Free Traffic Tips

Could also be called “Don’t concentrate all your efforts on Google, Yahoo and MSN”. Though through the use of less competitive terms, you can show up on many of the less popular search engines without doing much extra work.

Study confirms importance of other search engines:

“According to the study, 58 percent of Google searchers also visited at least one of the other top two search engines, MSN Search and Yahoo, showing that even though Google’s market share is dominant today, there is significant opportunity for its competitors to grow their share.”

Somehow I managed to miss this gem.

See how seach engine optimization software maker Axandra views the Google Patent on its search technology.

Good reading and free tips on Google.

Google ranking secrets revealed – Part 1:

Tips on whether or not you should be updating your site – for example, if you haven’t been updating and you rank well for information that doesn’t need changing, should you make that page dynamic by adding RSS feeds to it or leave well enough alone?

Google ranking secrets revealed – Part 2 Does your domain name make any difference at all?

Google ranking secrets revealed – Part 3 How does your linking strategy affect your ranking in Google?

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Google steps into banner ad world – silicon.com:

A quote:

“Beginning today, the search giant will start allowing advertisers to display animated image ads on third-party partner sites – a first for Google and a departure from company founders’ early stance against such web advertising. (Google itself still shows only text ads on its site.)”

If you’ve ever thought “my market is too small for related text ads from Google”, then you might want to keep abreast of this test.

Hey, that rhymes.

“The ads would not have to be related to the content of the publishing site, nor would it have to be text-based, which is the traditional format used by Google when displaying ads related to search results. The ads could contain graphics and some simple animation.

Google launched a test of the new offering Monday with a select group of advertisers, a spokesman said. The service is expected to be generally available in the ‘coming weeks.’

Google does not plan to sell non-search-related ads for its own sites.”

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Our friend Rok is full of Google news today. Here are some thoughts on how the move to CPM might be a test for something bigger at Adsense.

“For now it seems that the CPM model is only going to be limited to ad campaigns targeting specific sites, giving advertisers the choice of where (Google’s network of ad partners and not on Google’s search results) their ads appear, for the first time.

The new program should provide advertisers with more ‘direct’ ad placement relevance, while at the same time putting more of the risk on them.

But what if this is only a test for Google to see whether the CPM model might also work for Google AdWords and Google AdSense as a whole … as a substitute for the cost-per-click model?”

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There have been sightings, according to my friend Rok over at Marketing Studies. He says:

“But since Google is [?] integrating this service with their standard Google AdSense program, RSS ads are now getting the same treatment as ’standard’ ads, meaning that RSS publishers can take advantage of Google’s immense base of self-service clients and literally sell out all of their available ad space.

And with such an unitrusive format, publishers do not need to worry about alienating their subscribers.”

See an example and find out what the deeper meaning of this could be at Marketing Studies in the full article:
Google AdSense Ads in RSS Feeds.

Blog of the Day : Google News Blog – Google PageRank and Directory Update Underway

GoogleAdvisor.org is quite an informative site – first place I saw the announcement of the page rank update and the only place really talking about the directory update. Drag this link into your feed reader to subscribe to the RSS 2.0 version – other versions available at their site.

According to an article posted to WebProNews, those rumors about the Google Browser are true, according to bloggers.

Bloggers Spot the Google Browser.

Though it could, of course, be a browser for internal use only….