But before I jump into the details, let me say this: The Dogpile Search Engine is one of the first meta search engines that queries multiple sites all at one time. Even better, you’ll get results from the largest search engines to the smallest search engines all combined together and compiled neatly for you.

Bear in mind that a meta search engine is not designed to index or rank websites. That’s right, it simply queries several sites at once to deliver a results page that combines the best sites from all the search engines.

What this means is, the higher a site is ranked on individual search engines, the higher it will rank on the Dogpile Search Engine.

To begin with, search engine order has been predefined. In fact, if a website ranks higher on one of the first search engines, chances are the site will rank higher in Dogpile.

What’s more, if you are a website owner, and you want to get your site listed on the Dogpile Search Engine, you will have to manually submit your site to one of its many search engine partners.

I’m sorry to say that direct submissions are not currently accepted.

But, here’s some good news for you. In most cases, your site will be listed immediately once you submit.

But wait, there’s more. Dogpile offers a search toolbar that is designed to provide every user added convenience and lightening fast access to information.

Right off the bat, you can download the toolbar directly to you web browser. In a combined fashion, results from any page on the Internet including yellow and white pages are delivered to you immediately.

When the dust settles, with Dogpile, you can search up to 50% more of the Web than any other search engine.

Now get this, you can choose to search a particular search engine or get the best of all search engines. This choice dramatically changes your results.

So far, so good. Right?

As if that’s not enough, there’s a news search that will sort your results by relevance and dates. For added convenience, there is an “Are You Looking For” feature available to steer you to a better-worded search query.

For all these reasons, Dogpile stands out. Consider this. You can use the “Bold Search Terms” option, to have all of you keyword search terms stand out on all the results pages.

And what’s more, you can track and display your previous 15 recent searches if there is something you want to go back and look at.

All in all, using the Dogpile Search Engine to search several search engines and directories at once is a huge time saver, and lots of fun. You can find what you are looking for faster, and in a more accurate way. And that’s really what you want isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: dogpile metasearch engine, dogpile search engine, dogpile search engines

If you are already running an Internet marketing campaign or are about to embark on an Internet marketing campaign, one concept you cannot afford to skimp on is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is one of the most popular buzz words in Internet marketing but unfortunately most Internet marketers simply do not know enough about SEO to make this strategy work for them. Even those who are knowledgeable about SEO may have difficulty executing their SEO strategies to produce the desired affect.

Advertising is a very important part of running any type of business. You need to advertise to reach new customers and market your products or services. Whether you run your business online or not you probably already realize how important it is to advertise but if you are running your business online you should understand there is a great deal of free advertising available in the form of optimal search engine rankings.

Well known search engines such as Google rank websites according to complex algorithms which are designed to determine which websites are most relevant for particular search terms. Therefore taking the time and effort to optimize your website for relevant search terms may result in you being rewarded with high search engine rankings for these terms. This is important because most Internet users rely heavily on these rankings. It is not uncommon for Internet users to only review the first few results when they search for a particular term. This means if your website ranks high enough to appear on the first page of the search results you will likely enjoy increased website traffic. However, if your website doesn’t make it to the first page or even the second page, it is unlikely you will receive a great deal of website traffic from visitors who use search engines.

Now that you understand why search engine rankings are so important you might wonder how to achieve these rankings. The easiest way to optimize your website is to hire a SEO specialist to do the work for you. The world of SEO is complex and continually evolving making it difficult for most business owners who do not specialize in SEO to keep up with the changes in the industry. Therefore, business owners who attempt to optimize their website by themselves may have difficulty keeping up with competitors who hire a SEO consultant to optimize their website.

The algorithms used by search engines can be rather complex and include a number of different factors. Some of the common factors in the equation include keyword density, META tags, titles, inbound links, website traffic and content.

Keyword density refers to the number of times a particular keyword is used in the content of your website. The theory behind this concept is that website which use a keyword often are likely extremely relevant to that keyword, however, overuse of that keyword may result in penalties to the website if the search engine deemed the keywords are not being used appropriately.

META tags are pieces of HTML code which some search engines use in evaluating the content of a website. Placing keywords in these tags can be beneficial in some search engines. However, care should be taken to avoid placing irrelevant keywords in these tags as this may result in your website being penalized.

Inbound links are also used by some search engines to rank websites. Inbound links refer to links on other websites which point to your website. In evaluating the worth of these inbound links, some search engines consider the rank of the website providing the link to your website. This means you should ensure the website providing inbound links to your website are high ranking websites to receive the most benefit from these links.

Finally, the content on your website can do a great deal to bolster your search engine rankings. Most SEO firms retain a staff of writers who are skilled at providing quality content which is also optimized for relevant keywords. If you hire a SEO firm who does not providing copywriting services you should invest in hiring a professional writer yourself. This will help to ensure the copy on your website is not only valuable to your visitors but also considered valuable to search engines.

Technorati Tags: SEO, SEO Tips

As marketers, we are told that we should be article marketing.  It is how you make money as an affiliate, it is how you promote your websites and it is how you add content to your virtual real estate empire.

Many people find article writing difficult to do because they are not used to writing.  If you have the money, it can be outsourced.  However, for many people starting out online, money is tight and so they can’t afford an outsourcer.

You can get articles written for a couple of dollars, but they are likely to be very poor quality.  For a decent 400 to 500 word article you are looking to pay around ten dollars, possibly more depending on the niche and the author.

You can write the articles yourself, and it’s not that difficult to do if you follow a system.  Many people suffer from writers block or are just not used to writing an article.  It can be very daunting to sit down and write if it is something you are not used to.

Below is a system that works very well, it is one I use myself and you can be writing high quality articles surprisingly quickly with this technique.  It really isn’t that hard and it enables even the most novice of writers to create decent articles rapidly.

Step 1 : Decide upon the niche you are writing in.

Step 2 : Determine which keyword(s) you are targeting in your article.

Step 3 : Determine the subject your article will be about.

Step 4 : Type into Google some of your keywords and see what problems and issues people are facing in that niche.  What do they want to know?  What is their pain?  What solutions are they looking for?

Step 5 : Write a powerful, interest building title with your keyword at the start, if possible.

Step 6 : Write out four or five short sentences about the problem (don’t give away too much … you want your reader to buy).

Step 7 : Turn each sentence into more descriptive paragraphs, remembering not to give away too much information.

Step 8 : Write a paragraph introducing the article at the top.

Step 9 : Write a paragraph summarizing what was in the article at the bottom.

And there you have a good quality, unique article that you could spin or just submit to an article directory or use on your website.  Content is king on the Internet, and unique content provides you with an edge over the competition.

This method will help you to quickly write articles, and it won’t be long before you can write a high quality article in under ten minutes.  With practise, you will be able to do them in five to seven minutes easily!

And remember the more articles you have out there, the more you can potentially earn!

Many marketers get so caught up in the stampede for traffic that they spend all their time building links.  They forget that one of the most vital parts of SEO are the on page factors.

These are not complex for you to do and are something that should be fundamental when you create a new site.  WordPress is an ideal platform as it typically lends itself well to search engine optimization.

The first step is for you to ensure you have set your title tag correctly.  This needs to be 64 characters in length.  Any longer and it will be cut off and this will look very odd in the search engine results.

The title tag needs to tell people what your site is about in such a way to entice them in to your web site.  It needs to include a keyword that is specific for the page the title tag is on.  Every page on your website should have its own unique title tag.  You should never use the same title tag on every page.

Next are your meta keywords and meta description.  These tell the search engine spiders what your site is about.  They are not massively important to the search engines, as most of them will analyse your site to see what it is really about.

These are important if you are using Adsense as without these meta tags in place, you find your Adsense ads are not focused on your niche.

The meta description is important because it appears in the search engine results.  It is 150 characters for you to get people to click on your link and come to your website.  You need to be concise and enticing in the same sentence.

Your meta keywords and description should also be unique for each page within your site.

Any images on your site have what is known as ALT tags.  These are tags which provide an alternative description for the visually impaired. These are noticed by the search engines and can get your images ranking well.  Make sure you do not attach the same keyword to too many ALT tags and add the word graphic, picture, image or something similar afterwards.  This will again help tell the search engines your website is relevant for those keywords.

On top of this you can include your keyword in the header 1 (h1) tag on your page, i.e. the title in the text.  This is another indicator to the search engines that your site is important for that keyword.

Using your keyword well within the text of your page and including related keywords around it will also help your site rank.

You must make sure you do not spam or keyword stuff any of your pages because it is a surefire way to get yourself dropped from the search engine results.

By performing some simple on page SEO optimization you can gain the advantage in the search engines.  Remember that not all marketers do this, and this can put you ahead of your competition, which is vital for your profitable success.

Web 2.0 technologies are taking the Internet by storm.  They have captured the hearts and minds not only of Internet Marketers, but of their target markets too.

More and more people are using Web 2.0 sites to either connect to their friends and family or to create their own hobby or fan sites.

These technologies can be extremely important in your traffic generation strategies because it allows you a method of direct contact with your target market.  Done well, web 2.0 technologies can provide you with thousands of visitors plus a valuable boost in the search engine rankings.

There are hundreds of Web 2.0 sites, with more cropping up every day in more focused niches.  These are the sites that are of particular interest to the Internet Marketer as you have a tightly focused niche of people who would be interested in your product or services.

Of course, you can’t just walk into a Web 2.0 site and start promoting your product.  Doing this will get yourself shot down in metaphorical flames.  Marketers who do this quickly find themselves hounded out of the market.

When you use a web 2.0 site you have to use it like you would a list. You have to establish yourself in the niche as an expert, someone to listen to and who knows what they are talking about.  Sometimes this means being yourself, other times you may have a pseudnym.

Whatever the case, you need to spend some time understanding the group and the market so that you can appeal to them in the best way.  Be helpful, provide valuable information and you will soon be viewed as an expert.

Once you have established yourself as an authority figure you can easily promote your products and services as people will link your expertise with them.  It allows you not only to promote your products, but to promote products as an affiliate.

One word of caution is to not spread yourself too thin.  Working on a social networking site to establish yourself as an authority can take a lot of your time and if you try to work on too many, you find yourself unable to do enough on any of the sites.  Pick just a couple to focus your attention on, one niche site and one general site.

Other web 2.0 sites allow you to create your own websites.  Some of these frown on overt commercialism, whereas others are pretty much a free for all.

This type of site is best used to push your product or information site up the search engine rankings.

You create sites on web 2.0 properties using unique content based around your keywords.  You then create active links through to your own website.  You do some simple promotion of these properties (pinging, social bookmarking, etc) to give them some link juice, and then they will work to boost your website in the search engine rankings.

Whilst this doesn’t give you direct traffic, it will give you a leg up the organic search engine rankings.  This will help to further increase your traffic.  Plus, the additional benefit is each of these Web 2.0 properties will rank in their own right and get traffic, some of which will be passed on to your main site.

Web 2.0 sites are an incredible method of getting traffic.  If you use them properly and spend the time on them, they can help you get thousands of additional visitors for free!

Yahoo Answers is a source of very targeted traffic that many marketers overlook.  The time involved with it and the ease with which it appears Yahoo ban people puts them off.

The basic premise of Yahoo Answers is that people ask questions and other people answer them.  Think of it as an advice board, if you like.  Some of the questions are bizarre, some peculiar, whereas others are normal.

The quality of answers varies too from the single sentence, to the rude to the outstanding.  The latter is the type of answer you want to be providing.

Firstly, people are only banned if they abuse the system and provide consistently poor answers.  So long as you stay on the right side of their terms of service and provide good quality answers you will have no trouble keeping your account.  People have had the same account for years and have accumulated thousands of points, whereas others lose theirs in a few weeks because they break the terms of service.

The key to succeeding with Yahoo Answers is to find questions that you can answer and your website provides more information on.

The benefits of Answers are threefold.

1)  You gain traffic from people reading your answer
2)  Your answer, if chosen as the best answer, will rank in the search engines and get traffic directly
3)  You can get a backlink from your answer which will boost your sites rankings.

As Yahoo Answers is considered an authority site by the other search engines, having links from it are considered highly relevant and very beneficial.

You must do an advanced search to find the best questions to answer.  Search only questions opened in the last 7 days with your keyword.  This will give you the most relevant questions.  You then need to go through each question and find the ones you can answer well.

In order to keep your account and to get voted as the best answer, you need to provide high quality answers.  This means reading the question thoroughly and understand what is asked.

Start your answer with a greeting, e.g. “Hi there” or “Hi, thanks for your question”.  This instantly makes your answer stand out from the crowd and will start to build a relationship with the questioner.

Then provide your answer and sign off with something equally friendly such as “Hope this helps you out” and then sign out with your name.

You should only put your link in your answer directly if it has been asked for.  Putting your link in every answer is likely to get your account banned.  Your link needs to go in the resources box below.  Don’t worry, it will get seen and clicked on, particularly if your answer is voted the best answer.

Yahoo Answers provides a very good method of generating targeted traffic through to your website.  It works well for most types of sites and some people earn decent money just from Yahoo Answers.  Use it well and wisely and you can receive many benefits from it.

Social bookmarking is one of the best ways to get your websites ranking well and for getting direct traffic.  The search engines know that the social bookmarking sites are a direct indicator of what people are actual interested in.  Sure, they know marketers use it, but they realise that the majority of content that is social bookmarked multiple times is real content that people are finding useful and interesting.

You can take advantage of this and use social bookmarking to get your sites ranking well for their keywords.

Firstly, you need to open an account on some social bookmarking sites.  Rather than social bookmark each site manually, look at software such as OnlyWire which semi-automates the process.  This will make your life a lot easier.

Once you have your account set up, find some Internet marketing colleagues, friends or family who would be willing to set up an account themselves with Onlywire.

Then you simply trade bookmarks.  They bookmark your sites, you bookmark theirs.

Most marketers only have their sites bookmarked once, and very occasionally more than once.  The search engines are probably very aware of this and so pay more attention to sites that have multiple bookmarks on a single site.

This simple technique can easily get you multiple bookmarks and will give your sites a much needed boost in the search engines.

Alternatively, you can outsource the bookmarking and hire people to do it for you.  This will very quickly add up if you are creating a lot of sites.  You can find people on forums such as Digitalpoint who will do it very cheaply for you, but it is still going to add up.

You can apply the same technique to sites such as Stumbleupon and Digg, both of which can potentially get you massive amounts of traffic.  These sites expect more newsworthy and interesting articles.  With a well written article you can expect thousands of visitors in a day, quite literally.

Setting up multiple social bookmarking accounts yourself and bookmarking your sites is possible.  However, these sites are smart and will realise what you are doing unless you hide behind proxies.  This can be done, but often the hassle isn’t worth it, particularly when it is easy to network with other marketers.

Networking with other marketers and trading bookmarks also has a side effect of building your network of contacts.  These could potentially turn into joint venture partners, product partners or more in the future.

Social bookmarking is an excellent way for you to get traffic both from the search engines and from the social bookmarking sites.  Do it well and you can benefit from great search engine rankings and massive traffic.

Technorati Tags: Blogging Tips

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a method of taking content and syndicating it out to multiple sites.  It was primarily aimed at newsfeeds and providing content from news sites to other sites.

Like many other technologies, it has been hi-jacked by Internet Marketers who have found this is an excellent way to get backlinks.  It allows you to syndicate your content to hundreds of other websites at a click of a button, which in turn will boost your site in the search engine rankings.

In order to use RSS syndication, you have to have an RSS feed from your website.  The easiest way to do this is to use WordPress when creating your website.  There are ways of making RSS feeds from normal HTML websites, but it is not always as simple as you may think.  Quite often it involves a manual process and manual submission of files.  However, there are a few websites that will automatically convert HTML to RSS for you.

Once you have an RSS feed you need to find some places to submit it.

There are two types of site you want to find.

Firstly you are looking for RSS directories.  A quick Google will bring up plenty of directories you can use.  There is software available you can buy which will automate the submission for you.

Once you have found your directories you want to submit your RSS feeds to them.  Manually it isn’t the fastest process, but it can be outsourced.  You need to have your keywords, a title and sometimes a description prepared, but that won’t take long.

It is often worth using different descriptions, titles and keywords to ensure each submission is unique.  What level of difference this actually makes no one is quite sure, but it does appear to help.

If you are manually submitting RSS feeds then you must keep track of which sites you have submitted where.  The reason being you don’t want to submit the same site more than once.  Plus, you are likely to want to submit other sites in the future.

The second type of site is the RSS Aggregator. This is a site which takes a number of RSS feeds and combines them into a single feed or webpage.  This single feed can be submitted to RSS directories, further increasing your backlinks.

The RSS aggregator can be useful to mix up your RSS feeds on a topic with feeds from news sites on the same topic.  This will provide a higher level of authority and provide more bulk to the content.

When using RSS feeds, you need to also remember that many Web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo and many article directories have RSS feeds for the pages you create.  These can also be submitted to RSS directories and aggregators in order to further increase links and boost rankings.

Your RSS feed submissions will be updated every time you update your webpage.  Therefore, if you are regularly adding new content, you can find it syndicated out to many websites very quickly, gaining you backlinks to your site.

RSS feeds are a great way to get additional backlinks and to help your sites rank well for their keywords.  Use them, enjoy them and see the links flooding in.

Do you want to do a Google rank check?  Google’s page rank is a patented algorithm.  Google considers more than half a billion variables when determining your rank on the search results.

No one person knows what all of these variables are – not even the person who oversees the code.  So, anyone claiming to be a Google rank check authority should be viewed with caution.

Still, there are some things we do know about how page rank works.

Google flat out says that pages they believe are important get a higher page rank than others.  Pages with higher rank tend to appear higher in the search results, though you will see page rank 5 pages occasionally ranking higher than page rank 7 pages for a specific search.

Google also sees the links on a page acting as a “vote” for other pages.  So, if a highly ranked page links to your site, you get more “juice” out of it than when a friend with no page rank links to your site.

Most experts agree that backlinks from .gov and .edu sites to have higher link juice than other top level domains because they are restricted to not for profit sites.

One way to get .edu links is to take out online ads on college newspaper sites.

But, any links from PR 2 or higher sites can help your page rank.  One way to get links is to post comments on with decent page rank.  But make sure that Google “follows” the links on the page first.  Some webmasters set their sites up so that you don’t get any link juice from your posts.  You can do this by downloading free software on the internet.

Other ideas for increasing page rank include:

·    Join forums and post a link back to your website in your signature.  Every time you make a post, you’ll get link juice.

·    Submit your site to directories.  Each directory which lists you will give you more of a chance of being listed higher in Google’s search results.

·    Add an ezine to your site.  Not only will this allow you to keep up with the people who visit your site, but you can also post information about your ezine to ezine directories.

·    Publish articles on the article sites.  You can drive traffic to your sites this way.  But, high PR article sites also give you link juice.

·    Create a sitemap on your website.  This lets Google know how to index your page.

·    Link to other pages within your web site.  Putting links to the internal pages within the web site allows you to increase your link juice.

·    Continue building pages within your site.  Every page you create and link back to your home page increases the strength of your home page’s PR.

To do a Google rank check, you can install the Google toolbar to your Firefox browser.  The tool is at http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/FT3/intl/en/index.html -This will give you the page rank of every page you visit.

A Google rank check will allow you to know how your site is faring compared to similar sites.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a daunting process to learn for any person who is unfamiliar with it. However, this process is one of the more important skills that you must learn and master if you plan on making some money on your online site or business. This seems like a tall order for a novice in the whole SEO game, but fortunately for you, there are a couple of things that you can learn about that can help you understand, and hopefully implement, the entire process to help improve your site’s ranking.

What is SEO?

The first thing that you must know before anything else is what search engine optimization (SEO) is and how it can benefit your online site.

Just in case you do not know, search engine optimization is an important skill that will allow your website or webpage to get better rankings in search engines, such as google, thereby making it easier for people to discover it. There are a lot of techniques and processes involved in SEO, which is why learning how it works first of all is the most important first step that you must take.

Basically, SEO helps online sites, or online businesses, to get a certain amount of exposure on the web by making them more visible and easier to find through the use of search engine’s indexing software, thereby making it easier to redirect traffic to your site and business, improving your chances of receiving a steady stream of market.

How is your site or page ranked?

Before your website can make full use of SEO, you must first get it indexed by search engines. How this works is that search engines find your website or webpage through the use of different indexing programs, such as crawlers or spiders that basically follows all links that lead to your site or page and downloads copies of it as it goes.

After this, your site or page will be analyzed and indexed based on some algorithms and criteria set by the search engines, thereby giving your site its ranking. This can be achieved through effective link building, which requires you to create connections to other sites that have similar contents to that of your site.

Benefits of SEO for your site

One of the more obvious benefits of SEO is that It can help improve your site’s web ranking in search engines, thereby increasing the amount of web traffic that you website can generate. Since your site is now easier to locate in the web, it is a safe bet that there will be a significant change in the amount of visits from potential customers that your site can get. Keep in mind that making your site easier to find makes a whole lot of difference for your business’ survival, especially for those based online.

Avoid spamming

Spamming is one way of getting traffic directed to your website, however, this type of method will only work for a short period of time, and will ultimately lead to your site’s failure.

This type of method works by literally tricking traffic to get redirected to your site through the use of some deceptive techniques, such as using irrelevant keywords and using duplicate content on other sites just to try and increase your site’s page ranking.

Initially, this can generate some traffic to your site, but it will create some problems later on for your site, making it a big possibility that you might even lose some potential customers along the way.

Learning how the entire SEO system works is your first step on managing your online business or website, especially for a beginner such as yourself. Understanding how it works can help you determine what other steps you need to take in order to fully realize and take advantage of the entire SEO process in turning your business into a complete online success.