Did you find a Gold Nugget? Don't stop looking. There will be more than one.

Last week I wrote about 10 Essential Tools for your online business.

Today I am going to dig deeper into another great tool that I use for my online business - Google Trends.

I treat finding a great website like finding a gold nugget. Don't stop looking when you find one, because there might be a cluster of them.

So, how do you find them quickly and easily.

Google Trends

You can use Google trends for a number of things like seeing what search terms are hot on the web.

But, a lesser used section of Google trends is the websites section. You can see different stats about people that visited a certain website.

Lets say that we look at a website like ezinearticles.com

If you put this into the website section of Google Trends you get some info about visitors to the website.

You can see the volume of traffic and the trend in the traffic.

But, more importantly you get a list of the top 10 websites that people that visited ezinearticles also searched for. Here are the nuggets. Some of these websites you may already know about, but there are some nuggets here that maybe you didn't know about.

You can also see a list of other search terms that they searched for as well.

If you want to dig a bit deeper you can then repeat the propcess for any of those top 10 websites to find other websites.

So, rather than using the search engine and typing in something like 'article directory' and then sifting through the search results, you have a list of the top 10 websites that people visited.

Imagine the possibility in terms of keyword research and linking. Stay tuned, over the next couple of days I am going to take you through using these tools to find great websites to link to and ways to find new keywords.

Did you find a Gold Nugget? Don't stop looking. There will be more than one.

Duplicate Content Penalty - Is it just BS?

OK. So here is my thought on the subject.

The Duplicate Content Penalty is BS.

So, some of you might be saying 'What is this Duplicate Content Penalty?'

The duplicate content penalty is something that has been tossed around for years that says that the search engines will penalise you if you have a piece of content on one of your web pages that is the same as a piece of content on a web page on another website.

It doesn't happen.

If it did happen, article directories like ezinearticles would not exist. I have many articles on ezinearticles that are also on my web design website. I have posted these articles on other article directories as well.

I don't see ezinearticles suffering too much from this duplicate content.

If the duplicate content penalty existed I could quite conceivably put the article directories out of business by posting my articles to as many of them as I possibly could so that they all got hammered by Google for having duplicate content. Ridiculous.

On a number of occasions I have had one of my articles picked up by manta. I like it when that happens. They are a PR6 website with about 5 million unique visitors per month. So, they get one of my articles of ezinearticles and republish it on their website.

Doesn't seem like they are too worried about a duplicate content penalty.

So, if you have some really good content and you are worried about putting it out there because you don't want to get penalised for duplicate content - TAKE OFF THE HANDCUFFS.

There is a whole lot of link love you are missing out on. I regularly use 4-5 article directories for each article I write. I often put content up on Squidoo as a lens. I write eHow articles from my content. I put content on my blog that is on my website and vice versa.

If you have been holding yourself back because you have been worried about getting penalised for duplicate content - STOP. It won't happen.

The Real Duplicate Content Penalty

OK. So here is what you don't do. Create a website with 100 pages, 1 page of unique content and 99 pages of copy. Google won't love you.

That is the duplicate content penalty.

It is generally accepted that the Google algorithm takes into account the size of your website. It stands to reason that a 1000 page website would have more authority than a 1 page website.

Now, don't get me wrong it is entirely possible to get a 1 page website to rank well in the search engines.

But, it must be unique content. That is what duplicate content is all about.

So, use your content. Submit it to article directories. Make a squiddo lens. Write some eHow articles. Make a blog.

Use your content to create links back to your website to bring traffic and to help you rank better in the search engines.

Create some link love for your website.

Duplicate Content Penalty - Is it just BS?

Squidoo

Have been away for a few days cause my internet died. It is very hard to run an online business with no internet connection but I am back online now.

I have just made a squiddo lens for my internet business. Squidoo is another good social media forum. You can showcase anything you like. You can use it to link to content on your site, and you can generate some extra income by featuring Amazon products and other things on your site.

My lens is Professional Website Design for Small Business and you can check it out using the link at the top of the page.

Social media is a great way to promote your business and also to create links to the content on your site. A win win situation for your website. Squidoo is one way of doing this. I am in the process of putting together a list of my top social media sites. Which ones do you like to use? Got any recommendations that you think should be on the list?

Squidoo

Drive Traffic & Search Engine Rankings using Social Media

Been busy for a couple of days looking at ways to drive traffic to my sites and gain search engine rankings by using social media.

I have previously written articles on networking and link building with associated businesses and this is what I have been working on. My website design business is focussed on small business website design, so I have been looking at small business forums and blogs.

I have also been using social media sites like Linkedin, Stumbleupon, Facebook and of course Blogger. There are obviously many social media sites that you can use to draw extra traffic to your business.

Just remember the golden rule, DO NOT spam these sites with your website link. Create meaningful content and help people solve their problems. Share your knowledge and for this you deserve a link.

Networks are also a great way to find associated businesses to share links with. Again, remember that you should do this around quality content. Not just a reciprocal link sharing arrangement.

Drive Traffic & Search Engine Rankings using Social Media

Website Design Work

Finding website design work? How do you do it?

I have found some very useful sites on the net for finding website design work. Designquote and Sitepoint are a couple of the sites that I follow to find website design jobs.

At the moment my Website Design site is not seeing alot of traffic. My current PageRank is Google is 1 but I have been working on building links, increasing the size of the site, and on optimising it for the search engines. Unfortunately all of this takes time.

As you know, one of my goals for this project was to spend as little money as possible. I want to see if I can create something that generates cash, using as little of my own money as possible.

Hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas and that you are all making lots of money online.

Website Design Work

Web Site Design Tools

Checked out a couple of different tools tonight to ramp up my internet businesses. Had a look at Internet Business Promoter and trialled the free version. It looks to be quite an effective bit of software. Their guarantee says top Google rankings or your money back. Will have more of a look at it over the next few days. Anyone out there have any experience - good or bad - with Internet Business Promoter?

Worked on getting some more links as well. This morning I submitted to some more directories and tonight I submitted an article that I wrote on website design to some different article directories. You can check out some of the website design articles that I have written. Always happy to get some feedback - good or bad. I have started using a tool called article submitter to submit my articles to different directories in a more timely fashion.

Web Site Design Tools