Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Ever wondered what search engines see as the best perfoming pages on your website?  This post shows you how to find out what google sees as the most important pages on your site. 

Why is it important to find the most valuable pages on your site?  Very simply put,  to help you  optimise your internal “link juice“.

For the most important pages on your site, type into Google

• www site:yoursite.com

For the most important pages on a subfolder on your site, type into Google

www site:yoursite.com/your-subfolder

Other ways to find important pages on the internet:

To find the most valuable domains with a particular extension:

• www site:.gov.uk

• www site:.ac.uk

To find the most valuable sites with a particular word in the URL:

• www inurl:ipod

And there you have it, now you have an invaluable tool to find important pages on the internet.  What you do with them is really up to you

Here are some tools I use for estimating traffic potential for keywords:

Google Adwords Tool

The Google Adwords traffic estimation tool gives you an estimation of traffic to a particular keyword(s) or allows you to plug in a URL for a particular site to crawl and bring back suggestions. 

The figures from Adwords are displayed in graphs and not actual numbers, but it gives you a good place to start you keyword research as it generates lots of suggestions.  Keep in mind though that this tool is based on PPC traffic, not natural. 

Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery is by far my favourite tool out there.  It allows you to plug in a keyword and outputs suggestions including estimated daily searches.  Its data is compiled from 180 search engines. 

If you had some money to invest I would recommend investing in the commercial version of this tool.

Word Tracker

Word Tracker also allows gives you suggestions based on a seed keyword including daily estimates.  Its figures are based on statistics from Meta Crawlers (such as dogpile.com and metacrawler.com) which account for 0.63% of all global searches).  Word Tracker is a good tool, but if you had a choice between Wordtracker and Keyword  Discovery I would go with Keyword Discovery (see above)

Wikipedia Traffic Estimation Tool

The Wikipedia shows up for more and more generic (1 word) keyword phrases than any other site out there.  This tool, that estimates daily page views from the Wikipedia, allows you to get an idea of keyword potential (you need to account for 15-20% internal search traffic from within the Wiki)

SubmitExpress.com

This tool from Submit Express combines the results from both Keyword Discovery and Word Tracker in one interface, very handy and saves lots of valuable time!

During the month of April/May 2008, Google has been showing more and more shopping feeds (Google Base) on top of the Natural search results. Companies not participating in shopping feed distribution most certainly would have seen a substantial drop in their website sales as a direct result of this.

Its all part of Universal Search, the concept of adding non traditional search results in the SERPs (Search Engines Results Pages).  As a bonus, Google gets to monetise more and more of its SERP space … Google base results are a natural (pardon the pun) solution for accomplishing this crucial goal!

Its simple really, since shopping feeds appear above the natural search results, and since shopping feeds almost always contain various competitive prices from various suppliers, users will most likely click on them over natural search results which are not updated on a regular basis. 

The problem is further compounded by the appearance of the PPC (Sponsored) results at the top of the page.

What’s the solution?  Simple…Participate in shopping feeds! 

Not only will you give your brand more exposure, but more importantly, you’ll ensure that you limit the damage from the inevitable drop in sales resulting from this new trend. 

For more info on how to create a shopping feed for your product, post your questions here…

Have you added a favicon to your site?  If you haven’t then this post will guide you through the simple process.  But before I start, let me explain what a favicon is.  A favicon is the little icon that shows up in the browser and tabs of your computer (depicted below).  It can distinguish your site from the masses by adding that special touch.

So how do you go about creating your favicon?  Simple, follow the following few steps:

1. Go to  http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

2. Create the favicon as instructed.

3. save it to your desktop

4. upload it to the root of your site (where the index page lies)

5. In the head section of your html add the following code:  <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>

Done!  You now have your very own Favicon!  Enjoy!

After a few months of wrangling, MSN has now officially abandoned its efforts in bidding for Yahoo. Yahoo shareholders are now bracing themselves for a share slump as a direct result of this news.  

MSN’s decision to officially bid for the world’s second largest search engine was made towards the end of January when it bid $45 Billion for Yahoo!.  This bid was swiftly rejected.

Yahoo went on to make a deal with Google allowing the search giant to take on the advertising platform by serving Google ads to its customers.  The deal was meant to add hundreds of millions of dollars to Yahoo!’s bottom line and fend of MSN from making a move to becoming a force to be reckoned with.

Yahoo!’s decision to reject the MSN offer has angered its shareholders and the pressure is now on Yahoo! management to prove that the decision was right.  This can only be done by improving financial results and adding value to the Yahoo shares over the next few months.