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With Google’s amazing success, you can bet there are many competitors wanting a piece of that pie. Well here are a few beta and upstart search engines working to change the face of search. Keeping up with changes in the search market is important since some of these search engines may end up being the next Google. Don’t write Google off, however, they have billions to pour into research; and quite frankly their search results still rock.

Future of Search Engines

Hakia

http://hakia.com

Today’s search engines bring popular results via statistical ranking methods but a popular Web site may not always be credible, and a credible Web site may not always be popular. As a result, searchers suffer in many ways ranging from wasted search time to using misleading information.

hakia’s semantic technology provides a new search experience that is focused on quality, not popularity. hakia’s quality search results satisfy three criteria simultaneously: They (1) come from credible Web sites recommended by librarians, (2) represent the most recent information available, and (3) remain absolutely relevant to the query.

Users will find that hakia search results are organized in a tabbed format that clearly distinguishes results as Web results, hakia Credible Sites, images and news. This new tabbed format reinforces the delivery of focus, clarity and credibility in hakia search.

Twine

http://www.twine.com

People use Twine to keep track of their interests. Twine is a new way for you to collect online content – videos, photos, articles, Web pages, products – and bring it all together by topic, so you can have it in one place and share it with anyone you want.

That is the beauty of Twine. It helps you collect information in a new, highly personalized, convenient way. You can use Twine alone, with friends, groups and communities, or even in your company.

And Twine is smart. It’s powered by semantic understanding, which means Twine gets to know you. It automatically learns about your interests and makes connections and recommendations tailored to you. The best part: The more you use Twine, the more useful it becomes.

Wolfram|Alpha

http://www.wolframalpha.com

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

Scoopler

http://www.scoopler.com

Scoopler is a real-time search engine. Scoopler aggregates and organizes content being shared on the internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. It does this by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, Scoopler gives you the most relevant results, updated in real-time.

TweetMeme

http://tweetmeme.com

Tweetmeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on twitter to determine which links are popular. Tweetmeme is able to categorize these links into categories and subcategories, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what your interested in.

Tweetmeme makes it easy for you to subscribe to each category and the most popular through our RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, you can find out more about theses through our help.

Using the TweetMeme button you can discover new content and tweet about it. The button provides a fully integrated URL shortener and the story or pages title. Each link which is posted on twitter adds one link to the link count on that story. Once the story has reached a critical mass of votes is makes it into the top 10 on the front page and gets tweeted by our Twitter account.

Each tweet on TweetMeme has a TweetMeme button which integrates both the current number of links that story has and also the ability to easily retweet the link. Giving you the ability to discover new media on tweetmeme.

OneRiot

http://www.oneriot.com

Increasingly, the web’s most interesting content is what our friends and other people are talking about, sharing and looking at right now. However, when people search for that content, traditional search engines struggle to surface these fresh, socially-relevant results. That’s the hole – and it’s a big one – that OneRiot is filling.

OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds. The end result is a search experience that allows users to find the freshest, most socially-relevant content from across the realtime web.

SearchMe

http://www.searchme.com

Searchme, the first multimedia search engine: Search for information, videos, music, images, news and more, and find the most relevant results displayed in a comprehensive blend of multimedia and non-multimedia web pages.

Cuil

http://www.cuil.com

The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When Cuil finds a page with your keywords, it stays on that page and analyzes the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then Cuil offers you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. Cuil feels that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so it doesn’t collect data about you and your habits. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Kosmix

http://www.kosmix.com

Kosmix is a guide to the Web. The site (www.kosmix.com) lets users explore the Web by topic, presenting a dashboard of relevent videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics. Kosmix’s categorization engine organizes the Internet into magazine-style topic pages, enabling people to navigate the Web.

FirendFeed

http://www.friendfeed.com

FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends. It’s fast and easy to start a conversation around shared items, or to show that you like something a friend has shared. You can subscribe to updates from individuals and groups, such as your family or a team of people you work with. On FriendFeed, you and your friends contribute to a shared stream of information — information that you care about, because it’s from the people that you care about.

You don’t need to install anything to use FriendFeed. You can read and share your FriendFeed however you want — from your email, your phone or even from Facebook. If you make your FriendFeed publicly visible, your friends can see what you’re sharing without creating an account, and you can embed your feed in your home page or blog. FriendFeed also lets you pull in updates from other sites around the web, and even publish your feed to services you already use, like Twitter.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great solution to anyone who wants to drive traffic to their site. But what is this bizarre thing known as search engine optimization — what does it even mean, and how can it possibly help your website?

On the internet, most people access websites via search engines or other sites. Since therer are billions of web pages search engines, like Google, act as filters for content. That being said, it is very important for your website to appear on the first few pages of those search engine results.

In general, nobody will look on the 99th page of a Google search result set! That would take forever, and the most relevant results are usually placed first. So how do you make your website “relevant” in the search engine’s eyes? How can your website appear on the first few pages of the results?

Results pages are driven by keywords. Keywords are the typical phrases a user types in when searching such as “web design texas”. You must match your website content (and intent) to the keywords people will be searching for, and then optimize for these keywords.

That’s where search engine optimization comes in. When people use search engines, they type in certain keywords, and the program behind the search engine looks for these keywords in the domain names, file names, and content of the website.

If there is careful repition of certain keywords, the search engine tends to place that website higher on the list of results, because it would be marked as “more relevant” to the search input. Websites that are only somewhat relevant, according to the search engine software, are put further back. Since you want your website to appear at the front, how would you use search engine optimization to your advantage on your webpage?

Well, you first need to pick a keyword. There are many ways to do this —- you can simply pick what the most relevant phrase to the website is, or you can choose to use different software to help you choose your keywords.

First, there is the Overture Keyword Lookup, which helps to tell you whether the keyword that you are considering using is actually being typed in as a search entry by anybody. This is obviously very important because if you had a great website filled with this keyword and nobody searched for it would be a waste of effort. Nobody would visit your site anyway!

So, you need to ensure that you have chosen a good keyword by checking to see if people search it. Another software tool often used by website owners is the Google Keyword Selector. This software helps you to find what the most commonly related phrases and keywords are. While this may sound fairly useless (why would you use that? You’d have to enter in a keyword to get other keyword phrases! That’s not helpful at all, right? Wrong!), it’s necessary for different pages on your site to have different keywords that are targeted and optimized.

Because there are so many billions of websites on the Internet, it’s likely that the keyword you picked has also been chosen by many other people. If you use a general keyword in this case, such as “Frisbee”, then it’s likely that there are tons of other sites dedicated to Frisbee that are greatly relevant, and yours may not be showcased on the first few result pages.

However, with the Google Keyword Selector, you can find keyword phrases related to “Frisbee” that people still search and that may yield fewer results. You will want to focus on the keyword that is searched often and results in fewer relevant websites, because otherwise your website might be overwhelmed by competition.

After you have chosen a suitable keyword or keyword phrase, the next step is to implement that keyword throughout all areas of that page or your website. It’s good to have the keyword in your domain name (or at least the page URL), for each page; it should also be contained in the title, the Header tag, and the footer of the web page. Moreover, you need it in your meta description and meta keyword tags (this is a place where the search engine program searches extensively).

Finally, it’s essential to have your keyword repeated at least several times throughout your text (2-3% is recommended). If you follow all of these instructions, then your website is well on its way to being optimized for search engines using this keyword!

This is called “on page” optimization; meaning you are optimizing the contents of your page to be found by the search engines. “Off page” optimization is incredibly important too, many folks say that off page optimization can count for 65% of your success. We will cover this topic in other blog posts. An example of off page optimzation is called “Link building.”

Link building is a part of SEO. If done correctly link building can bring traffic from many other websites as well.

Craig Meurer in France

• Article marketing
• Blog marketing
• Press releases distributed online
• Link requests
• Link bait (setting up attractive pages that attract links from other sites)
• Free offers (link bait)
• Social networking sites
• Social bookmarks
• Forums

Using these techniques to create links back to your site can be a powerful part of driving traffic to your site.

Be aware: do not use “black hat” techniques (unsanctioned or unfair). These include using link farms or automated link building programs (these can create link spam). You can be penalized for using “black hat” techniques.

Google is always experimenting with search methods and search marketing. Many of you probably have not seen their new visual search option called wonder wheel.  Conduct a search on Google and click on the “show options” right next to the word “web” below the Google icon. You get this search mechanism. It works by linking related topics of interest and it allows you to explore your search results in a new way. As a search marketer you always need to be aware of new changes in how search works.

Experiment!  Very cool. I have always liked using this type of visual concept linking. There is a thesaurus that works this way too. I am impressed. Good work Google!

Craig Meurer

]]> http://www.searchmarketingtimes.com/2009/03/follow-me-on-twitter/feed/ 0 http://www.searchmarketingtimes.com/2009/03/keyword-research-tool/ http://www.searchmarketingtimes.com/2009/03/keyword-research-tool/#comments Sat, 14 Mar 2009 04:01:48 +0000 Craig Meurer http://www.searchmarketingtimes.com/?p=79 Overview of Keyword tool KeyCompete.com

The Ultimate Keyword Research Tool: KeyCompete.com

Discover the best keywords for your search engine marketing campaigns

KeyCompete is an online keyword research tool that identifies the keywords your competitors are using in their pay-per-click campaigns. KeyCompete also identifies the competition that is bidding on your keywords.

• 130+ million keywords and web sites
• No software to download
• Keyword search estimates
• Web site / Keyword ratings
• Web site and keyword tracking with “Watch Reports”
• Competiton Reports with keywords you may be missing out on
• Long Tail Reports for even more keywords
• …and more

Features

Review

FAQs

Conclusion

Here are the top mistakes we see companies make when trying to build traffic

• Wrong title on the page or no title
• Wrong selection of keywords or no keywords in the meta tags
• Having no or limited textual content
• No Alt Tags
• Having wrong content and keywords
• Not updating the site
• Choosing the wrong target market
• No use of header tags
• Excessive use of keywords
• No link building plan
• Not blogging
• Don’t hide text using dark on dark or light on light text