SEO Marketing

25 Advanced Search Engines (Other Than Google)

28 March 2021 by
Advanced Search Engines 1

It may come as a shock to learn that Google is not the end-all be-all search engine. There are many search engines out there, much more than the 25 included in this list.

Learning how Google stores and utilizes the information you search for may lead to seeking out a different, more private search engine.

Which search engine is right for you? It depends on what you are searching for and what you are interested in finding.

Are privacy and tracking options important to you? Are you looking for academic material or strictly for video clips? The search engines you use can help better define your search, and get you the answers you need more quickly.

Thankfully, you have options! Keep reading to find which search engine best fits your needs.

25 Advanced Search Engines (Other Than Google)
  1. Bing is one of the most-used search engines behind Google. Some users find it more visually pleasing than the info up front layout that Google uses. Bing, while similar to Google’s layout, offers trending images while searching.
  2. Yahoo is another popular search engine, which boasts a different layout than other search engines, including top news headlines and recommended articles.
  3. Baidu, which is the most popular search engine in China, has a similar design layout to Google, but is heavily censored.
  4. Yandex is Russia’s answer to Google. Powered by AI, they utilize cookies, and their machines are constantly learning in order to provide better search results for their users.
  5. DuckDuckGo is among the most popular alternatives to googling. DuckDuckGo is the search engine for those who want privacy. They do not track and consistently block access from others trying to obtain your search history.
  6. Swisscows is notable for its privacy settings, and does not store your data. Many parents utilize Swisscows and find their family-friendly privacy policies ideal for their children’s internet experience.
  7. Ask.com formerly known as Ask Jeeves is a laid-back and user-friendly search engine.  Ask runs a “question-answering based search engine.”  Ask a question, get an answer, simple as that!
  8. Ecosia appeals to the environmentally conscious. With every search you type in, Ecosia helps give back while you do your research by planting trees where they are needed across the world. They are privacy-friendly and utilize Bing and their own algorithms to bring you your results.
  9. Startpage offers an interesting service as it does not track your history or cookies. But it goes a step further in that you can install a Startpage plugin and keep using Google and its search engine, without the potential privacy issues.
  10. Pinterest, while it may not seem like a search engine, is a massive database of images and other creative content. Although a (free) account is required, you can pin designs and photos into categories, making repetitive searches obsolete.
  11. Keyhole sets itself apart as a search engine by allowing users to search the World Wide Web by keywords, hashtags, or @mentions. Keyhole can show you how a piece was shared across platforms and offers a live campaign tracker. Keyhole utilizes social listening online and provides analytics to help improve your online marketing strategies.
  12. Flickr’s advanced search specializes in all things media. Whether you are looking for photos, videos, illustrations, you can find a variety of content with what Flickr offers.
  13. SlideShare is a major database of slideshow presentations. If you missed your latest conference or are interested in brushing up on some topics, Slideshare may be a perfect search engine for you.
  14. TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You plug in the picture and TinEye will compile a list and show you where the image has been shared around the internet.
  15. LinkedIn Answers Search can help you find keywords used on the site. It’s a great place to seek advice from experts in your field or ask their staff questions.
  16. Social Searcher can track keywords and social metrics. This search engine can also show you a specific hashtag or @mention all in one list. This is great for monitoring your growth as a brand and on social media, and see what people are talking about.
  17. Wolfphram Alpha: some may remember this search engine from seeking help in understanding difficult mathematic equations. But Wolphram Alpha goes a step further as a search engine. The website offers expert knowledge in a variety of fields, and is a hub of helpful videos and examples to explain any question you may have. It is privately owned and doesn’t track your searches.
  18. Boardreader offers a unique search engine perspective. With Boardreader, you can search message boards and forums specifically, which is helpful with a narrow search.
  19. Yippy is a search engine that offers private browsing. It doesn’t overload the user with results, which some may find more appealing in the never-ending search for information.
  20. Buzzsumo offers a unique perspective as you can search by topic or by competitor. This search engine is helpful to users and marketers, as they find which article topics were shared most and can see articles related to the topics or keywords they are searching.
  21. CC Search, also known as Creative Commons Search, aims to show licensed works in public domain. They help users find and share creative knowledge straight from the creators themselves. If you or your company want to avoid copyright claims, using CC Search may work for you.
  22. Amazon is rising in popularity as a search engine as well. Keep in mind that their search results are geared towards sales, but can be a great resource for research as well as for purchasing.
  23. Gigablast is a huge database of billions of indexed webpages. This cryptographically-protected search engine is private, and has a directory of categories you can search from. It’s free and open source, with an advanced index search as well.
  24. WebCrawler is a beloved search engine, as it was the very first to provide full-text searches. Now WebCrawler pulls from other major search engines, but it remains a useful facet for crawling meta-data.
  25. The Internet Archive which features The Way Back Machine, is a collection of content and webpages from around the internet, uploaded by people around the world. There are billions of pages within this engine.

Privacy concerns are not the only reason users may seek out other advanced search engines other than Google. Some users have a more specific search request or want to search a database without the possibility of copyright claims.

From Swisscows, known for its privacy settings, to TinEye, an advanced image search engine, there are many search engines that hold their own against Google, by offering niche or advanced features.

Really it comes down to which search engine best suits your needs.

Which search engine is your favorite and why? Let me know in the comments below!

Google Marketing

New Resources For Video SEO

18 March 2021 by

As global online video consumption continues to grow, Google aims to surface video content from diverse sources across the web. We want to make it easy for site owners to get their videos indexed and surfaced on Google.

Today, we’re excited to share two new resources to help you optimize your videos for Google Search and Discover.

Search Central Lightning Talk 

In this new lightning talk, we discuss how Google indexes videos, highlight features where videos appear on Google, and share five key tips to optimize your videos for Search and Discover:

Video best practices 

In addition to the lightning talk, we also updated our Video best practices guide to clarify the most important steps you can take to help Google find, index, and understand your videos. The guide shows you how to:

We’ll continue to update this page over time with our latest recommendations, alongside our video structured data guide.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Blog Marketing | SEO Marketing | Web Marketing

How To Create Blog Tags Automatically

9 March 2021 by
Blog Tag Generator

Achieving a #1 ranking on search engines requires a diligent approach in all aspects of your online marketing. This includes your website, social media, and online communications.

Many of my clients use blogs to share information and educate customers and prospects, but the one key strategy they often miss is blog tags.

Blog tags are those words or phrases that are used to describe a blog post. They are usually about one to three words long, and are attached as labels to your blog.

One function of blog tags is to help the search engine crawlers get a quick idea of what your content is all about. When created with search intent in mind, blog tags can help propel your content to the top or search engine results.

Another great benefit of blog tags is that they help visitors navigate the content on your site, especially as you continue adding content. Many companies use WordPress to create and upload blog content to their web pages.

Part of the uploading process asks you to designate which categories and tags should be applied to your blog. Tags are more specific than the categories.

Even though they are not required, I still highly recommend you add tags to each and every blog right from the start. After you have a number of blogs, WordPress offers up a list of your most common tags that you can click on to add to your piece.

WordPress uses these tags to create topic archive pages. Visitors searching for specific content can use these pages to instantly retrieve the information they want. This might require you to plan some sort of themes for your blog posts.

blog tag generator1

For example, most of my blog tags focus around topics like email marketing, SEO, PPC, social media and website design. Tags are not made-up words; they are real words or phrases that potential customers might use to learn more about the products and services you offer.

Best Practices for Blog Tags 

  • Keep them concise.
  • Avoid redundancy.
  • Be consistent across blogs.
  • Broad topics are better than narrow.
  • Keep the number of tags to a realistic number — not too few, not too many. Usually between 5-10 tags is just fine, unless you have something really special to tag!

Automating the Blog Tag Process

One helpful tip for creating blog tags is to perform keyword research first. This helps to uncover the tags you might want focus on in your blog content.

If you are really on your content game, and create a number of blog posts every month, adding blog tags might be easy for you, but either way, the process of manually adding tags each and every time can get a little tedious.

Fortunately there are some options which can help automate the blog tag process:

  • Auto Tag Creator: This plugin automatically converts keywords in a post/product title and category to tags upon saving. It includes a user-editable list of words you want the plugin to ignore. Activate the plugin through the WordPress Plugins menu.
  • Smart Tag Insert: Once you have defined a tags list, this plugin adds a box in the post editing page which looks for relevant tags based on post content. The most relevant are automatically selected (although the selection can be changed). Selected tags can be added with a click.
  • TagΒee Post Tagger: This is a simple plugin which proposes tags for your content.

This post is a great opportunity to tell you about the WORD ROBOT. This is a tool I created, and offer for free on my website.

WORD ROBOT automatically creates blog tags for your blog post by analyzing the keyword density. Simply paste in your article content and VOILA!

It also converts lower case and upper case letters, capitalize and uncapitalize, convert to mix case, and transform your text.

  • Sentence Case: The sentence case converter allows you to paste any text you like, and it automatically transforms it to a fully formed sentence structure. It works by capitalizing the very first letter in each sentence, and then goes on to transform the rest of the text into lowercase, and also converts each single lowercase “i” into a capital. Every letter after a full stop gets converted into an upper case letter, but it will not capitalize names or places.
  • Lower Case: If you are wondering how to uncapitalize text, this is exactly what the lower case text converter allows you to do. It transforms all the letters in your text into lowercase letters. Simply copy the text that you want to convert into a lowercase font, paste the text into the tool, and select the “lower case” tab option.
  • Upper Case: Sometimes you do want your text to be in all capitals. The upper case transformer takes any text provided and transforms all the letters into upper case. It essentially makes all lower case letters into CAPITALS, but still manages to keep upper case letters as they are meant to be.
  • Capitalized Case: There are times when you need the first letter of every word in a phrase capitalized. This might be for something like H1 and H2 content in your blog. The capitalized case converter automatically converts the starting letter of every word into upper case and leaves the remaining letters as lower case ones.
  • Title Case: When writing titles, especially in a Word Doc format, you frequently get those annoying notifications that certain words in a title should not be capitalized. The title case converter is perfect for those who are a bit unsure on how to title an upcoming essay. It ensures the correct letters are capitalized within the context of a title. Words such “an” or “of” will be left all in lower case, and words that are important will be converted to capitalize the initial letter.

Writing blogs, keeping content fresh on your website and updating social media sites can sometimes be tedious work.

Fortunately today’s technology offers a wide variety of specialized tools that can help automate some of the most mundane parts of each process.

Check out these tools and let me know in the comment box below if they help your blogging efforts?

Facebook Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Web Marketing

How To Increase Facebook Likes With a Semi-Automated Facebook Marketing Strategy

5 March 2021 by
Semi-Automated Facebook Marketing Strategy

One important aspect of growing your business online is social media. Many business owners turn to social media platforms such as Facebook to market their business. While some might think of Facebook as a purely social medium for individuals, there are plenty of good reasons to also include it as a major part of your business marketing strategy:

  • Facebook has an incredible audience: According to the company, there are 2.74 billion monthly users! That is a lot of people who use the channel to post updates, share content and watch videos. It’s a good bet that a significant percentage are in surrounding communities, and these people are anxious to learn about and connect with your local business.
  • Facebook is heavily used: Most fans visit Facebook daily. In fact, it ranks only behind Google and YouTube as one of the world’s most visited websites.
  • People are engaged when they visit Facebook: Users spend over a half hour each day visiting Facebook, most of them from a mobile device. Even better, two-thirds of Facebook users said they visit a Facebook Page from a local business at least once a week.
  • It works for local businesses: Partly due to more people searching for local services during the pandemic and also an increase in “Support Local” trends, Facebook clicks on searches for local business increased by 23% from February through May, 2020.

Despite all these great statistics, not every small business is thriving on Facebook, due to a lack of engagement from their Facebook community. To be successful on Facebook, you need to be active and you need to generate content that motivates your community to action through “likes,” comments, or shares. It’s not enough to just post occasionally and hope that people react to it.  You have to construct an effective plan to increase those likes and generate comments.

Know Your Audience to Increase Facebook Likes

The first step to increasing your Facebook likes is to make sure you know your audience. Knowing whether your prospects are young or old, male or female, consumer or business, will make all the difference in the type of content you share on Facebook and how you share it.

Besides knowing who you want to reach on Facebook, you must also build content in a number of different ways. Don’t just post videos, comical images, or promotions. Try mixing things up by incorporating different types of content such as brand stories, personal updates, lead nurturing and authority-building posts. Yes, you want to share your blog posts on Facebook, but also create unique posts that could start a conversation with your audience, stir a reaction from them, or solve their problems.

What to Include in a Marketing Strategy to Increase Facebook Likes

There are two ways to increase awareness of your business Facebook page. First, you want to have a large audience. This means more people will see your content every time you share it. Second, you want to have great content, so more of your current audience will like and share it to their social media circle. This spreads the word about your business to a larger audience than you might ever hope to reach through traditional advertising means.

You might see some ads offering to sell Facebook likes, but the quality of those connections is questionable. Better to do it yourself and have control over building your community. Here are some tips that will increase engagement with your business on Facebook:

  • Pay attention to your Facebook Page: This is the first thing people will see when they think about connecting with your business. Make sure it is optimized for search engines, has a crisp appearance, uses compelling photos, provides useful information, and includes your location and contact information.
  • Include Facebook links on your website and social media pages: Put buttons on your website that automatically direct visitors to your Facebook page, and be sure to ask them to “like us on Facebook,” especially on your Contact Us page. Ask your Twitter and Instagram followers to like you on Facebook, too.
  • Share your blogs on Facebook: Every time you post a blog on your website, share it to your Facebook page. Use an image and captivating headline to grab attention. Ask your blog readers to share your posts, too.
  • Ask people to “like” you: Tell your current customers that you have a Facebook page, ask them to like and share it with their friends. When you send an email to welcome new customers, inform them about your Facebook page. Include your Facebook address on your business cards, newsletter and email signature block.

Semi-Automate Your Facebook Likes Marketing Strategy

Here are just a few of the many tactics you can use to get your Facebook family more engaged with your content, and more likely to share it:

  • Create great content: Always have content that is topical and fresh. Use powerful images and headlines. Ask questions. Introduce your team, or tell a great customers service story. People get a lot of information through their Facebook streams, so your updates must stand out.
  • Add your posts to community pages: Facebook users are paying more attention to local community pages. If you have a service business, add something to the group’s page that provides helpful information for their community. You can also do this if there are groups that pertain to your business such as local bicycle groups, cooking groups or computer groups.
  • Boost posts: There are times when you put a lot of work into a post that you want more people to see. Boosting a Facebook post gets it in front of more people from a targeted audience you choose, and increases its engagement. If somebody likes one of your boosted posts, make sure you are set up to send them an auto-invite to like your page.
  • Pin your top posts: If you get a post that really spurs a response, you can keep the momentum going by pinning it to the top of your business page. Anyone who visits your page automatically sees this great piece of content first, so they will like your business and like your post, too.
  • Create a Facebook group: 1.8 billion people use Facebook Groups. If you have a really targetable audience, Facebook groups for business can be a great way to reach prospects outside your company’s brand’s page. Use your group to provide exclusive content, build community, and attract new customers.
  • Tag other pages: When you tag other relevant pages, your post will appear on their wall and may spark the interest of that page’s fans.
  • Share infographics: A good infographic on a pertinent topic can draw a lot of attention. If the information is really good, it should bump up your likes and shares tremendously.
  • Post videos: The average engagement rate for Facebook video posts exceeds other types of Facebook content. Viewers watch video intently and tend to be more engaged. Your videos can be a produced piece, or something that you shoot and post quickly on Facebook Live covering a particular topic of interest.
  • Cross-promote: Find other non-competitive local businesses and cross-share your Facebook content with them. It boosts your audience and gives your fans valuable content about local companies.
  • Website pop-up: Add a pop-up to your website that asks people to join your email list and like your Facebook page.
  • Ask customers to post: Encourage customers to post video or photos using your product or service. This provides an extended audience reach and an “accidental” testimonial.
  • Run Facebook ads: One quick way to garner attention is to run Facebook Ads that promote your brand. This is a paid strategy, but it can be useful for getting your name known quickly. There are software tools that help automate the creation of Facebook ads.
  • Time your posts: It just makes sense to share content when your audience is online, but how do you know when that is? Your Page Insights tab provides the answers. Once you understand more about when your audience is most active, you can establish your own posting schedule or schedule your posts if you’re unavailable to publish them manually.
  • Tell a story: 500 million people use Facebook Stories daily. Creating content for Facebook Stories is different from creating content for your news feed. The pace is faster, and you’ve got less text to work with. But Facebook Stories have the strategic advantage of appearing at the top of the viewer’s screen.

How Do I Know What Works Best on Facebook?

The Facebook Insights feature identifies the kinds of posts getting the most reach and engagements. Use this information to create more of the content your audience wants from you.  Facebook Insights give you the ability to learn from your mistakes and give followers what they want, so you’ll be able to continue increasing those likes!

Another way to determine what works best is to look at case studies from other brands. Here are a few you can check out:

  • Facebook Group: In 2018 Starbucks launched a Facebook group, the “Leaf Rakers Society,” for its Pumpkin Spice Latte drink. Since this is a seasonal drink, Starbucks uses the group to generate a “latte love” all year long. This group builds anticipation for the yearly release of its famous drink. Currently there are 41.0K members in the group.
  • Facebook Video: For Halloween 2016,Tomcat (a rodent extermination company) created a live video event featuring mice in a haunted cabin (Yikes!). During the video, the audience was questioned as to how the story should evolve. The video got as astonishing 2.3 million unique views, with 21% of viewers actively participating in the fun. The Tomcat Facebook fan page also grew by a whopping 58%.
  • Facebook Ads: In 2017, Brewer Direct used two fundraising strategies to determine if it could acquire new donors, generate revenue, and garner a positive ROI. The campaigns were a success – they generated instant donations, added new members to the Facebook audience and acquired new email addresses.

The addition of Facebook to your business marketing strategy can make a marked difference in awareness and results, but it is important to be consistent in your efforts. Use as many semi-automated techniques as you can to get your business noticed on Facebook and build an engaged audience.

Google Marketing

Charting A Course Towards A More Privacy First Web

3 March 2021 by

It’s difficult to conceive of the internet we know today — with information on every topic, in every language, at the fingertips of billions of people — without advertising as its economic foundation. But as our industry has strived to deliver relevant ads to consumers across the web, it has created a proliferation of individual user data across thousands of companies, typically gathered through third-party cookies. This has led to an erosion of trust: In fact, 72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies, and 81% say that the potential risks they face because of data collection outweigh the benefits, according to a study by Pew Research Center. If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web.  

That’s why last year Chrome announced its intent to remove support for third-party cookies, and why we’ve been working with the broader industry on the Privacy Sandbox to build innovations that protect anonymity while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers. Even so, we continue to get questions about whether Google will join others in the ad tech industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers. Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.

We realize this means other providers may offer a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not — like PII graphs based on people’s email addresses. We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long term investment. Instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers.

Privacy innovations are effective
alternatives to tracking

People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising. And advertisers don’t need to track individual consumers across the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising. 

Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers. In fact, our latest tests of FLoC show one way to effectively take third-party cookies out of the advertising equation and instead hide individuals within large crowds of people with common interests. Chrome intends to make FLoC-based cohorts available for public testing through origin trials with its next release this month, and we expect to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2. Chrome also will offer the first iteration of new user controls in April and will expand on these controls in future releases, as more proposals reach the origin trial stage, and they receive more feedback from end users and the industry.

This points to a future where there is no need to sacrifice relevant advertising and monetization in order to deliver a private and secure experience. 

First-party relationships are vital

Developing strong relationships with customers has always been critical for brands to build a successful business, and this becomes even more vital in a privacy-first world. We will continue to support first-party relationships on our ad platforms for partners, in which they have direct connections with their own customers. And we’ll deepen our support for solutions that build on these direct relationships between consumers and the brands and publishers they engage with.

Keeping the internet open and accessible for everyone requires all of us to do more to protect privacy — and that means an end to not only third-party cookies, but also any technology used for tracking individual people as they browse the web. We remain committed to preserving a vibrant and open ecosystem where people can access a broad range of ad-supported content with confidence that their privacy and choices are respected.  We look forward to working with others in the industry on the path forward.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog