First impressions are important, and for your web site to contribute to your bottom line, you need to worry about two first impressions.

First there’s the “impression” your site makes on the search engine spiders. That’s the impression that will get you god rankings and drive visitors to your site.

The second “first impression” is the few fleeting seconds you have to convince your visitor that you have what they’re looking for and that you’re a company they’ll want to do business with. That depends on the “look and feel” of your web site and written copy that conveys an irresistible marketing message.

Either one of these, by itself, isn’t going to do your bottom line much good.

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Have you ever wondered how your web site looks to search engine spiders? Lots of content on your web site that people can easily see and understand is invisible to the search engines. For example, flash content doesn’t register at all with search engine spiders. This spider simulator also includes a link to an article that explains all about how spiders work. Check out this cool tool and see what the search engines see: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php

Most Americans are concerned about what’s being done with their personal information online, according to a new poll from Consumer Reports.

“Many consumers have misconceptions about the information available about them and how commonly it is sold by companies without their knowledge,” said Joel Kelsey, policy analyst withConsumers Union. “Our poll makes clear that consumers want more control over the treasure trove of information companies are collecting about their activities online.”

The Consumer Reports poll found that 82% of Internet users are concerned about their credit card numbers being stolen online, and 72% are worried that their online activity is being tracked and profiled by companies. More than 2/3 of Americans have provided personal information to gain access to a Web site, but 53% said they weren’t comfortable with companies using their email content or browsing history to send them ads, and 54% are uncomfortable with third parties collecting information about their online behavior.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about whether the Google Sandbox is a real phenomenon or just an SEO myth. Regardless of that, a recent article in Search Engine Land promises to hold the key to getting past that hurdle quickly.

Use a less popular version of your keywords.

Make judicious use of keyword modifiers.

Mix up the keywords on your page. Use plural and singular version, employ other variations, too.

Try for long-tail versions of your keywords.

Buy traffic if you need to.

Google gets nearly half of all US searches performed on the Internet so you can bet that’s at the top of our SEO to do líst. Here are the exact numbers as provided by the “comScore for searchenginewatch.com” survey:

42.7% – Google
28.0% – Yahoo!
13.2% – MSN
7.60% – AOL (Google)
5.90% – ASK
2.60% – All Others Combined

Everyone seems to be making a big deal out of the proposed buyout of Yahoo by Microsoft. Even NJBiz asked me to comment on it.

While I suppose it is a big deal in terms of the level of competition, and it may well make Microsoft somewhat more competitive against Google, it’s not going to affect greatly how we do SEO o how people will find your web site in the search engines. Google will either retain the Yahoo brand and the Yahoo search engines, or kill it off and incorporate their technology within the MSN/Live search engine. The relative proportion of searchers who go to Google, Yahoo, and MSN may change a bit, but I don’t anticipate anything drastic.

Bottom line: don’t worry – this is unlikely to hurt your search engine visibility.

There’s a new search engine in town that makes it really easy to refine your searches. SortFix has a little tutorial that runs on its home page when you first go there, to illustrate how to use it. You start with a simple search, and then SortFix gives you a series of buckets. Potential modifiers, called power words, appear in the left-hand bucket, and you can drag them into either the add to search bucket or the remove bucket. When you click on the search button, you get a nicely pared down list of results with a new set of power words. Again, you can drag them into the add to search or remove bucket to further refine your search.

Results come from Google, Yahoo, or The Open Directory (dmoz.org), whichever you select. Pretty cool.

“You, a peddler of fine-quality dictionaries, have just launched a Web site for your business. Most people can’t spell worth a lick, so you are very excited about the possibilities.

Excited, that is, until you type the word “dictionary” into Google and it returns 318 million dictionary-related Web sites – meaning that yours is at the bottom of a very, very big pile.

The answer to this problem is something called search-engine optimization, or SEO, which is geek-speak for the methods used to improve a Web page’s rank in search results, and in turn, the number and quality of visitors that go to a site.”

So begins a pretty good basic introduction to search engine optimization on the Forbes Magazine website, entitled “Marching Up The Search Stack”. Read the full article here.

comScore reports that in July 2007, Google sites ranked as the top core search engine with 55.2 percent share of searches among the top five search engines. Yahoo!  ranked second with 23.5 percent, followed by MSN/Live Search (12.3 percent), Ask.com (4.7 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.4 percent). (“Google sites” includes other sites that serve up Google results, such as  AOL and Netscape)

From Read/WriteWeb comes a listing by Charles Knight of 100 search engines that he believes are better than Google in at least one respect. Many are specialty search engines, like video searches, blog searches, and so forth. You’re bound to find at least oine that intrigues you.

Criteria for inclusion in Top 100

Firstly, let’s explain how we developed the list. When we say “The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines,” we are referring to alternatives to Google. Many readers wrote in to ask what the criteria was for inclusion on the List, such as: is it the percentage of market share, or some other statistical measure? It is not. The criteria is twofold:

1) the Search Engine should exhibit superiority to Google – not as a whole, but in just one particular area. People have been talking about Wikipedia’s search engine Wikiasari or even digg as potential “Google killers”. That’s fine, but we are not arguing that any one of the 100 list members is a “Google killer”. Rather, that they should be matched against the appropriate corresponding part of Google. For example, TheFind is a shopping search engine and therefore should be compared to Google’s shopping search engine, Froogle. blinkx, a video search engine, should be matched against Google’s video search feature, and so forth. (See article #1 for a fuller explanation of these categories.)

2) Secondly, what ultimately gets a particular search engine into the Top 100 (as opposed to the hundreds and hundreds of “also rans”) is my evaluation. It is a subjective, personal judgment from an SEO – not an independent, statistical measure. I liken it to a movie critic, who must be ready to defend his/her ratings, but the reader is by no means obligated to agree with them after having seen the movie.

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