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.

8 Week Challenge - Week 1 - URL's

Week 1 - URL Structure

Over the next 8 weeks I am going to cover various on-page factors that have a bearing on your ranking in the search engines.

Let me say firstly that any of these factors by themselves may not be make or break for you, however if you put them all together they will be very powerful for you in terms of how your site ranks in the search engine.

URL's are the first factor that we are going to deal with. The URL is the individual web address for each of the pages on your website. eg. www.yourwebsite.com/index.html. This is most likely the address for the home page of your website.

Some other common URL's that you might see for pages on a website are -

www.yourwebsite.com/products.html
www.yourwebsite.com/contact.html
www.yourwebsite.com/about.html

One of the more powerful ways to use URL's is to include your keywords into them.

If your business is a florist, rather than having www.myflorist.com/products.html you could have

www.myflorist.com/flowers.html
www.myflorist.com/roses.html
www.myflorist.com/giftsbaskets.html

This then puts some of your keywords into your URL's. It gives Google a better idea of what the page is about and this will help your search engine rankings.

Dynamic URL's

Dynamic URL's are a URL that is automatically generated for a web page each time the page is loaded. So, each time the page loads it will have a new URL. This is difficult for search engines to index and can hurt your search engine performance.

There are sound reasons for using dynamic URL's for a website, so if you have dynamic URL's on your website you should talk to your web developer about why you are doing this.

PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait... wait... C: wait... SD: wait...

8 Week Challenge - Week 1 - URL's

Small Business Owners - Is your website search engine friendly?

Attn : Small Business Owners

there are some things that your website must have in order to be search engine friendly. Why are most websites for small business languishing on page 356 of Google with no hope of ever being seen by the average consumer.

When people search the internet they are invariably looking for 2 things. They are looking for information to solve their problem, or they are looking for a product to solve their problem. So, it is important that your website can be found.

Unfortunately I find that alot of small business websites are missing these critical elements.

The first of these elements are metatags. Don't worry about the computer jargon. Metatags are things that tell the search engines what your site is about. The title, description and keywords are what tells the search engines what your site is about. If your site does not have them then you are not helping them to understand your site and consequently your search rnakings will suffer.

Have you ever tried to sell a product to a customer without telling them what the product does? It is like a website without metatags.

The second element that your site should have is a sitemap. A sitemap is easy to create, but again I find alot of small business websites don't have them. A sitemap makes it easy for the seacrh engine robots to find all of the pages on your site. If your site does not have a sitemap, you are basically leaving the robots to find their own way around your site, and that won't be good for your search rankings.

And, once you have your sitemap you should tell the search engines where to find it.

My suggestion to you is that if your site was designed by a web designer make sure that they have included these basic elements into your site design. Your site might be the most beautiful looking site on the web, but if no-one can find it, what is the point?

Remember, beauty is only skin deep.

Small Business Owners - Is your website search engine friendly?