Getting started

I wrote this post to help out my good friends, Matt, Gary and Eli, all of whom wanted advice on setting up their first site, choosing a domain name and hosting.  What helps them will help you too.  I will provide a short step by step guide to choosing a domain, hosting it on some web space, and setting up the website.  There are lots of in-depth tutorials online, so I wont try to repeat the detailed background.  Instead this page will help you get started with a new website in an hour, cutting through the more geeky “options” and sharing my expertise to let you set up a new site that will last for life, without having to learn all the lessons the hard way.

Ready to start?  Well, lets go.  You will be up and running in less than one hour.

Step 1: Choose a killer domain name

The domain name provides the first impression of your site, your brand, your company.  More than that, of all the aspects of your site the only one that will never change is the domain name (URL).  Choose carefully.

If you want to catch “passing traffic”, ie people who are doing a search and just spot your site, then consider a name that is descriptive.  Looking for news on the Olympics?  Then a site named Olympics-latest.co.uk is likely to catch your eye more quickly than a trendy name like consiglium.co.uk.  Give your visitors a clue to what your site is about.  On the other hand if you are setting up a new company then having a name without any meaning can be an advantage.  It opens up all possibilities for what you put on there, without restriction.  After all you’d struggle if you wanted to change direction and turn olympics-latest.co.uk into a site selling cars!

Is your name available?  Check using a domain name search tool, like this one:  Domain Search Tool

Once you have chosen the name, its time to spend your first few pennies and purchase the domain.

Don’t worry.  Domain names are cheap.  Generally you will pay around £10 + VAT for a co.uk domain and £25 + VAT for a .com domain.  And that is for 2 years.  I recommend using Easily (www.easily.co.uk) to buy your domain.  Personally I have been with Easily for over 8 years and they offer fantastic service.  If you want to host somewhere else there is no problem.  You can buy the name at Easily and just point it at another host.  I do that with many sites because I find Easily hosting a little expensive for my smaller sites.  Other than easily another good host in the UK is NamesCo.

So, go ahead and buy your domain now.  Don’t wait too long or it will be gone.  And once you have it its yours for life to do with what you wish, or even to resell.  There is a big market in reselling domain names as the good ones are going fast…

Think about:

• Do you need the .com as well as the .co.uk?  If you don’t buy both how will you feel about that decision in 5 years time?
• Is this a “quick and dirty” test site, or your ten-bagger.  If this is your main site how would you feel with the domain name on your business card?  If its a smaller money site then keywords in the URL are far more important than having a great sounding name.
• Don’t try to save a few pennies by buying a .co.uk for less than £10+VAT.  Companies like Easily give you full rioghts to the domain to do what you like with it.  Many others actually just register the name themselves and let you use it, until you choose to move.  Then you find the name isn’t actually owned by you!

Step 2: Where to host your new site

Once you have purchased your domain you need to think where to host it.  Hosting a site allows it to be accessed 24 hours a day, from all over the world.  In theory you could host the site on your own PC, but nobody does that.  It means that as soon as you turn off your PC your site can’t be accessed.  Not a good idea.

There are literally thousands of hosting services available.  Prices vary from free to several thousand pounds a month.  For the average site a cheaper hosting provider will be fine.  Once you are earning a few thousand pounds a month you can think about upgrading your hosting package.  In fact the only difference between cheaper and expensive hosting is the number of customers it can serve.  For example, WebMasters hosting (which I recommend highly) offers an entry package for around £50 per year, which lets you host up to 100 domains and 300 databases.  Once your customer volumes go above 5000 or so a day you can upgrade to their next package with a single click.  At the top end sites like BBC iPlayer pay thousands per month because of the huge traffic volumes.  Something that is unlikely to be your problem for a while!

I strongly recommend WebMasters (www.webmasters.com) as the host if you are willing to pay.  If not, then there are some good free hosting providers available.  For my small test sites I have used free hosting from freevirtualservers.com and am very pleased with it.  Avoid freehostia.com.  Terrible availability with servers heavily overloaded.  I moved my sites from there and Freevirtualservers.com have stood up very well in comparison. Get started with a new website by choosing the right host.

Think about:

• What is the importance of reliability of your site?  Free hosts are always overloaded and you will suffer high downtime.  I have tried many.  Don’t believe the “99% up-time guarantee”.  Its false.
• Do you want to add extra domains later.  If so, choose a host that offers free “add-on” domains.  That way your hosting will let you add new sites without paying any more.  The great thing about these add-on domains is that as far as Google and the other Search Engines is concerned, each site is 100% independent.  They can not tell that the sites are on shared hosting.
• Where will your customers come from?  Are they spread globally, mainly in the UK or mainly in the US.  Most hosting is in the US, which will work perfectly well for most regions due to the excellent high-speed connections that the US has.  However, if all nearly all your customers are in the UK you may want to choose a UK based host, such as UKHost4U (www.ukhost4u.co.uk).  I use them for my high-traffic football sites and have found them excellent, though a little more expensive than WebMasters.

Step 3: Install WordPress

Why did I call this step “Install WordPress”?  Why WordPress.  Cant I just build my site in HTML / Dreamweaver / Joomla / Other?

Well, yes. You can build a site from scratch.  But this article is about the best way to get a great-looking site up quickly so I am going to tell you to stick with WordPress.  It is quick, simple, looks great, and will let you maintain a scalable website that will last for many many years.

Before we continue, let me clarify one thing.  When we talk of WordPress here I am referring to self-hosted Wordrpess, not wordpress.com.  You can set up a site at wordpress.com, similar  to blogger.com, but then you are handing over ownership of all your content to a third-party.  They set the rules, and they can delete your site if they don’t like what you are doing.

Hosting WordPress on your own site means you remain in full control.  For ever.  If you want to move your site to a new host then you can.  Its yours, and no-one can touch it.

So lets go:

1. Download WordPress from WordPress.org.  Save it to your hard drive.  This is only temporary.  When we have finished you wont need any software at all on your own PC.  Everything will be on the server so you can access it from any PC.  Great news if you plan to make updates to your site in your lunch hour from the office!
2. Upload it to your hosting provider.  If you are using WebMasters (I recommend you do) then click File Manager -> Upload
3. Alternatively, instead of Step 1 and 2, you may be able to install WordPress directly from the control panel of your hosting provider.  That can save a bit of time.  Look for something called “Install scripts”, “Intall WordPress”.  On WebMasters hosting it is called “Auto Installer” (see Figure 1).  The end result is the same.
4. Go to your domain in Internet explorer and you will see step by step instructions.  WordPress is famously easy to use, but if you have any questions please post them below this article and I will help.

Figure 1: You can autoinstall WordPress from WebMasters control panel

Step 4: Configure WordPress

At this point it is time to experiment a little.  Most of the options in WordPress are very simple to access, and are intuitive.  Just try them.

The great thing about having a site in WordPress is that your customers see a fantastic looking site, and you manage everything via your control panel so you never need to see any HTML, unless you want to!

If you want an example of a site built in WordPress, you don’t need to go far.  This site (www.linkbuildingtools.co.uk) is entirely WordPress, using only standard WordPress plugins.  I haven’t touched any html.  In fact the only addition is changing the default theme to Suffusion (my favourite theme), which you can do by clicking the Add Theme button in the WordPress Admin console.

Step 5: Create Content

A site with nothing on it won’t attract much traffic.  So next step is to start writing.  Content is King!

At this stage many people slow down.  After all you have a working site right.  Content can wait eh?  Well don’t wait too long.  Try writing an article every single day.  Even if it is just 50 words.  if you can add a post every day, or even once a week, within a few months you will have loads of interesting and unique content, all being indexed by Google.  Search Engines love fresh content, and if it is unique to you then all the better.  Traffic and customers will just start pouring in…

Step 6: Promote your new site

Again, this is too big a topic to cover here.  So I wont.  But suffice to say promoting your content is crucial if you want it to be found.

There are many good articles on this site that I have written to help you promote your site.  I really recommend you read everything and try them all.  I have learned the hard way so I know what works and what is a waste of time.  Also sign up to the newsletter (that’s it over there in the right hand column) and you will receive an email alert every time I add a new article to this site.

If you want an absolute killer way of getting loads and loads of links and customers then look at Brute Force.  Nothing comes close in terms of the impact on traffic.

Linkbuilding is also crucial.  Its another topic, too big to go into here, but if you want the full works then nothing comes close to BackLink Builder.  It is a full-suite automation package.

For those with a little more to spend you can purchase links back to your site from Backlinks.com.  Well worth it to get additional Google pagerank and more traffic.

Step 7: Monetise your site

Why did you first create your site?  Whatever the reason probably the chance to make shed-loads of easy cash on autopilot was somewhere in the back of your mind.  If not, why not!

To make some money out of your site there are a few options:

1. Google Adsense.  The easiest to set up.  You need to set up a Google account and Google will then post small text or image ads on your site in the pace you specify.  If you look around you will see some on this site (though not intrusively I hope!).  Done well, these can add to the user experience by offering relevant links to them.  The advantages:  Quick and Easy.  Google manages the ads so all you do is wait for the money to pour in (or more realistically to trickle…).  The disadvantages:  Google are strict on content so you cant place the ads on a site they don’t like the look of.  Secondly, the amount you get for a click can be very small, so don’t expect to retire on this alone.
2. Affiliate adverts.  Sign up with an affiliate programme such as Affiliate Window (www.affiliatewindow.com).  Once you have signed up you have access to hundreds of companies, all from one place.  Click the company whose goods you want to sell and you will receive a simple link.  Add that to your site and you will receive a percentage of the sales.  You can add the link to photos too.  Advantages:  Quick and simple.  Many vendors in one place.  No need to handle payments, customer queries etc as all that is done by the site without you doing anything.
3. Sell something. Selling directly can be lucrative.  You get all the profit for yourself and no-one else is involved in the payment cycle.  The disadvantage is that you need to create a shopping basket, collect the money, physically package and deliver the good and deal with queries and refunds.  You can save some time by selling “non-physical” goods, such as an eBook, but you still need to deal with queries, payments etc.
4. Amazon.  Join Amazon’s affiliate programme and they will provide you with links, images, reviews and many other tools that you can place on your site.  When one of your readers clicks on the advert they are taken straight to Amazon.  From that point on you get a percentage (currently 5-10% but it changes from time to time) of all sales for the next 24 hours.   Advantages:  Amazon are the master of upsell!  You may refer someone to a cheap book, but what does everyone do on Amazon?  Firstly, they add another book or two to bring it up to the free postage limit.  Then Amazon suggest you may “like these too”.  So your customer adds another item.  You get a percentage of everything, not just the small item you referred the customer for.  Once your first customer buys a £1500 garden table and chair set, or £2000 3D TV you will recognise Amazon’s power to upsell!

Step 8: Optimise your Robots.txt file

I won’t go in to this in detail here, as it is more advanced.  However, the robots.txt file is really important.  It will increase the speed of your website, increase security, and provide you higher rankings in the search results.  If you are on a WordPress blog read how to set up the best robots.txt file for WordPress and start there.

Comments and questions?

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If you have any questions, feel free to post them below and I will get back to you just as soon as I can.  I am happy to help.

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Search engines could use crowdsourcing to expand the range of answers they give to their users, a group of researchers from the Microsoft and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have concluded.

Today, Web search engines primarily use computer-run pageranking algorithms to generate results for user submitted queries. For a small number of simple queries however, services return the exact answer the user is seeking. Google, for instance, could return a the local show times for a movie, the weather for a certain region, or the results of a simple math problem.

This range of answers could be radically expanded through some data mining techniques and crowdsourced editing, according to M.I.T. researcher Michael Bernstein, who summarized the group’s work at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, being held this week in Austin, Texas.

In a trial survey with 361 participants, the researchers found that search engines, by providing more direct answers to queries, could significantly improve their users’ perceptions of search quality, especially for those queries that did not return many relevant pages. “Our findings suggest that search engines can be extended to directly respond to a large new class of queries,” stated the paper describing the work, entitled “Direct Answers for Search Queries in the Long Tail.”.

The range of answers search engines could provide could be radically expanded with a relative minimal additional cost, the researchers argued. The key would be to harness the power of crowdsourcing, or contracting people to identify the answers to simple but frequently asked questions.

Today, search engines will only provide direct answers to a small subset of queries, namely those that get asked often. In these cases, the search engine provides the actual answer to the question, rather than just a link to where the answer could be found. With such popular questions, search engine companies find it worthwhile to devote engineers to manually craft program code to identify each question, and then find and supply the answers. “These kinds of answers are only available to popular queries, because search engines have to put a lot of effort into them,” Bernstein said.

The number of direct answers provided to users could be expanded, at minimal cost, the researchers argue. About 50 percent of the queries that search engines get are completely novel, Bernstein said. But the rest are questions that are repeatedly asked. At least some of these queries have answers that can easily be generated, and checked through some simple crowd-sourcing.

“We are focusing on a set of queries that are somewhat popular,” Bernstein said. “We can create thousands of these answers.” In the future, a search service could provide direct answers to many additional questions, such as how to shut down a stalled Apple Mac computer, what the average body temperature is for a dog, how to bake a potato, or how to play the Rummy 500 card game.

In a trial experiment, the researchers had data mining software comb through 75 million search queries from Microsoft’s Bing search engine, looking for those queries that resulted in a click through to a single site. They then identified those queries that could be succinctly answered and contracted workers to quickly craft simple answers and proofread the work. They found these workers through Amazon‘s Mechanical Turk, by way of a third party service called Crowdflower.

By automating as much of the process of creating the content as possible, search engines can keep their costs minimal. Search engines could contract out the manual labor on a piecemeal basis, using services such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The researchers identified about 20,000 queries that could be easily provided with answers. They estimated it would cost search engines about .44 cents to provide a simple answer for each query.

Bernstein admitted that this approach, should it be used, would raise a number of issues. For one, search engines would have to filter out incorrect information somehow. Also, search engines would risk the ire of Web site owners, who would complain that the answers deprives them of Internet traffic (Get 10000 free hits), because the search engine itself is providing the answer. “We have to ask ourself whether we are going too far,” he said.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab’s e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

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Fareham, Hampshire (PRWEB UK) 8 May 2012

A brand new search engine with a unique take on targeted search results has launched specifically for the older internet user. Designed with 50+ surfers in mind, AskMabel.co.uk is tailored to the search preferences of a mature audience.

Developed by the team behind online portal Mabels.org.uk, AskMabel uses an intuitive search agent to fine tune displayed results to more closely match topics and ages relevant to older internet fans. This level of demographic profiling helps to create a seamless user experience, providing a quicker and easier route to finding relevant information online.

Jon Wickham, Owner and founder of Mabels said, “Over 50s are rapidly becoming prolific internet users with traditional desktop and mobile phone access on the increase. It’s very important that information about issues affecting the older generation are easily and broadly accessible. There are so many fantastic web sites and information out there but we found that finding them quickly without wasting valuable time having to search all over the place wasn’t as easy as you’d think. AskMabel has been designed in conjunction with Mabels.org.uk and uses all of our expertise gathered from years of working with internet users over 50 to help them find suitable answers to their search queries as quickly as possible.”

Ask Mabel combines the innovative ability to match and fine tune the results of searches directly to the topic and age of the older internet user with an intuitive, super-clean interface. An information-rich design adds to the user experience, keeping search screens and results pages on topic for clearer, more concise searching, including large font and useful buttons like ‘clear search term’.

When entering a search term in to the search box, the user can choose to Ask Mabel to find internet pages related to specific categories such as health, finance, retirement, mobility or homecare or can opt for a Google-powered search. The results page shows the pre-selected web pages determined to be most applicable to the older user.

Latest topical news relevant to the age group is sourced manually and automatically, with headlines shown on the left of all results for convenience. News items are also sourced from the Mabels.org.uk portal, making them highly relevant to the over 50s.

The launch of AskMabel has been driven in part by the meteoric rise in so called ‘silver surfers’ in the UK over the last 24 months. Research by Nielsen suggests that more than 12 million people over 50 use the Internet regularly. Their studies found that the older generation have embraced the internet, using it to carry out everyday tasks such as shopping or booking a holiday. Driven by this proliferation, niche websites have sprung up from providers such as Saga, women’s clothing retailers and a number of cruise lines, targeting the older, tech-savvy internet user. AskMabel helps users to correlate all of this data and access only the most relevant of web pages, making it easy to navigate the internet and find information of interest.

Jon Wickham added, “Filtering the users search results to the topic of the search as well as the age group of the user is the first steps to a much improved internet browsing experience and believes is the way forward in attracting the quality and value content we all strive for.”

To find out more about AskMabel and to conduct a tailored search, visit http://www.askmabel.co.uk

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So, you have set up a new site, added some content, made it look reasonably presentable, but still you are not appearing in Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.  How can you get it indexed fast?

First, one thing not to bother with.  Search Engine submission forms.  They are useless.   Ignore.  The good news is that Google will follow all links eventually so as long as you have a link or two from other sites you will be indexed.  But the bad news is it can be slow, unless the site pointing to you has a very high page rank.

Getting a site indexed fast

Fortunately there is a sure-fire way to get your site indexed.  Its a tool I was told about a year ago, and it is still almost unknown.

This tool is invaluable.  I use it for every new site I create, and the site is always indexed within a few days.  I don’t know how, but it works.  And its free and totally without sign-up, so you cant receive any “reconstituted tinned meat products”, if you know what I mean.

The tool is:  http://woothy.com/domain_indexer/

All you need to do is enter your URL in the first box, then select the total number of submissions.  I leave 5 in the first box, and set the second to 100.

Make sure the pop-up blocker is off, then just hit the button and wait.  It takes 20 minutes or so and is 100% automated.

Go and have a coffee while it works because your desktop will be cluttered with lots of windows (it will close them when it finished submitting).

If you want a more guaranteed way, there are some great Gigs on Fiverr.com that will do it.  I’ve used this one and its fantastic. Get your site indexed in 24 hours.  SEO Agencies charge a lot of money for this.  Don’t pay their huge fees when you can get the same thing for $5 or even for free.

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Don’t worry! I am here to help by sharing with you my knowledge of link building tools and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), developed over the last 8 years of website design.

Google, Bing, Yahoo… Find the secrets and tricks on how to great traffic, absolutely free.

Start here!

Getting Started with Link Building

• Getting started
• Top 10 WordPress SEO Plugins
• Awesome Article Marketing
• Search Engine News
• Pay Per Click Advertising
• Thousands of free hits via Viral Marketing
• Questions and Answers (Q&A)
• Use your Robots.txt file to get more traffic
• Use Twitter to get massive traffic

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The real question is does Facebook obtain any value for putting Bing in its portfolio? If Bing was acquired by Google (watch for the flying pigs) would it slow Facebook down any? Who else would think that they could take Microsoft’s investment and build Bing into a profit center without sinking large amounts of capital of their own? Who thinks search and advertising is a core competency?

About then I came up with one other public Google-grouser, NewsCorp (Murdoch, Fox, etc.,)

The question then becomes, could they afford Bing. Is Microsoft in a mood to sharpen the pencils and do what it takes to get a Facebook or Newscorp into a nice, shiny Bing today?

Returning to Facebook. No, I don’t think it adds commensurate value, unless Microsoft took a bath on the asset, and I don’t think it’s a impediment to Facebook’s growth if someone else gets it.

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by Liane Cassavoy, PCWorld  

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from PCWorld.com.

Bing versus Google: It’s the modern-day version of Coke versus Pepsi. For many people, the two search engines are indistinguishable. Both search the Web and deliver images, news, and product information in easy-to-read formats. But which one is better—and can you be sure?

Some users switch between them without a second thought. Others are devoted to their search engine of choice, just like cola die-hards. And most search engine devotees stick with Google: It’s the king of search, attracting 66 percent of searchers compared to Bing with 15 percent, according to ComScore.

If you’re a Google loyalist, you’ll be interested to know that although Google excelled at producing lightning-fast results in our showdown, when it stumbles, it falls hard. Bing boosters should note that while your favorite search engine delivers uncannily relevant results, it has an annoying habit of auto-editing search queries in hopes of guessing what the user’s true intent is.

To settle the great search engine debate, we created our own version of the Pepsi Challenge for Bing and Google to see which one could serve up the best results without the fizz. We focused on search fundamentals: How easy is it to find a specific website? How simple is it to track down a certain factoid? Can either search engine find and deliver the best place to buy online? In the course of testing, we also rated Bing and Google on their ability to deliver spam-free results that show no bias toward their own services.

Navigational search challenge

Since there is no index for the Internet, users depend on search engines to find a specific website, and often, particular pages on that site. So how do Bing and Google measure up to the challenge of steering clear of junk sites and delivering the right ones?

When we used both Bing and Google to track down the official website for Mitt Romney, President Obama’s YouTube channel, and a dosage chart for Infant Tylenol, the top results were correct in every case.

One exception cropped up, however, during our “CDC flu vaccine information” search. Google’s first result promptly took us to a PDF of the CDC’s detailed information sheet about the flu vaccine, but Bing pointed us to a more general CDC page with information on the flu itself; we had to click two more links to obtain the detailed information on the vaccine that we wanted.

Bing: 4 stars

Google: 5 stars

Search Tip: Keep your searches as specific as possible. Taking the time to enter an extra keyword or two (such as “official site” after “Mitt Romney”) will save you time when it comes to sorting through the search results.

Query autocorrecting

While the search results themselves are of utmost importance, how long it takes you to get to those results is worth considering, too. Search innovations such as autocorrect, automatic search refinements, and Google Instant are designed to be timesavers. Although we found Google Instant to be a welcome aid, we discovered that Bing was sometimes overzealous in autocorrecting search queries.

Both Bing and Google automatically correct misspellings. But Bing often went too far in our experiments, automatically altering three of the nine test queries we entered. When we searched for “Barack Obama YouTube channel”, Bing included results for “barack obama youtube tv” automatically. When we searched for “Entertainment Weekly’s Grammy Coverage”, Bing also included “Entertainment Week Grammy Coverage”. In all instances where Bing assumed that it knew what we really wanted to search for, the suggestions were not helpful.

The good news is that clicking to remove the included Bing results is easy, but it’s a step that users shouldn’t have to take so frequently. The bad news is that we couldn’t find a way to turn the autocorrect feature off in Bing or Google.

Bing: 2 stars

Google: 4 stars

Search Tip: Be on the lookout for overzealous autocorrecting. It’s easy to overlook a minor (or sometimes, major) edit to your search query, unless you’re expecting it.

Searching for specifics on large Ssites

One of the most popular types of searches involves looking for a particular page on a specific website you already know of. For example, many Boston Red Sox fans first visit Bing or Google for spring training news, with the intent of linking to Boston’s local online supersite Boston.com. To gauge how well Bing and Google did at this task, we created typical search engine queries with the name of the source website in the query, and tried to find information on small to large sites.

Google was stymied by our “Boston.com Red Sox spring training” query. Instead of pointing us to any information on Boston.com, Google returned several results from boston.redsox.mlb, which was not at all what we were looking for. To find any content from Boston.com, we had to scroll down the first page, as nothing relevant appeared in the initial screen of results.

A search for “CNN Andrew Breitbart obituary” on both Bing and Google returned News results in the top spot, which was to be expected when searching for a timely topic (we conducted our searches in early March). But only Google’s results pointed us to the right page on CNN.com. Bing’s top result pointed us to a story on Daily Beast, with CNN.com results appearing in the third spot.

While neither search engine was perfect, Bing was a bit more capable at delivering the right results in less time.

Bing: 4 stars

Google: 3 stars

Search Tip: Use advanced search syntax such as “site:pcworld.com” to tell a search engine when you want to see results from a specific site.

Product Searches

Searching for specific products is one of the most popular kinds of online searches. And in our test, both Bing and Google did a good job of taking us to official product pages when we ran them through their paces.

Google fared slightly better with popular queries such as “iPad models”, “P90X workout system”, and “iPhone 4S specs”. In all three test cases, the search engine’s top result led us directly to an official or manufacturer site. Bing was almost equally astute, but stumbled on the iPad search with top results dominated by news stories about the third-generation iPad and the iPad 2. At the very bottom of the first results page was a link to Apple’s iPad Web page.

Bing redeemed itself on product test searches that included less-common, more-specific queries such as “Rossignol S3 skis”, “best digital meat thermometer”, and “ingredients in Diet Coke”. In these cases, Bing’s results led to official or authoritative sites. Google did well too, but fell flat on its face when we searched for “Cadillac 2012 models”, delivering no links to Cadillac’s website.

Bing: 4 stars

Google: 4 stars

Search Tip: Searching for a product name only (such as “P90X workout system”) is a great way to begin your product research. But refining your query, adding terms such as “reviews” and “prices”, will help you get more information before you buy.

Taking Action: Transactional searches

Searches in which the intent is to sign up for classes, cancel an account, or find forms to download are particularly annoying when a search engine lets you down. After all, you aren’t looking up the capital of Montana; you want to get something done.

In our test of nine transactional searches, both Bing and Google handled most queries without a problem, allowing us to begin our transaction within one to three clicks. Bing topped Google slightly, however, mainly because Google choked on two queries, delivering us to the right site but the wrong page: Both times we needed multiple clicks (two or three) to reach the page that Bing was able to serve up immediately.

Bing: 4.5 stars

Google: 4 stars

Search Tip: A search engine may not return the specific page you want, but that doesn’t mean the page isn’t out there. Some sites (such as, ahem, those for cable companies) may make it difficult to cancel your service, while others (such as those for smaller, local organizations) may have sign-up pages buried deep on their sites. Keep looking.

Information Sources

Search engines have replaced dusty encyclopedias, dictionaries, and dog-eared reference books of all kinds, becoming everyone’s go-to resource for finding correct answers. Is a bite from a scarlet kingsnake poisonous? Let’s hope that your search engine gets the answer right, and fast.

Deciding on the best result from these types of searches—called informational searches—isn’t as easy as doing so on product searches, for obvious reasons. There is no official product page for, say, “most popular baby names of 2011”.

Overall, both Bing and Google handled many of our queries with aplomb, delivering a wealth of information on a variety of topics ranging from “What is the best Brad Pitt movie” to “Where was Mitt Romney’s father born”. But Google’s results, and its delivery methods, gave it a slight edge.

When we searched for “Oscar winners 2012”, Google brought the information to us on its results page, no clicking required. We could see a list of winners in key categories atop our results, and the info was sourced to Oscar.com, so we knew it was reliable. Bing, meanwhile, pointed us to Oscar.com in its top result, but we had to click through to the site to get the same details. Slight advantage goes to Google.

And, in our “What is the best Brad Pitt movie” search, in which we hoped to discover information specifically about the actor’s films, Bing’s results focused on Brad Pitt himself rather than his body of work, pointing us to his IMDb and Wikipedia pages before any movie reviews. Google, meanwhile, more fittingly directed us to several sites where reviewers debated the merits of his movies.

Bing also continued its habit of correcting our searches, even when we didn’t want it to. The search engine automatically changed a query for “Meredith Vieira husband medical problems” to “Meredith Vieira husband health help”, which is related, yes, but different.

Bing: 2 stars

Google: 4 stars

Search Tip: Ask and you shall receive—both search engines proved capable of quickly and easily answering questions. Even when we used colloquial language, Bing and Google understood what we were asking, and answered appropriately.

Bias

No one likes to play a card game against the house if the deck is stacked. The same goes for search engines.

While Bing.com and Google.com may focus on search as their core competency, both sites also serve as hubs for the variety of Web properties that their parent companies own. And both Microsoft and Google stand to gain if they can keep Web surfers on their network of sites, whether it’s a video site, a travel site, or an entertainment-news site.

That’s why we tested both search engines for any signs of bias, to see if they pointed us toward one of their own sites when another might have been a better fit. And we were pleased to see that both came away with their hands clean, returning unbiased results in almost all cases.

Since both Google and Microsoft offer smartphone platforms and VoIP software, we searched in those areas. Our “What is the best smartphone” and “What is the best VoIP service” queries brought us to a host of neutral sources, including Cnet, PCMag.com, and PCWorld.com. In neither case did we see any mention of the company’s own products, such as Android, Windows Phone, Google Voice, or Skype.

Similarly, a search for “The Voice contestants” on both search engines pointed us to NBC-owned sites, which is fitting for that NBC show, rather than directing us to the Google News page or Bing’s Entertainment site. And a search for “Affordable flights to London Olympics” resulted in links to third-party travel sites, not to Google- or Microsoft-owned properties.

In two cases we noticed a slight slant in the search results. Our “Aerial views of Boston” query appropriately produced links to Bing’s images of, well, aerial views of Boston. But the same search on Google pointed us to Google Maps in the top spot, which didn’t exactly deliver an aerial view of the city.

Bing did show its own slant when we searched for “Mike Wallace videos”, though, returning links to Bing Video in its second spot. Google, meanwhile, avoided pointing us toward YouTube, as it placed links to good-quality CBSNews.com videos high in its results.

Bing: 4 stars

Google: 4 stars

Search Tip: If something seems fishy when you’re searching Bing, try searching Google—or vice versa. But don’t be shy about using the advanced search features on either Bing or Google; both search engines offer great in-house tools for refining your search for products, deals, and sites.

Spam

Searching for medical information on the Web can open up a minefield: In your quest for info, you could easily land on some third-rate site pushing pain pills from China. So we decided that we would see how well Bing and Google did in steering us clear of spam search results.

In our tests, we considered a site spammy if it was designed to trick, hijack, or clutter up your search results, and if it was obviously misleading in any way—not simply a site that could be considered a link farm or is optimized aggressively for the keywords.

For our “Viagra” search, the top results from both Bing and Google presented credible information on the drug, though both sites’ later results did include sources for buying the drug (and buying it “Cheap!”). As we expected, a search for “Viagra prices” was less impressive on both search engines, leading us to several sites where we could, again, get the drug “Cheap!” Or, if we were really lucky, “Free!”

Bing: 4 stars

Google: 4 stars

Search Tip: Don’t be afraid to tattle. If you come across spammy sites or link farms, report them. Both Bing and Google accept online spam reports.

Who really won?

Which search engine is better, Google or Bing? Neither. And both. While neither site ran away with our tests, neither failed miserably. So why, then, is Google so dominant in the marketplace? It might simply be a matter of habit: Google established its place atop the search engine charts years before Bing debuted, and many people continue to use it simply because they always have. They turn to Google just as they reach for Coke on the store shelves.

And then there’s that catchy name. If you’re looking for information, no one is going to tell you to “bing it.” But as our tests clearly show, sometimes “binging it” might be the better way to go. Relying on just one search engine will get you where you’re going most of the time. But switching between the two will get you there faster, with a little variety for good measure.

Special thanks

We crafted our test queries after consulting with a number of search engine experts, all of whom are well versed in how real-world Web surfers are searching online. We offer a tip of the hat to these experts who helped us create our test methodology, including Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz.org, Eric Pugh, a principal at search consultancy Opensource Connections, and Danny Sullivan, the search expert behind Search Engine Land.

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A prospect calls up and asks you to “do this search engine optimisation thing” for their website. After checking their website against identified keywords and the competition, you check their link profile, only to find no links (or very few of them).

For whatever reason – whether it’s due to the website being brand new or having never been marketed – these guys are starting from scratch. But they want rankings now and SEO is the hot topic for the CEO/owner/whoever.

Sound familiar?

The best advice you can give these people is to slow down and be prudent.

What is a Link Profile?

It’s important to understand that search engines are trying to rank the best results that they can for their users. In this process, Google – especially – has put quite a bit of emphasis on trying to rank “big brand” websites. There’s a lot of debate on how this is determined, exactly, but one major factor is a website’s link profile.

A link profile is made up of:

The types of links to your website (sources such as directories, forums, news articles, press releases, social, etc.).

How these links were acquired (all at once, or slowly/steadily over time).

The anchor text (words used) in those links (perhaps the most important piece).

Building a Link Foundation: Getting Started

For any website just beginning to build its link profile – sites with no/few backlinks (Get massive backlinks) – it’s important to establish a sound foundation of links.

To start, reach out to partners/vendors, trade associations, local Chambers of Commerce, Better Business Bureau, business.com, and other “good” directories. Another way to get things off the ground is to send press releases with links to their website and use their company name in the anchor text of these links.

Above all, especially for a new website, it’s important to create great content that is link worthy, says link building specialist David McBee.

Avoid Aggressive Link Building

Too often, companies simply don’t have the patience to wait things out and let things “naturally” build. For example, this PPC-seo-discussion-forum/576534-unnatural-links-penalty.html” target=”_blank”>Warrior Forum post is from someone who was nailed for “unnatural” link building because he built links a bit too quickly.

Websites, especially recently, are being hit for being aggressive with their anchor text use for their backlinks (Get massive backlinks). As with many things in SEO, opinions will vary, but many would tell you that you would want a minimum of 35 percent of your backlinks (Get massive backlinks) to be links using your domain name/URL or some other “branded” link text. In fact, you might find that many of the top performing websites contain 50-80 percent “branded” anchor text.

McBee notes that it’s important to take your time and grow your links a “reasonable” percentage month after month after month.

“Build links slowly and continually,” McBee said. “Don’t try to win the race in 90 days.”

McBee offered some additional sage advice:

“All the ‘standard’ link building advice applies: diversity in anchor text, lots of branded anchor text, diversity in the kinds of links you acquire (not all directories, people!), get lots of low PageRank to balance any high PageRank you happen to get and watch out for site-wide links. Oh, and get some no follows and image links too.”

Natural vs. Paid

What’s interesting is that you could, conceivably, do this through “natural” or “paid” means (however one might define “paid”, but that’s a subject for another column). But, while we’re on the topic of “paid”…

Paid links still work. However, this doesn’t mean you should go out tomorrow and buy 20,000 links. That’s not natural. And, chances are, if you’re buying links, you’re going to get too aggressive on your anchor text.

If you want to do well in Google today (and I dare say, in the future), you need to have a “natural” looking link profile, with loads of branded anchor text links, from many sources, linking to your home page and to deeper pages (blog posts?), built up over time.

Once your website is established as a “big brand” in the eyes of the search engines (a deep website with loads of pages filled with unique/good content and lots of branded links), then you can consider adding some keyword-rich anchor text links pointing to your home page or specific pages to get a top position on otherwise competitive keywords.

For example, one top retailer ranks very highly on Google for search queries such as “microwaves”, “refrigerator”, “washer and dryer”, “video camera”, “printers”, “digital cameras”, and “laptop computers’. Truth told, they are a decent result (they do sell all of these products) but without a little SEO/link building help, they wouldn’t be in these positions. They earned it by building a big brand, and taking advantage of that big brand to sprinkle in just enough keyword-rich links to earn these positions.

Home Depot: More Linking, More Ranking

See this blog post, below? Anyone gonna tell me that this isn’t a paid post? (and note the date…this was done recently). This points to the home page of the same retailer mentioned above.

Want to see some of the other “quality” posts from this website?

Since this is already public, I will name this retailer: Home Depot.

If you hadn’t already heard, an email went out from Home Depot, asking their partners to link to the Home Depot’s website. You can see a copy of this email, here.

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking partners and/or vendors to link to your website, and even to encourage them to link in a certain manner – I might suggest that you’d want to mix up the anchor text use and, depending on the amount of authority (links) that you have built up, you may want to continue to use branded anchor text. What Home Depot messed up was providing incorrect information in their request.

For example:

• Please note that the hyperlink does not have to be visually indicated.
• Linking to The Home Depot website will benefit our business partners by increasing the page authority of your website.

There is so much disinformation about SEO out there, that I think it’s important to note. You should never hide a link. And, while it may help to link out to authoritative websites, it’s inaccurate to say that it “increases the authority of your website.”

My point in sharing this is that even those authoritative websites are working on anchor-text-rich, deep linking, because they have earned the authority that allows them to do this, more than most. Don’t know why they focused specifically on this page…Home Depot ranks No. 1 for this already on Google, for me. You too?

Bottom Line

Everyone’s link building plan should be unique to a website’s individual situation. For example, a website may already have the authority needed, so perhaps internal linking would be a bigger priority. For a website starting from scratch (just bought the domain last week), it’s important to lay a sound foundation (branded links from quality sources, spread out over time).

Don’t just look at link building as a tactical affair. Analyze your website’s particular situation, devise a strategy, and then lay out the tactics that will help to get you where you want to be.

For individuals trying to go SEO alone: when you’re not certain that the course of action that you’re taking is correct, please consult a professional. In today’s SEO environment, it makes a lot of sense to “measure twice, cut once.”

SES Toronto 2012 is June 11-13. Register before May 11 and save up to $300!

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Mediafire Starts Blocking FilesTube Search traffic (Get 10000 free hits)

In a week where “reasonable practices” for cyberlockers were high on the agenda, file-hosting service Mediafire decided to block all incoming traffic (Get 10000 free hits) from the popular media search engine FilesTube. Commenting on the move Mediafire’s co-founder explains that it was a logical step as their service was never intended to be indexed in public.

With millions of daily visitors FilesTube is among the most frequently visited websites on the Internet.

Founded in 2007, the Polish-operated site is the largest meta-search engine for content hosted on cyberlockers such as Hotfile, 4Shared and Mediafire. FilesTube refers a significant amount of traffic (Get 10000 free hits) to these sites, but not all of them are very happy about it.

In fact, Mediafire don’t want to be indexed at all, and a few hours ago took action to block all incoming traffic (Get 10000 free hits) from FilesTube.

“As a private service MediaFire was never designed to be indexed which is why we don’t have an index,” Mediafire co-founder Tom Langridge explains to TorrentFreak.

“Our meta tags for file access are set to not-indexable and services like Google, Bing and other search engines honor this. FilesTube was not honoring this and thus we were forced to block them.”

While the decision makes sense from Mediafire’s point of view, it would be naive not to relate the recent change to the increased debate about the legality of cyberlockers’ business models. After the Megaupload raids and arrests Mediafire and other file-hosting services have been publicly scrutinized by Hollywood.

Mediafire was among the five cyberlockers labeled as rogue sites by the movie studios recently. Mediafire was quick to refute the allegations and emphasize that they run a perfectly legitimate business.

This week the debate continues when RapidShare published a set of guidelines cyberlockers should follow to deter mass-copyright infringement.

While we assume Mediafire’s recent change is in part aimed at deterring infringement, it is no silver bullet.

The FilesTube block stops users from clicking through to Mediafire, but it doesn’t prevent links being indexed, as FilesTube gathers this information from third-party sources. This means that FilesTube users can still find content on MediaFire, but instead of clicking on a direct link they have to manually paste the URL in their browsers.

FilesTube points out this workaround on their Facebook page.

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Try outsourcing articles if you are short on time

Using Articles to promote your website is not a new idea.  But the evolution of Article Marketing has now taken the practice full-circle.  In the early days articles were about building a presence in the online community, and this use of articles, to establish your brand and provide you with high quality backlinks for very little effort is what makes Article marketing so compelling.

What is Article Marketing

Your site will fail if it doesn’t have inbound links.  It will sink into ignominy, down into the hidden depths of the Internet.  But with a few well placed links from other sites it will rise to the top, where it gets read, gets linked to, and gets indexed, in a virtuous circle of success.

This is where articles can help.  Article Marketing involves you writing a short article (300-500 words in best) and then including a link back to your site in the footers.  You then submit the article to the main article directories (see below) and they publish your article, including the links back to your site.

That in itself is pretty good. These article sites, like Ezine Articles, are very high page rank, and the search engines index them almost constantly, so you will get links back to your site in no time at all.  But it gets much better!    As well as your article getting published at the directory it will also get picked up by tens, or hundreds, of blogs, news sites and publishers.

These publishers come to Ezine Articles and take your article for publishing on their website.  The crucial detail is that they must leave all the links intact.  By doing that you still receive the credit, and now, instead of having links from a few article directories you also have it from potentially hundreds of blog and magazine publishing sites.  Backlink heaven!

Killer Article Marketing Strategy

Follow this simple plan to get awesome results, massive traffic, and high quality “link juice” back to your site.

1. Create your article.  Make it 500 words max, with a simple clear title that explains the contents
2. Carefully check your article for spelling and grammar.
3. Make sure text is well spaced out.  No huge paragraphs.  Bullets and lists work well.  Think of your reader, who is probably scanning very quickly
4. Now publish the article to your own website.  Many people will suggest you first publish to Ezine Articles (EZA) but they are wrong.  I have tested both ways and believe me that publishing to your own site first will help.  In any case, who do you want to be seen as the “original owner” in the eyes of the search engines.  These things matter.
5. Wait a few days until Google has come along and indexed it.  You can submit to some social bookmark sites to help speed it up if you wish
6. Now for part B:  Take the same article, and add two links.  One should be to the exact same article on your website, and one to another place (on that site or a different site you own).  These links are what gets you all that lovely link-juice.
7. Publish the article on EZA.
8. Wait until the article is indexed.
9. And finally part C:  This is where the huge traffic boost comes in.  Take the article, and rewrite the title slightly.  For example you could change “Dog Training: How to teach a dog to sit” to “Teaching a puppy to sit in 7 days”.
10. Change the links.  The first link, which pointed back to your website, is fine. However, make the second one point to your article on EZA.  This will keep the EZA article, which is by far the most important in terms of your visibility, high up in the article rankings so it will keep on getting referenced.  You now have two permanent links to the same original article on your site
11. Sit back and watch the traffic build up.  Rinse and Repeat!

If any of that isn’t clear please leave a comment below and I will explain further.

Which Article Directories?

There are literally thousands of Article directories out there.  However, the following directories will provide you with 80% of the coverage, for around 10% of the effort.

• Ezine Articles (EZA):  The largest and most visited of all the Article Directories.  Always start here.  Beware:  Content must be owned by you.  Despite what many will tell you there is no problem submitting articles that you have already published on your website, so long as you own the copyright to those articles.  That means you write them yourself, or you paid someone to write them for you.
• Articlesbase.com:  Second in size to EZA, and contains a large store of articles.  Slightly less strict with the URLs, so you are allowed to include a link in the main body as well as in your author signature (called the author bio) section.
• Goarticles.com: Another of the biggest article directories.  High Google Page Rank (PR5) and daily indexing so your article, and the links to your site will appear in Google very quickly
• Articledashboard.com: The last of the big article directories.  Just copy and paste your articles into here for an extra boost of link juice and traffic
• Suite101.com:  A great site to use if you are looking to use the Article to make money, rather than just drive traffic.  Suite 101 pays you for your articles.  They must be original and in your name.  No pen-names or pseudonyms allowed

I’d recommend submitting to these and then stopping, but if you really want more then there are good online resources where you can find more.  Does anyone have a list?

Get started now and you will see a steady increase in traffic and inbound links.

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