Google Search Shortcuts are commands that can be entered into Google to find out information regarding the indexing of a particular site. A useful one I have already mentioned is "link:" which shows all of the indexed inward links to your site. I had a look round the web and come up with this list :-

• link:www.example.com/ - Pages that link to your site
• site:www.example.com/ - Indexed pages in your
• cache:www.example.com/ - The current cache of your site
• info:www.example.com/ - Information Google has about your site
• related:www.example.com/ - Pages that are similar to your site
• site allinurl:www.example.com/ - Pages that refer to your site’s URL

There are loads more relating to the calculators and phonebooks etc. Take a look here.

I’ve often wondered when investigating how many inward links our clients have why Google always shows less than MSN & Yahoo. You can check how many links a site has by using a link: command.

e.g. link:www.bbc.co.uk

Yahoo uses a linkdomain: command.

If you run the commands on all 3 search engines you’ll probably find quite a difference in the results. I decided to do a little research to find out what was going on..

If Googles main criteria for a good search result is links isn’t it a little weird that it doesn’t index all your precious inward links?

It turns out that Google purposely doesn’t list all links pointing to a particular page. They do this because they feel by giving webmasters this information they may be able to use it to manipulate search results. This implies that Google still know they’re there and includes them while calculating page rank.

Another discovery is that Google unlike the others only shows the links to a particular page so running a “link:” on your domain will only includes sites point at the homepage. The others show all links to all pages.

So keep an eye on your inward links but don’t be disappointed if they don’t all show up in Google. They’re probably being counted, just not being acknowledged.

One of the most important components of your Adwords Campaign is the keyword lists your use to promote your ads. Your keyword list is going to give you the power over your competition and as most people spend very little time on their keywords you can work this to your advantage.

Adwords Best Practice number 2:

Research, Research, Research.

The extra time you spend planning your campaign will pay dividends in the future by providing targeted visitors at a fraction of the price.

3 Steps to Great Keyword Research.

Step 1 : Brainstorming.

This step is the ONLY step most people carry out and even then they don’t spend the time it needs. Get a pen & paper and try to think of all the words people may use to search for your product and service.

For example one of our clients sells sweets online. During brainstorming some of the ideas we came up with were “sweets”, “traditional sweets”, “old fashioned sweets” and “jars of sweets”.  

Don’t stop at the general terms however. By breaking it down even more you can break it down to categories e.g. “Sugar Free Sweets” and “Chocolate Sweets” or even down to product “Sherbert Lemons” etc.

Once you get going you should be able to think of a healthy looking list full of variations.

Step 2 : Keyword Tools.

Brainstorming is a great start but you need to carry out research to find out exactly how many people are using certain terms and more importantly how much competition is attached to your terms (more on this in future articles).

The Google Keywords tool can be accessed from with your AdWords account and you can find the Yahoo! Search Marketing tool here:

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/

One of the best research tools available is Wordtracker. Wordtracker not only shows you the number of people searching but also offer data regarding growth, competion and much more. I would recommend you invest in Wordtracker if you’re serious about Internet Marketing and PPC.

Wordtracker - Take your Free Trial

Get all these tools in your Internet Marketers Toolbox.

Step 3  : Beating the Competition

There are many tactics to get 1 UP over your competition. One of the most common is spelling mistakes. By bidding on spelling mistakes you can achieve clicks for far less than the correctly spelt terms that all your Competition is bidding on. People do make typos all the time while browsing.

We’ll go through all the tactics in future posts. Keep working on your keyword research and you’ll get a refined list of words that really works for you and your business.

Keep informed via RSS as number 3 will be here soon.

An article on ZDNET into the number of searches confirms that searching is still going strong and the small decline is simply down to seasons.

The most interesting figures in the article relate to the number of searches on the major search engines.

June 2006

Google 2.9 Billion
Yahoo! 1.8 Billion
MSN 818 Million

This confirms that around 95% of searches are carried out either on Google or Yahoo! making them the first port of call in any online marketing strategy.

Original Article..

6.4 bln searches in June 2006 by ZDNet’s ZDNet Research — Americans conducted 6.4 bln searches in June 2006, a 6% decline from May 2006 (6.8 bln searches), but a 29-percent increase over June 2005 (5.0 bln searches), comScore says. The decline in search volume from May is considered to be mainly a seasonal effect [...]

A lot of our clients originally approach us because they are already running a Google Adwords Campaign, but without success. They are usually paying far too much for far too little, or in some cases nothing at all !

I can normally predict what their account will look like before I even log in and take a look. Most accounts contain 1 adgroup, with a selection of keywords which in turn are linked to a single advert. Put simply this type of campaign is far to broad.

This leads us to one of the most important best practices.

Focus Your Campaign

The first question you should ask yourself before even setting up your adwords account is.