Lets give our Traffic Snowball a little push!

So now you have completed the design of your website and you have uploaded the content to your server. The next step is to bring traffic to the website by announcing to the world that your site is live through search engine submission. This should be considered the first little push that we are giving your traffic snowball.

With a rapid increase in the number of web sites competing for exposure, the role of online search engines and directories is becoming critical to any websites success. Eighty seven percent (87%) of web site visitors find their chosen site through search engines.

What’s more, almost all of them use just seven - namely AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, LookSmart, Google, Hotbot and above all, Yahoo

This means that if you don’t have a top listing on these engines, thousands of potential clients will never find you.

There are 3 steps involved in search engine submission
1) Optimization of your web site
2) Submission of your site to the search engines and directories
3) Monitoring of your listings

Lets deal first with Optimization

The website needs to be made “search engine-friendly” before it is submitted to the major search engines This is an art in itself and there are specialist companies, such as Traffic Builder Systems, that deal only in Search engine optimization and rank management.

The first step that is undertaken is to determine the keywords that are relevant to your website.

Some people achieve a top 10 placement in a major search engine and get plenty of traffic. Others do the same but get nothing.

Why?

Simple. The first group selected keywords that many people are searching on, and the second did not!

To find the optimum keywords that are going to bring you the most targeted traffic you could use a tool such as Wordtracker

Wordtracker will compile a database of terms that people search for. You enter some keywords, and they tell you how often people search for them, and also tell you how many competing sites use those keywords. Wordtracker helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service - many of which you might never have considered. You’ll find out how popular these keywords really are. Then for each major search engine, they will show you the chances of making the top 10.

Once you have got the correct keywords together you will need to format them into META TAGS to place into the HTML of your webpages

If you are going to submit your site to the search engines individually it must be sensitized with META tags.

There are three META tags used by the popular search engines. META tags are added to your website’s HTML coding, and do not appear on your visible webpage. These tags are placed within the head portion of your HTML document, usually directly beneath your tag.

1) The “Keyword” META Tag

The “keyword” META tag helps meta capable search engines in indexing your website. It tells the search engine under which search terms your website should come up under.

Here is an example of this tag:
<META NAME=”keywords” content=”widgets, cheap widgets, widgets for sale, john store etc..”>

Within this META tag, use your prioritized list of keywords and commanding combinations. Don’t duplicate your keywords too many times. Each keyword should be separated by a comma, and there should be no spaces. Different search engines allow different numbers of keywords. Make sure all keywords listed in your META tag are related to your site.

If you put unrelated keywords in your keyword META tag, some search engines may penalize you or refuse to list you. Be careful not to put competitors’ company names, product names or trademarked names in your META tags. Some companies have sued because they found their names in the META tags of their competitors.

2) The “Description” META Tag

The “description” META tag helps meta capable search engines to summarize your website.

Here is an example of this tag:
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”John’s widget shop has the largest and cheapest selection of widgets”>

Within this tag, use a description of your website and keep the tag length under 200 characters. Some search engines allow longer or shorter descriptions. Put the most important part of your description first, for cases where search engines do not use all of it.

Some search engines extract your website’s summary from the first 250 characters of your webpage, so be sure you include a good opening paragraph on your webpage. Make sure everything in your description is related to your site. If you put unrelated words or phrases or sentences in your description META tag, some search engines may penalize you or refuse to list you.

As discussed above, be careful not to put competitors’ company names, product names or trademarked names in your META tags.

3) The “Robots” META Tag

The “robots” META tag tells meta capable search engines which pages should get indexed, and which pages should not. You may have certain pages which you may not want to show up in the search engines. You may have test pages, private pages created for a particular customer, and so on.

If you have a frames site, you wouldn’t want to index your HTML documents which display within the various frames which make up your page.

The following options are available for this tag: all, none, index, noindex, follow, nofollow.

If you wanted all of your pages indexed, you would use this tag on your main page:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”all follow”>

It would tell the search engine spider to index your main page, then follow any links it finds on that page, and spider those links.

Use this tag on a page which you don’t want indexed:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”noindex”>

After entering the META tags into the HTML of your website pages and then uploading to the server, you will then need to proceed to the search engines to submit your website.

Doorway pages

Most people optimize each of their webpages for all of their keywords, and to be submitted to all the major search engines. For less popular keywords this strategy will often suffice. However for competitive keywords it won’t get favorable listings, mainly because when you overly fine tune a webpage to score well for one search engine, it will likely score lower for other search engine. For competitive keywords you should consider using a “multiple entry page” strategy.

This involves using multiple entry pages (also called doorway pages, bridge pages, jump pages and gateway pages), each optimized for a particular keyword and/or search engine. Entry pages act as “front doors” to your website. These special pages are designed to score high in keyword density and relevance.

Each entry pages can be fine tuned for one or a few keywords, and can be fine tuned for a particular search engine. It is not advisable to use the above page naming convention with all search engines, as certain search engines may detect that you are using multiple doorways.

To be safe use names which do not resemble one another: The second step is the submission to the search engines

You have the following options:

1) Submit your site manually to the search engines by visiting each one individually. This can be very time consuming and also there is the problem that every search engine is different in the sense that they each use different logarithms for analyze and ranking the website submission.

2) The submission service will submit your website to many hundreds of search engines and directories on a regular basis. This is usually an automated process, with the drawback being you get no advice on optimization. You may or may not receive reports charting your success.

3) The meta-tag optimisers will take your site and optimize it for a one off fee. They may also offer a service to submit the site once it has been optimized. With this service you have little idea of how successful the service has been long after your money has gone.

4) A small number of companies are taking a Search Engine Rank Management approach. This involves the specialist company taking complete, ongoing control of your search engine marketing needs by optimizing, submitting and monitoring your ranking activity on an ongoing basis.

High search engine ranking is the key to unlocking the true potential of your company’s web site.
Based on our industry leading knowledge of search engine technology, Traffic Builder Systems brings you Traffic Builder, an affordable rank management solution for all web site owners.

Finally, the choice is yours but remember that search engine promotion is fundamental to your success and should be the start of the the initial push to get noticed. Investment in good search engine promotion will pay dividends later.

In this section I discuss the 6 steps you will take to quickly, easily and inexpensively get started in your affiliate marketing business.

Quickly & Easily find High Demand Topics

The topic you choose should both interest you and have high consumer demand. You already know what interests you, but how do you find out whether a topic has high demand?

Well, the first place I check is a free tool call the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. It is located at:

inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

At Overture Search Term Suggestion tool, you simply enter a term related to your site and it will show you:

• Related searches that include your term
• How many times that term was searched in the previous month

So, let’s assume for a moment that you are a mortgage and insurance broker who suspects that insurance might be a good service to sell online.

To find out how many people are looking for insurance online, I typed in the word ‘insurance’ and discovered that the keyword ‘insurance’ had been searched for 971,914 times at Overture and its search partners in just one month!

That’s almost a million people! Wow!

As I consider any term that receives 50,000 or more searches in a month a subject with good demand and potentially viable, insurance looks like it might just be a winning topic for an affiliate web site.

Find High-Profit Potential Products & Services

Once you’ve determined that your topic is in high demand, you need to find out now is whether there are merchants selling related products and services online, AND how much commission they pay.

For that, I go first to Commission Junction.

Commission Junction is an ‘affiliate network’ that puts merchants and affiliates together. They refer to merchants as ‘advertisers’ and the affiliates are called ‘publishers’.

To see all the merchants with products and services at Commission Junction, you’ll need to set up a free account.

To do that, go to Commission Junction, then click on ‘Solutions’ near the top right- hand portion of the page, then go to the left side of the Solutions page and click on ‘CJ Marketplace’.

At the very bottom of that page and you’ll find a link for the application process. Where it asks you to supply a URL, just enter yahoo.com or geocities.com if you don’t already have a web site.

Once your account is set up and you’ve logged into the Commission Junction interface, click on ‘Get Links’, and select ‘Advertisers’ in the drop-down box beside the word ‘Search’ near the top of the page. Next, type in the word ‘insurance’.

My search came up with 51 merchants. Your results may be more or less depending on whether merchants have been added to, or dropped from the network.

In choosing merchants, you want to select those with the highest EPC ratings and commissions.

What is an EPC Rating?

3-month EPC: 3-month EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows how well an advertiser converts Web site visitors into commissions, over a three-month period.

7-day EPC: 7-day EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows the average commissions paid to publishers for every 100 clicks, over the past seven days. Use this number to see the most recent EPC trend for advertisers.

So how well did our insurance merchants do?

Zurich insurance had a 7-day EPC rating of $250.88. That means that affiliates are earning an average 250.88 for every 100 visitors they send to Zurich Insurance.

Wow!

Now what about those commission rates?

Well, at the Good Sam Club, if the customer completes a form and becomes a member, Good Sam will pay you $5.00. That’s JUST to fill out a form.

And if they purchase an Emergency Road Service package, you’ll get paid $15.00.

Not bad!

You can find even MORE merchants at the following affiliate networks:

„ Linkshare
linkshare.com

„ BeFree
affiliates.befree.com

„ Clickbank
clickbank.com

Cheap Sources of Site Content

Because we want to leave the selling job up to the merchant, an affiliate’s job is to ‘pre-sell’ their merchants’ products.

To pre-sell, you need site content.

Content consists of articles and endorsements that explains how your visitors problems can be solved by using the products you promote. In most cases, webmasters write their own endorsements for the products they promote.

However, if you aren’t inclined to write product endorsements, you can:

„ Find Free Content
„ Use Merchants’ Ad Copy
„ Pay for Content

I like looking for free content first.

Staying with our ‘insurance’ topic, I searched Google for the terms “Free Articles”+ “Insurance” and found the following articles listed at legalwhiz.com:

• “How to Save on Title Insurance Costs”
• “Understanding the Terms of Your New Loan”
• “Common Sense Mortgage Tips!”

In many cases, the author will allow you to use his work on your site if you include credit to the author and a link back to his site.

This is even MORE effective when the author has an affiliate program and you can make money from that link.

To get approval to use the article, you’d simply email the author a request, and they will usually be very happy to have you use their articles on your site.

Another way to get free content is to use what the merchant makes available to their affiliates.

For example, here is an email promotion that Corey Rudl gives his affiliates to promote his very popular ‘Insiders Secrets to Internet Marketing’ course.

Dear Friend,

This e-mail is extremely urgent so please read the entire thing… I would feel terrible if you missed out on this because you did not get my e-mail in time.

I just got an e-mail from Corey Rudl and he said there were only 150 copies left of the new version of his best-selling Internet marketing course, The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet, that includes the $952 in FREE bonuses!

Chances are, as you read this, a lot of those 150 copies are already gone.

Just to recap my last e-mail, Corey Rudl is literally “the” guru of Internet marketing… he’s grown his online businesses to over $7.6 million in online sales last year and he gets over 1.8 million visitors to his web sites every month!

And in the new version of his best selling course he is going to show everything from step-by-step instructions you can use to start your very own Internet business in as little as 48 hours to how to build a top-selling web site… for less than $100!

No matter how small your budget is, Corey shows you the cheapest ways to build a web site that sells!

He is going to show you where to find hot products (in 20 minutes or LESS!) that you can start selling TODAY! These in-demand products will sell like hot cakes, no matter what your experience!

Corey will even reveal his personal rolodex with 100s of FREE and cheap online tools, resources, and software that you can use to automate your web site (and save yourself at least 35 hours every week)!

And if that’s not enough, he is going to even reveal, for the first time, some of his most advanced strategies like how to get #1 rankings in the search engines and get tons of free traffic from the “Big Guys” like Google… and his secret to writing sales copy that increases sales by 400% (or MORE)!

Like I said before, I know these strategies are going to make my business tons of extra money in 2004 and as my subscriber I want to make sure you experience the same rewards, so go to…

www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/3885

… if the page is still there, this means you made
it in time and he still has some copies of his course with the additional $952 worth of FREE bonuses!

So please hurry! And if you have any questions, just let me know.

All the best…

As you can see, that copy is written in the first-person, so it looks like it is coming directly from you. Use merchant copy judiciously however, as your credibility will take a beating if your subscribers and visitors have seen the exact same copy in other newsletters and on other affiliate sites.

Lastly, you can have articles written for you, sometimes very inexpensively.

To find ghost writers on the net, check out some of these sites:

• Guru.com
• FreelanceWriters.com
• Elance.com

Once you have organized your content, it’s time to start putting you’re your site together.

The Fastest Way to Build Your WebSite

There are 3 steps to quickly build your website. They are:

1. Register a Domain
2. Domain Hosting
3. Buy Template

Domain registration is painless, and CHEAP. Go to Godaddy.com where it will cost you 8.95/year for each domain. You can get them even cheaper when you register for more than one year.

Here are two good, yet inexpensive, hosting services that I recommend.

• GoDaddy.com - $8.95/mo.
• HostRocket - $9.95/mo.

The quickest way to build a website is to buy a template. Here is a list of some of the best template sites I’ve found to date:

o 4Templates.com
o BigWebmaster.com
o BoxedArt.com
o DollarTemplates.com

My personal favorite is BoxedArt.com. You can download as many templates as you want from Boxed Art, all for only $49.96 for six months access.

Once you’ve placed your content in your template and sent it to your web host, it’s time to join affiliate programs.

Sign-Up for Affiliate Programs

Go back to Commission Junction or the site where you found products you want to promote and sign up for the merchants’ affiliate programs.

The reason you build your site before joining the programs, is to have a site to show the merchant. This demonstrates that you are indeed serious about selling their product, and will almost guarantee your acceptance into their program.

Get Oodles of Traffic Today!

After placing merchant links on your site, it’s time to let the world know about your site.

Although I discuss ‘29 Ways to Market Your Site’ in the Super Affiliate Handbook, my favorite way to bring visitors to my sites is by using cheap Pay- Per-Click search engine advertising.

The primary benefit of PPC’s is that you can drive targeted traffic to your site quickly, instead of waiting months for the search engines to list your site… if they ever do.

Just a few of these include:

• Google.com
• Overture.com
• Enhance Interactive
• Findwhat.com
• Kanoodle.com

Pay-per-clicks allow you to bid on terms or keywords that are relevant to your site. In our insurance site example, the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool produced a list that included terms like:

car insurance
insurance
health insurance
life insurance
home insurance
affordable health insurance
travel insurance
renters insurance
insurance quote
car insurance quote
insurance lead

You should be able to find and bid on HUNDREDS, if not thousands, of terms in any category you choose. The more keywords you list your site under, the more exposure your site will get.

I HIGHLY recommend that you use PPC’s to advertise your site. I get returns of 2, 3, 4, and sometimes even FIVE dollars for every dollar I spend advertising my site.

So, let’s summarize again the steps that it takes to build an affiliate site…

„ Find a HUGE Market
„ Find Products & Services
„ Collect/Create Web Content
„ Build Site
„ Market Site
„ and… Enjoy the BIG Kachings!

If you wanna find some applications, files etc on rapidshare.de via google, do de followin’.

Paste this into de google search window (not de adress bar):

site:rapidshare.de -filetype:zip OR rar daterange:2453402-2453412
This searches de site rapidshare.de for any file that is rar or zip, and has been indexed between 1-11 February.

dvd site:rapidshare.de -filetype:zip OR rar daterange:2453402-2453412
This is de same search but it specifically searches for “dvd” with de same search criteria, so any app posted with de word dvd in it will be found.

There are mainly three criteria to keep in mind when doin’ this search.

1. site: your site of choice to search

2. filetype: filetypes you wanna search. If you put a “OR” after de first Filetype you can add more.

3. daterange: (start date-enddate). This uses de “julian calendar” converter can be found here:

Code:
aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.html

Anoder good way of findin’ MP3s (or oder formats) is usin’ Google and typin’ de followin’:

parent + directory + mp3 + OR + wma+ #dido#

Replace #dido# by whatever artist you wish to find, for example:

parent + directory + mp3 + OR + wma+ #Lamb#

You should get plenty of dirs with MP3s or WMA files (you could add OGG, etc, to de query).

I use Google because it’s de best search en’ine that everyone can access. The easiest search quote is “index of …”

Some kind of examples are:

index of ftp/ +mp3
index of ftp/ +divx
index of ftp/ +”whateveryouwant”

Google has many operators that should help you to specify your search. There are also lots of advanced operators available. Here are a few:

cache:
link:
related:
info:
stocks:
site:
allintitle:
intitle:
allinurl:
inurl:

eg:
allintitle: “index of ftp/mp3″

Try to combine thin’s and maybe you’ll find somethin’.

All rapidshare.de Downloads:
Try This!

Apps Rapidshare.de Downloads:
Try This!

Movies rapidshare.de Downloads:
Try This!

This is a trick that works fairly decent for findin’ mp3’s on de web (which is hard to do normally, to say de least)

Say you want to get, for example, a Garth Brooks son’. Type this in de search bar - “index of/” “garth brooks” .mp3 de ones you want to check out first are de ones that say “Index of/” in de title of de search result. This technique allows you to easily pull up web folders with direct downloads. It will look de same as if you were loggin’ into a ftp url. I’m sure you can be pretty flexible on how you type that in, so lon’ as you include “index of/”

I’m sure you can use this for more than just mp3’s (it’s not perfect but it has worked for me on a few occasions)

Always make sure to use de quotations where i placed them. They help pinpoint de correct search results more accurately. Just try it out and if you want to learn how to do more with google look up “google hacks”

Let’s pretend you need a serial number for Windows XP Pro.

In de search bar type in just like this - “Windows XP Professional” 94FBR

The key is de 94FBR code. It was included with many MS Office registration codes so this will help you dramatically reduce de amount of ‘fake’ porn sites that trick you.

If you want to find de serial for Winzip 8.1 - “Winzip 8.1″ 94FBR

Just try it out, it’s very quick and it works nicely.

Tools Needed:

SmartFTP [ smartftp.com ]
NAPALM FTP Search Site [ search.ftphost.net ]
vcdquality.com Release Nfo Site
DAMN NFO Viewer or just notepad [www.damn.to ]

This tutorial is so i can stop answerin’ tha same questions everyday in this tutorial I’ll explain how to use search sites like NAPALM effectively. basically better search results and a quality release. We are goin’ to use a movie as de example so here we go.

First thin’ I do is try and figure who released it and if any were nuked and why most of de time you can find de NFO at de sites below

www.deisonews.com - www.nforce.nl - www.vcdquality.com
we are goin’ use vcdquality to find out NFO on Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life
h**p://www.vcdquality.com/index.php?imdbid=0325703

Say you chose de copy Centropy released

Here is de link to de nfo file

h**p://www.vcdquality.com/nfo.php/ctp-tr2.nfo?id=16662&show=text&save=1

If you read it you see a section that says Archives [56/56*15]

Ok so now you know your lookin’ for 2 CD’s and that are Split RAR files at 15mb each. You will also see this (( password is “drudgereportdotcom” )). Im sure that will help later so now to go find de file names by doin’ a search.

Here are some sites you can use

NAPALM - RELIZ - AMUN - FTPSpider

Im goin’ to use NAPALM for de example do an un-filtered search for “tomb raider centropy” without de quotes. But I wouldn’t recommend always searchin’ as above because de name of tha Movie/App/Game/ReleaseGroup isnt always goin’ to be in file name or url. So results could be limited but it helps on gettin’ correct file names. You should notice that de file name seems to be in this format ctp-tr1.r54 and ctp-tr2.r54. “ctp-tr1.r54″ is in a file from CD1 and “ctp-tr2.r54″ is in a file from CD2

Ok so now we know de file names, so search for ctp-tr2.r54 and you will have more streamlined results before we had over 100 results from each ftp that had this movie. With one result per file at over 50 files per cd, that would take way to lon’ to go through page by page till you get to each FTP site.

Now that we have tha search narrowed down by a sin’le file name each result is a different ftp site. Notice also that I have searched for a high number file from cd 2. The reason for this is because it is more likely that it has been fully uploaded and not missin’ any files because most people start uploadin’ from cd1 and in order of first split file .rar .r00 .r01 and NOT from cd2 and backwards .r50 .r49 .r48.

Ok that was easy enough but now we get to de hopefully not slow part of DOWNLOADING de files. Normally you can get better speeds from an anonymous server because you can use multiple connections at once. Say de server only gives ya 4k download, you may be able to connect 50 times at once and get more like 200k download, but a FTP that needs a Password and user name normally isnt that easy. The reason is normally bacause only 1 connection per IP is allowed and amount of users at one time is limited to about 15 or less, so dere are always a lon’ line of peope waitin’ to get in. Basically even if we could have more than one connection per IP, if it took 9 hours to get access you would need to wait that lon’ for each connection or thread. By de time anoder thread connected you would have probably already finished downloadin’ de file anyway.

NAPALM search site has nice search and filter option that will only show anonymous servers in de results page. Now open up SmartFTP and dere are a few options we want to be sure and change.

Tools > Settin’s > General:
Set Default Download Path to whatever you want

Tools > Settin’s > Connection:
Set Max Retries to -1 (( -1 = unlimited ))
Set Retry Delay to @ least 40 sec.*

*(( because some ftp will ban if you hammer/try and login to often ))
*(( read welcome messages on tha ftp log/status window for possible hammer rules ))

Tools > Settin’s > Connection > Keep Alive:
Make sure Keepalive is checked
Set interval to about 40
(( if set to low will be anoyin’ & to high may not be effective on some sitez ))
Highlight NOOP in de list and push Remove
Now type LIST into de box and push tha Add
(( This is de command that keepalive uses to pretend your not idle ))
(( some ftps will kick you out if you are idle to lon’ ))
(( and some still do with tha NOOP command we so have changed it to LIST
(( if you want you can change it to somethin’ better all i know is this works for me ))
(( nobody wants to sit for 9 hours waitin’ to get in den get kicked out ))

SmartFTP also has Clipboard monitorin’, so all you need to do is have smart ftp runnin’. Go Back to NAPALM. Right click a link and select “Copy Shortcut” from tha menu and smartFtp will popup and say FTP URL in clipboard detected. If you want to open that site, just cick yes.

But it can be even more simple than that if you want.

Tools > Settin’s > Display > Prompts:
Uncheck: On URL Catch
(( Now it will just open tha FTP without any prompt ))

When you are conectin’ to ftp you need to watch tha log/status window

For possibe crap links (( dead links and/or ratio sites )), dese are tha most common errorz to look for:

530 Account Disabled.
No connection could be made because de target machine actively refused it. A connection attempt failed because de connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

550 Permission denied
While tryin’ to download a file
(( this is probably a ratio site if it has everythin’ you ever wanted and more & looks to good to be true ))
(( it probably is and id just move on to tha next site ))

Anoder problem you may find on anonymous ftp is that tha files or folders are not dere. 2 reasons for that is dey were eider deleted or just moved. If dey were moved this could be a problem most people uploadin’ to anonymous ftp, made a huge maze of locked folders to hide deir files and that makes for an endless task tryin’ to find de files unless you have an application that can spider de ftp and has de capability to get through locked folders. To have a list of every file on de ftp I dont know of any public application i can recommend with that capability. But dey do exist. This app can get through locked folders and may help. It seems like a crap program, but de best i could find on google in about 5 min worth of searchin’ is:

PubView.zip - www.jtpfxp.net has nfo about dir lockin’ & breakin’ dirs

Ill go over some basic instructions on downloadin’ from Anonymous and NonAnonymous Sites, or maybe i should say sites that allow more than one connection per IP and ones that dont.

We will start with anonymous or multiple thread capable FTP

Once you have de ftp open and you see de files you want. Just drag and drop them into de Global Queue tab on de transfers window and den just push de start button. We should have de In Speed at bottom right status bar. If its not goin’ fast enough, you can adjust de amount of connections/threads you have runnin’. Keep addin’ threads until your bandwidth is maxed or until your total In Speed doesnt get any faster. Anoder thin’ you may wanna keep in mind is that you can connect to more than one ftp downloadin’ CD1 from one site and CD2 from de oder etc. for a combined speed.

Now we go onto NonAnonymous Sitez

You cant use Global Queue because you cant have multiple threads, so just right click de file or folder you want and select Download > Direct > Select Folder. Most of dese sites will be slow and could take hours maybe days to get into, so what i do is just open every sin’le result in NAPALM at de same time. I figure that i have a better chance waitin’ on 10 sites rader than 1. So when you have them all open just close out de ones that have de errors mentioned above, den you can walk away and check every so often to see if you have gotten in one yet. This is where de keepalive option helps out and of course if you happen to get into more than one at a time
just go for tha combined speed method if it is goin’ slow.

Google is clearly de best general-purpose search en’ine on de Web (see

www.pcmag.com/searchen\’ines

But most people don’t use it to its best advantage. Do you just plug in a keyword or two and hope for de best? That may be de quickest way to search, but with more than 3 billion pages in Google’s index, it’s still a struggle to pare results to a manageable number.

But Google is an remarkably powerful tool that can ease and enhance your Internet exploration. Google’s search options go beyond simple keywords, de Web, and even its own programmers. Let’s look at some of Google’s lesser-known options.

Syntax Search Tricks

Usin’ a special syntax is a way to tell Google that you want to restrict your searches to certain elements or characteristics of Web pages. Google has a fairly complete list of its syntax elements at

www.google.com/help/operators.html

. Here are some advanced operators that can help narrow down your search results.

Intitle: at de beginnin’ of a query word or phrase (intitle:”Three Blind Mice”) restricts your search results to just de titles of Web pages.

Intext: does de opposite of intitle:, searchin’ only de body text, ignorin’ titles, links, and so forth. Intext: is perfect when what you’re searchin’ for might commonly appear in URLs. If you’re lookin’ for de term HTML, for example, and you don’t want to get results such as

www.mysite.com/index.html

, you can enter intext:html.

Link: lets you see which pages are linkin’ to your Web page or to anoder page you’re interested in. For example, try typin’ in

link:http://www.pcmag.com

Try usin’ site: (which restricts results to top-level domains) with intitle: to find certain types of pages. For example, get scholarly pages about Mark Twain by searchin’ for intitle:”Mark Twain”site:edu. Experiment with mixin’ various elements; you’ll develop several strategies for findin’ de stuff you want more effectively. The site: command is very helpful as an alternative to de mediocre search en’ines built into many sites.

Swiss Army Google

Google has a number of services that can help you accomplish tasks you may never have thought to use Google for. For example, de new calculator feature

(www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator)

lets you do both math and a variety of conversions from de search box. For extra fun, try de query “Answer to life de universe and everythin’.”

Let Google help you figure out wheder you’ve got de right spellin’�and de right word�for your search. Enter a misspelled word or phrase into de query box (try “thre blund mise”) and Google may suggest a proper spellin’. This doesn’t always succeed; it works best when de word you’re searchin’ for can be found in a dictionary. Once you search for a properly spelled word, look at de results page, which repeats your query. (If you’re searchin’ for “three blind mice,” underneath de search window will appear a statement such as Searched de web for “three blind mice.”) You’ll discover that you can click on each word in your search phrase and get a definition from a dictionary.

Suppose you want to contact someone and don’t have his phone number handy. Google can help you with that, too. Just enter a name, city, and state. (The city is optional, but you must enter a state.) If a phone number matches de listin’, you’ll see it at de top of de search results alon’ with a map link to de address. If you’d rader restrict your results, use rphonebook: for residential listin’s or bphonebook: for business listin’s. If you’d rader use a search form for business phone listin’s, try Yellow Search

(www.buzztoolbox.com/google/yellowsearch.shtml).

Extended Googlin’

Google offers several services that give you a head start in focusin’ your search. Google Groups

(groups.google.com)

indexes literally millions of messages from decades of discussion on Usenet. Google even helps you with your shoppin’ via two tools: Froogle
CODE
(froogle.google.com),

which indexes products from online stores, and Google Catalogs
CODE
(catalogs.google.com),

which features products from more 6,000 paper catalogs in a searchable index. And this only scratches de surface. You can get a complete list of Google’s tools and services at

www.google.com/options/index.html

You’re probably used to usin’ Google in your browser. But have you ever thought of usin’ Google outside your browser?

Google Alert

(www.googlealert.com)

monitors your search terms and e-mails you information about new additions to Google’s Web index. (Google Alert is not affiliated with Google; it uses Google’s Web services API to perform its searches.) If you’re more interested in news stories than general Web content, check out de beta version of Google News Alerts

(www.google.com/newsalerts).

This service (which is affiliated with Google) will monitor up to 50 news queries per e-mail address and send you information about news stories that match your query. (Hint: Use de intitle: and source: syntax elements with Google News to limit de number of alerts you get.)

Google on de telephone? Yup. This service is brought to you by de folks at Google Labs

(labs.google.com),

a place for experimental Google ideas and features (which may come and go, so what’s dere at this writin’ might not be dere when you decide to check it out). With Google Voice Search

(labs1.google.com/gvs.html),

you dial de Voice Search phone number, speak your keywords, and den click on de indicated link. Every time you say a new search term, de results page will refresh with your new query (you must have JavaScript enabled for this to work). Remember, this service is still in an experimental phase, so don’t expect 100 percent success.

In 2002, Google released de Google API (application programmin’ interface), a way for programmers to access Google’s search en’ine results without violatin’ de Google Terms of Service. A lot of people have created useful (and occasionally not-so-useful but interestin’) applications not available from Google itself, such as Google Alert. For many applications, you’ll need an API key, which is available free from
CODE
www.google.com/apis

. See de figures for two more examples, and visit

www.pcmag.com/solutions

for more.

Thanks to its many different search properties, Google goes far beyond a regular search en’ine. Give de tricks in this article a try. You’ll be amazed at how many different ways Google can improve your Internet searchin’.

Online Extra: More Google Tips

Here are a few more clever ways to tweak your Google searches.

Search Within a Timeframe

Daterange: (start date�end date). You can restrict your searches to pages that were indexed within a certain time period. Daterange: searches by when Google indexed a page, not when de page itself was created. This operator can help you ensure that results will have fresh content (by usin’ recent dates), or you can use it to avoid a topic’s current-news blizzard and concentrate only on older results. Daterange: is actually more useful if you go elsewhere to take advantage of it, because daterange: requires Julian dates, not standard Gregorian dates. You can find converters on de Web (such as

CODE
aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.html

excl.gif No Active Links, Read de Rules - Edit by Ninja excl.gif

), but an easier way is to do a Google daterange: search by fillin’ in a form at

www.researchbuzz.com/toolbox/goofresh.shtml or www.faganfinder.com/en\’ines/google.shtml

. If one special syntax element is good, two must be better, right? Sometimes. Though some operators can’t be mixed (you can’t use de link: operator with anythin’ else) many can be, quickly narrowin’ your results to a less overwhelmin’ number.

More Google API Applications

Staggernation.com offers three tools based on de Google API. The Google API Web Search by Host (GAWSH) lists de Web hosts of de results for a given query

(www.staggernation.com/gawsh/).

When you click on de trian’le next to each host, you get a list of results for that host. The Google API Relation Browsin’ Outliner (GARBO) is a little more complicated: You enter a URL and choose wheder you want pages that related to de URL or linked to de URL

(www.staggernation.com/garbo/).

Click on de trian’le next to an URL to get a list of pages linked or related to that particular URL. CapeMail is an e-mail search application that allows you to send an e-mail to google@capeclear.com with de text of your query in de subject line and get de first ten results for that query back. Maybe it’s not somethin’ you’d do every day, but if your cell phone does e-mail and doesn’t do Web browsin’, this is a very handy address to know.