to as many RSS aggregators as you can find. Make sure that your RSS feeds contain your targeted keyword in the title of the posts.

You can even name the feed as your target keyword. Within days, sometimes hours, you will often see your feed on page 1 of Google. Of course, this isn't your page, but that page does contain many links to your page and you know that you now have a far better chance of getting that all important visitor click than the person who previously owned that spot.

2. Blog - Google loves a blog, especially blogger.com, Squidoo and WordPress. You can add HubPages to that list too. Create a target keyword focused page on your target keyword focused blog, update with a few similar posts, maybe mention the other blogs with a link or two (vary target keyword hyper link a little) and you are almost there. Create at least one RSS feed from each of them and submit them as in 1.

3. Yahoo Answers - Google loves Yahoo Answers. Go in and answer a few related to your target keyword. Why not ask a question about your target keyword? Of course, you need to leave a link to your target site. Be careful! Don't over commercialize, be helpful, be useful, good things will follow.

4. Forums - Google loves a forum. Especially well populated and active forums. Search for forums related to your targeted keyword. Go in and answer a few questions related to your target keyword. Why not ask a question about your target keyword? Of course, you need to leave a link to your target site. Be careful! Don't over commercialize, be helpful, be useful, good things will follow.

So there you have it, a few of my SEO secrets that will help you generate more web traffic.

New Unavailable_after Tag and More!

2009-01-23T18:38:00.000-08:00

What Is Indexing?

Dan started out his presentation discussing what “indexing” means and how Google goes about it. Basically, the process for the Google crawler is to first look at the robots.txt file in order to learn where it shouldn’t go, and then it gets down to business visiting the pages it is allowed to visit. As the crawler lands on a page, it finds the relevant information contained on it, then follows each link and repeats the process.

Robots.txt Explored

Dan proceeded to explain how to use your robots.txt file for excluding pages and directories from your site that you might not want indexed, such as the cgi-bin folder. He told us how each of the major search engines have their own commands for this file but that they’re working to standardize things a bit more in the future.

In terms of what the crawler looks at on the page, he said there are over 200 factors, with “relevance” playing a big part in many of them.

Google Still Loves Its PageRank

Dan also discussed the importance of PageRank (the real one that only Google knows about, not the “for-amusement-purposes-only” toolbar PR that many obsess over). He let us know that having high-quality links is still one of the greatest factors towards being indexed and ranked, and then he proceeded to explain how building your site with unique content for your users is one of the best approaches to take. (Now, where have you heard that before? ;) He explained how creating a community of like-minded individuals that builds up its popularity over time is a perfect way to enhance your site.

Did You Know About These Tags?

We were also treated to some additional tips that many people may not have known about. For instance, did you know that you could stop Google from showing any snippet of your page in the search engine results by using a “nosnippet” tag? And you can also stop Google from showing a cached version of your page via the “noarchive” tag. Dan doesn’t recommend these for most pages since snippets are extremely helpful to visitors, as is showing the cache. However, Google understands that there are certain circumstances where you may want to turn those off.

Breaking News!

Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site. Unavailable_after is the tag for you! Pretty neat stuff!

Webmaster Central Tools

Dan couldn’t say enough good things about their Webmaster Central tools. I have to say that seems to be very common with all the Google reps I’ve heard speak at various conferences. The great thing is that they’re not kidding! If you haven’t tried the webmaster tools yet, you really should because they provide you with a ton of information about your site such as backward links, the keyword phrases with which people have found each page of your site, and much, much more!

Sitemaps Explored

One of the main tools in Webmaster Central is the ability to provide Google with an XML sitemap. Dan told us that a Google sitemap can be used to provide them with URLs that they would otherwise not be able to find because they weren’t linked to from anywhere else. He used the term “walled garden” to describe a set of pages that are linked only to each other but not linked from anywhere else. He said that you could simply submit one of the URLs via your sitemap, and then they’d crawl the rest. He also talked about how sitemaps were good for getting pages indexed that could be reached only via webforms. He did admit later that even though those pages would be likely to be indexed via the sitemap, at this time they would still most likely be considered low quality since they wouldn’t have any PageRank. Google is working on a way to change this in the future, however.

Flash and AJAX

Lastly, Dan mentioned that Google still isn’t doing a great job of indexing content that is contained within Flash and/or AJAX. He said that you should definitely limit your use of these technologies for content that you want indexed. He provided a bit of information regarding Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR), and explained that when used in the manner for which it was intended, it’s a perfectly acceptable solution for Google. Dan said that Google does hope to do a better job of indexing the information contained in Flash at some point in the future.

The Q&A

Many of the points mentioned above were also covered in greater detail during Dan’s extensive Q&A session. However, there were many additional enlightening tidbits that got covered. For instance, Sherwood Stranieri from Catalyst Online asked about Google’s new Universal Search, specifically as it applied to when particular videos (that were not served up from any Google properties) would show up in the main search results. Dan explained that in Universal Search, the videos that show up are the same that show up first while using Google’s video search function.

The Dreaded Supplemental Results

Of course, someone just *had* to ask about supplemental results and what causes pages to be banished there. (This is one of the most common questions that I hear at all SEO/SEM conferences.) Dan provided us with some insights as to what the supplemental results were and how you could get your URLs out of them. He explained that basically the supplemental index is where they put pages that have low PageRank (the real kind) or ones that don’t change very often. These pages generally don’t show up in the search results unless there are not enough relevant pages in the main results to show. He had some good news to report: Google is starting to crawl the supplemental index more often, and soon the distinction between the main index and the supplemental index will be blurring. For now, to get your URLs back into the main results, he suggested more incoming links (of course!).

There was a whole lot more discussed, but I think this is enough to digest for now! All in all, my SEMNE co-founder Pauline and I were extremely pleased with how the night unfolded. We had a great turnout, met a ton of new contacts, caught up with a bunch of old friends, and received some great information straight from Google!

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

2009-01-22T09:13:00.001-08:00

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
{sergey, page}@cs.stanford.edu
Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
Abstract

In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/
To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web, very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from three years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine -- the first such detailed public description we know of to date.
Apart from the problems of scaling traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want.
Keywords: World Wide Web, Search Engines, Information Retrieval, PageRank, Google

Introduction

2009-01-22T09:12:00.003-08:00

(Note: There are two versions of this paper -- a longer full version and a shorter printed version. The full version is available on the web and the conference CD-ROM.)
The web creates new challenges for information retrieval. The amount of information on the web is growing rapidly, as well as the number of new users inexperienced in the art of web research. People are likely to surf the web using its link graph, often starting with high quality human maintained indices such as Yahoo! or with search engines. Human maintained lists cover popular topics effectively but are subjective, expensive to build and maintain, slow to improve, and cannot cover all esoteric topics. Automated search engines that rely on keyword matching usually return too many low quality matches. To make matters worse, some advertisers attempt to gain people's attention by taking measures meant to mislead automated search engines. We have built a large-scale search engine which addresses many of the problems of existing systems. It makes especially heavy use of the additional structure present in hypertext to provide much higher quality search results. We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.

Web Search Engines -- Scaling Up: 1994 - 2000

2009-01-22T09:12:00.001-08:00

Search engine technology has had to scale dramatically to keep up with the growth of the web. In 1994, one of the first web search engines, the World Wide Web Worm (WWWW) [McBryan 94] had an index of 110,000 web pages and web accessible documents. As of November, 1997, the top search engines claim to index from 2 million (WebCrawler) to 100 million web documents (from Search Engine Watch). It is foreseeable that by the year 2000, a comprehensive index of the Web will contain over a billion documents. At the same time, the number of queries search engines handle has grown incredibly too. In March and April 1994, the World Wide Web Worm received an average of about 1500 queries per day. In November 1997, Altavista claimed it handled roughly 20 million queries per day. With the increasing number of users on the web, and automated systems which query search engines, it is likely that top search engines will handle hundreds of millions of queries per day by the year 2000. The goal of our system is to address many of the problems, both in quality and scalability, introduced by scaling search engine technology to such extraordinary numbers.

Google: Scaling with the Web

2009-01-22T09:11:00.001-08:00

Creating a search engine which scales even to today's web presents many challenges. Fast crawling technology is needed to gather the web documents and keep them up to date. Storage space must be used efficiently to store indices and, optionally, the documents themselves. The indexing system must process hundreds of gigabytes of data efficiently. Queries must be handled quickly, at a rate of hundreds to thousands per second.

These tasks are becoming increasingly difficult as the Web grows. However, hardware performance and cost have improved dramatically to partially offset the difficulty. There are, however, several notable exceptions to this progress such as disk seek time and operating system robustness. In designing Google, we have considered both the rate of growth of the Web and technological changes. Google is designed to scale well to extremely large data sets. It makes efficient use of storage space to store the index. Its data structures are optimized for fast and efficient access (see section 4.2). Further, we expect that the cost to index and store text or HTML will eventually decline relative to the amount that will be available (see Appendix B). This will result in favorable scaling properties for centralized systems like Google.

Improved Search Quality

2009-01-22T09:10:00.002-08:00

Our main goal is to improve the quality of web search engines. In 1994, some people believed that a complete search index would make it possible to find anything easily. According to Best of the Web 1994 -- Navigators, "The best navigation service should make it easy to find almost anything on the Web (once all the data is entered)." However, the Web of 1997 is quite different. Anyone who has used a search engine recently, can readily testify that the completeness of the index is not the only factor in the quality of search results. "Junk results" often wash out any results that a user is interested in. In fact, as of November 1997, only one of the top four commercial search engines finds itself (returns its own search page in response to its name in the top ten results). One of the main causes of this problem is that the number of documents in the indices has been increasing by many orders of magnitude, but the user's ability to look at documents has not. People are still only willing to look at the first few tens of results. Because of this, as the collection size grows, we need tools that have very high precision (number of relevant documents returned, say in the top tens of results). Indeed, we want our notion of "relevant" to only include the very best documents since there may be tens of thousands of slightly relevant documents. This very high precision is important even at the expense of recall (the total number of relevant documents the system is able to return). There is quite a bit of recent optimism that the use of more hypertextual information can help improve search and other applications [Marchiori 97] [Spertus 97] [Weiss 96] [Kleinberg 98]. In particular, link structure [Page 98] and link text provide a lot of information for making relevance judgments and quality filtering. Google makes use of both link structure and anchor text (see Sections 2.1 and 2.2).

Academic Search Engine Research

2009-01-22T09:10:00.001-08:00

Aside from tremendous growth, the Web has also become increasingly commercial over time. In 1993, 1.5% of web servers were on .com domains. This number grew to over 60% in 1997. At the same time, search engines have migrated from the academic domain to the commercial. Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Appendix A). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.

Another important design goal was to build systems that reasonable numbers of people can actually use. Usage was important to us because we think some of the most interesting research will involve leveraging the vast amount of usage data that is available from modern web systems. For example, there are many tens of millions of searches performed every day. However, it is very difficult to get this data, mainly because it is considered commercially valuable.

Our final design goal was to build an architecture that can support novel research activities on large-scale web data. To support novel research uses, Google stores all of the actual documents it crawls in compressed form. One of our main goals in designing Google was to set up an environment where other researchers can come in quickly, process large chunks of the web, and produce interesting results that would have been very difficult to produce otherwise. In the short time the system has been up, there have already been several papers using databases generated by Google, and many others are underway. Another goal we have is to set up a Spacelab-like environment where researchers or even students can propose and do interesting experiments on our large-scale web data.