Remember Bing, the search engine Microsoft launched to topple Google? Ok, it didn’t work that way but it still has lots of great features and deserves a second look.

42 Bing Search Engine Tips and Tricks

Here are 25 tips and tricks to get the most from Bing, the decision-making engine from Microsoft.

1. Add your site on Bing

To add your site on Bing, click on http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

This link sends you to the submit URL page of Bing where you can provide the URL of your blog or website.

2. Area Codes

Area Codes displays the area code or ZIP code. Type area code followed by code. For example, area code 515.

3. Advanced Search Keywords

Using this to find the search results you only what you see. Don’t include a space after the colon in these keywords.

4. Celebrity Tracking

Bing xRank tracks celebrities and ranks them. xRank shows News results, Image results, Video results , biography details, and digg links.

5. Cheap flight tickets

To get the cheap flight deals, enter:

• Deals on specific routes: flights from London to New York
• Deals from a specific city: flights from San Francisco
• Deals to a specific city: flights to Rome

6. Contains parameter refines searches

In Bing, the parameter ‘contains’ tells the search engine to only look for websites that contain that search term. For example

iPhone contains:download

Beatles contains:mp3

Annual Report contains:doc

7. Combine or Excluding words

Use the OR and NOT keywords to combine or exclude words. For example, if you use iphone NOT Green, you will get results for iphone but not for green iphones.

8. Currency Converter

Type ‘convert 100 dollars to euros’ for currency conversion from dollars to euros.

9. Check if your website is listed in Bing.com

To verify that your website is in the index, type url:yoursite.com.

For example, url:ivanwalsh.com returns a single result.

Tip: Check that your robot.txt file allows Bing.com to index your website.

10. Check the number of webpages indexed in Bing.com

Type site:yoursite.com  to see how many pages have been actually indexed in bing.com. For example, site:ivanwalsh.com.

11. DHL and UPS Packages

Track DHL, UPS and other packages by tracking number. For example, type DHL 123456789.

12. Display wallpaper images

You can display Bing’ wallpaper images in its Image search results. Search for a term in Bing image search and then click on the Size category in the left sidebar. This automatically display various size filters including an option for wallpaper. This display only images that have the exact size of the computer screen resolution.

13. Exact phrase

To search for exact phrases, enter the search words within quotation marks. For example, “natural asthma remedy”.

14. Export Session History to SkyDrive

Session History records the sites you visited within a single browser session for 48 hours. You can also save searches to your Windows Live SkyDrive folders using My Search Folders view.

Tip: You can also send your search queries by email or publish them on your Facebook account via Bing.

• Click the Manage link under the previous search queries at the bottom of the Explore Pane.
• In the History Management page, browse through past searches and identify the query you’re looking for
• Click on the link to pick up where you left off.
• To save a search, click Save and Share on the right of the screen.
• Check the boxes next to the results you want to save and click Save.
• Create a new folder to save the search or sign in with Windows Live ID and save the results to your Windows Live SkyDrive.

15. Find Organizations

To find results about golf but that primarily pertain to the organization, type golf prefer:organization.

16. Find Blogs

To see blogs from the BBC websites, type “blogging” (site:bbc.co.uk) .

17. Find RSS feeds

To find RSS feeds about iphone, type feed:iphone.

18. Find RSS feeds of particular website

To find webpages on the New York Times website that contain RSS feeds, typesite:www.nytimes.com hasfeed:iphone. ‘hasfeed:’

Finds webpages that contain an RSS feed on a website for the terms you search for.

19. Firefox Plugin for Bing

Bing provides great general search results, relevance, a big index and speed — all of the hallmarks of a good search engine.

However, because sorting through search results can often be time consuming, Bing organizes popular results in a different way, designed to help you get the answers you’re looking for without having to guess the right way to phrase a search term. https://addons.mozilla.org

20. Search Bing.com if outside USA

If you are outside the US, you may not be getting all Bing’s features and only it’s localized version. To view all the options in Bing, which may not be available in your region, go to http://www.bing.com/worldwide.aspx and set English – US as your default region.

21. Hotels

Use the following as examples:

• New York hotels
• hotels in Egypt
• Dublin hotels

22. Hulu Videos

Search for any TV show episode on Bing Videos. Hover the mouse over the video thumbnail to watch a short clip.

• Click on Videos from the Bing Home Page.
• Click on TV Shows from the Explore Pane.
• Search for ‘house’ from the top search box.
• In the Explore Pane, click on ‘Source’ and choose from where you want to see your results.
• To see a full-length, high-quality video, choose Hulu.

23. Job Salary

For example – Type LosAnglelesmarketing manager salary, developer pay in Bangalore, IT Manager pay.

24. Images by Format and Type

Bing can tell the difference between a photograph and an illustration. Use the similar images link when you hover over an image to see similar related images.

25. IP Address lookup

Use Bing to lookup any IP address

IP:[IP Address]

Change [IP Address] with a valid IP, such as the IP address you want to track.

26. Mathematical Equations

Enter the equation that you want to solve, for example:

7+5/2-(45*2)
sqrt 9
sin 11 * 66
13% of 994

27. Preview Search Results

Hover over any search result and a small bar with a bubble appears. If you hover over the bubble, it gives you a preview of the landing page on the site.

28. RSS Feeds from search results

You can save every search on Bing into an RSS feed. This means you can pull the search results into your blog or website and increase your web traffic.

Access the feeds from the browser’s toolbars (or by pointing a feed reader to the search result’s URL) and then add

&format=rss

to the results.

A search for Snagit v 9 would be available as an RSS feed from the following URL

http://www.bing.com/search?q=Snagit+9&go=&qb=1&format=rss

29. Remove Bing background image

To remove the background image in Bing’s search engine, enter the following url:

http://www.bing.com/?rb=0

This displays the homepage without the background image, making the download faster.

31. Search sites with filetype
To search for websites that contain links to Microsoft Windows Media Audio (.wma) files, type music contains:wma.

32. Search for files with a particular filetype.

To find document created in PDF format, type the name of the document, eg report, followed by filetype:pdf.

33. Snow reports

Type ‘snow report’ followed by a city. For example, type snow report Cairo.

34. Stock Quotes

In the search box, type the ticker symbol followed by stock or quote. For example to find the financial quotes of Microsoft, type MSFT stock or MSFT quote.

35. Statistical Information

In the Bing.com search box, type what you want to find. For example, population of England, or iphones in USA.

36. Track Flight Status

To see the status of your flight:

flight status for United – enter the flight number and press Get Status .

flight status – Bing prompts you to enter the flight name and number on the first result itself.

Enter the flight name and number and click Get Status.

37. MP3 Music Files

Type U2 contains:mp3 will show pages that are about U2 and link to MP3 files.

38. Web pages for a specific language

To find results in a particular language, select the language code after the language: keyword. For example, if you are searching for laptops then type “laptops” language:en.

39. Web pages from a specific country

Enter the country or region code directly after the loc: keyword. Use a logical OR to include one more language. For example, to see web pages about wine from the France or Italy , type wine (loc:FR OR loc:IT). Image results are shown at the bottom of the page.

40. Used Cars

VIN provides protection against buying a used car with hidden problems.

Type the VIN number and hit Search.

41. Unit Conversion

In the Bing search box, type the quantity, followed by in, followed by the conversion.

For example, type 15 kilometers in miles or 33 degrees F in Celsius.

The operator ‘in’ convert units of measurements for distance, weight, time, volume, and temperature.

42. Change the Wallpaper
Click the icon in the lower right corner to see yesterday’s Bing wallpaper.

Got any favorite features in Bing? Please add them below.

Want to know how to use Google Image Search to send traffic back to your site? To do this you need to understand how Google indexes images. Once you optimize your images for Google, they’ll appear in search results and ultimately lead traffic to your site. Here’s how to do it.

Why Use Google Image Search?

It’s all about traffic. It doesn’t matter how ‘good’ your site is, if you don’t get traffic your sunk. Over 8% of the traffic to my site comes from optimizing the images on my site. That’s a lot of free visitors for very little work

• Google Images bring your site a lot of visitors
• Google Images will drive extra traffic is your images rank page 1
• Google Images will drive extra traffic is they are heavily searched, so you want to think in terms of going for specific keywords.

Some sites get more traffic from Google Image search than regular search.

Understand Alt Text

The W3C says you should use Alt text on images to help visually impaired users browse your website. Remember, Google cannot see your site – it reads code.

So, you need to write the code so Google can read/see your site in the correct way, right?

Google Image Bot

This bot crawls the web, indexes images like the regular Googlebot does and looks for keywords.

These are two different bots. However the Google Image bot is very slow and doesn’t visit a site with the frequency of the regular Google search bot.

How To Optimize Images for Google

As Google can’t “see” images, it uses different ways to analyze every graphic.

Here are some of the things it looks for:

• Alt Text
• File Name
• Surrounding Text
• Page Title
• Links

My testing shows that Alt Text followed by the File Name are biggest factors in determining how Google Image indexes each image.

What is Alt Text?

This is the ‘alternative’ text you see when you hover over an image.

To include Alt Text in your code, do this:

<img src=”filename.gif” alt=”Enter Alternative Description Here”>

Use real words that will sense to humans and includes the right keywords – don’t over do it or Google will punish you for keyword stuffing.

Use words you would search for if looking for that image.

Avoid filler words such as like, the, and, or, we, are, for, etc.

Right: PayPal logo for ecommerce site

Wrong: this is a logo of PayPal for an ecommerce site

Keep is short and remember that Google prioritizes keywords from left to right.

So, write the most important keywords first.

Image File Name

This is also very important. How you name the image is as important, if not more, than the ALT text.

Instead of calling it pic1234.jpg

use descriptive text such as:

PayPal-logo-ecommerce-site

Also:

• Make the File Name the same, or very similar to the Alt Text.
• Don’t try and rank the same image for multiple terms by stuffing different keywords in to the Alt and File Names
• This will confuse the Googlebot
• Be consistent

Image File Structure

Use a consistent, and keyword rich, file structure for your images, for instance:

website.com/images/logos/paypal-ecommercec.jpg

Is much better than:

website.com/whatever/imgs/ppal23.jpg

Does It Work?

You can see if it works when you start seeing images.google.com in your server logs. These will also appear in your Google Webmaster and Analytics stats.

I get a consistent amount of traffic from specific keywords this way. It doesn’t take very long to do and once you create images with Google in mind, your traffic will begin to move up.

Let me know how you get on.

This article shows you can increase your Google AdSense earnings by at least 12%. I’ve started to use video-based ads in Adsense (not the text ads) and the results have been impressive.  Split testing showed us that websites with video ads 1) keep viewers onsite longer, 2) increase repeat visits and 3) generate significantly higher AdSense payments than standard plain text ads. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to setup AdSense video, look at different sizes and formats, test the ads, examine the risks and benefits, and also show you how it increased our earnings.

Why Use Google AdSense Videos Format

The first benefit that videos offer is that they increase Google Adsense payments. In our tests, it increased earnings by more than 12%.  When you’re designing your site layout, consider dropping the text ads and insert one large video ad instead. Do some split testing and check the results. Video ads, or video units as Google likes to call them, lets you enrich your site with relevant video content, which can be embedded in a customizable player.

What is Google AdSense Video?

Google AdSense videos are user initiated ads that run on sites that are part of the Google content network. These ad formats provide users with a rich and engaging advertising experience.

How to get Adsense Videos

Sign in to your AdSense account and open the AdSense Setup tab. Click the video units link and setup up your video unit. Add it to you site and see if it compliments your content.

Risks of Using Video Ad Formats

• Risk #1 – the ads may not compliment your product offerings
• Risk #2 – the ads may be too slow when downloading (not everyone has broadband), which will leave the reader with nothing to see but a blank space, i.e. where the ad should be
• Risk #3 – your AdSense earnings will drop. In our tests, they don’t but your experience may be different.
• Risk #4 – while using video ads should lead to increased sales, especially in the short term, web users may try the video ads and then reject the regular text ads resulting in lower sales.
• Risk #5 – video ads may have a negative impact on your Adsense earnings if do not match your sites look and feel, i.e. the overall color scheme. You can’t control the appearance of video ads as you can with text ads.

Which Video Ad Formats are available?

Video ads are currently available in several ad formats:

• 336 x 280 (Large Rectangle)
• 300 x 250 (Medium Rectangle)
• 250 x 250 (Square)
• 200 x 200 (Small Square)
• 728 x 90 (Leaderboard)
• 120 x 600 (Skyscraper)
• 160 x 600 (Wide Skyscraper)

How to Get Started

To display video ads on your site, make sure you are using one of these supported formats and that you are opted in to image ads for that ad unit. If not, the video option will not be displayed.

How to Enable Image Ads

There are two ways to enable image ads. You can:

1. Enable image and text advertising for all of your pages or
2. Enable image ads for individual pages

Warning - Enabling image ads for individual pages overrides account-wide level selections.

To enable image ads across your account:

1. Sign in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
2. Click the My Account tab
3. Click the edit links next to the Ad Type Preference header
4. Select Display text and image ads in all ad units

If you’ve already generated the code, you can change the ad type of your AdSense unit using the ad management feature:

1. Log in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
2. Click the AdSense Setup tab.
3. Select the Manage Ads sub-tab.
4. Click Edit settings for the ad unit you’d like to update.
5. Under Format pick your desired ad type.
6. Click Save settings.

Adding YouTube Ads – How it works

If you’ve embedded video from YouTube into your site before, you’ll know what to do. Once you’ve configured the options in Adsense, embed the code as per usual, which display the relevant YouTube content to your site. When selecting content, you can:

1. Choose video categories to target to your site or blog
2. Select content from individual YouTube partners
3. Get video targeted to your site content

Configuration options allow you to blend the YouTube player into your site, customize the color scheme and layout, and choose different player sizes.

How to Test Video Ads on Your Blog

You can test the ad from inside AdSense as follows:

• Enter the URL of a page where this ad unit currently appears to see what the ad unit that you have designed will look like.
• Click Preview on this page
• The test add appears and you can see what it looks like. Pretty impressive!

Tip: If you enter a URL that does not display the code for this ad unit, you will not see any ads in the preview.

Why Can’t I See Video Ads on my Site?

You might not see video ads for a number of reasons.

1. Are you using one of the ad formats that support video ads?
2. Have you opted in to image ads for that ad format - otherwise, your ad unit will not display video ads.
3. Even if you are using supported ad formats, and you are opted in to image ads, video ads may not be targeted to your content for the time being.

Make sure that you are opted in to both text and image ads for these ad units to maximize competition for your ad space.

Split Testing & How Video Increases Your AdSense Earnings

This table shows the AdSense earnings before I added the videos units. Note that 210 clicks generated $77. This is an average for the site performance in March 2010.

Page Impressions – 99,219
Clicks Page 210
CTR – 0.23%
Page eCPM – €0.77
Estimated earnings – €77.14

This is $77 per day across all of March, which is approx $2,310 for the month.

Google AdSense – Search Earnings Without Video ads

This shows the AdSense Search results before I added the videos. Search always pay better. We had 80 clicks which generated $20. Again, this is the average return for the site in March 2010. The eCPM is $26.

Queries – 830
Clicks – 80
CTR – 9.64%
eCPM – €26.51
Estimated earnings – €20.20

This is $20 per day for each day in March, which is approx $600 for the month. Google AdSense earnings for both Page Impressions and Search was $2,900 approx. We also had some small payments from the RSS feeds, but not much.

Google AdSense – Page Impressions Earnings With Video ads

We added the video ads formats across three sites in April. So, these figures are for the first 15 days of the month. Earnings increased by 12%.

Page Impressions (15 days)- 46,986
Clicks Page 118
CTR – 0.24%
Page eCPM – €0.79
Estimated earnings – €43.01

Google AdSense – Search Earnings With Video ads

This shows the AdSense Search results after I added the videos. Its earnings increased by approx 10%.

Queries – 410
Clicks – 39
CTR – 9.84%
eCPM – €27.15
Estimated earnings – €11.88

Conclusions

There are a few things to note. Adding the video formats to Google AdSense made no difference to traffic or at least not yet. We didn’t expect it would. It did increase the earnings though, but about 12%.

1. Page Impression earnings increased by 15%~.
2. Two ads formats performed very well. The first was the Skyscraper video down the right side of the page. However, we also placed Google Ads (with video) embedded inside the article near the top-left. Looking at the heatmaps, it’s clear that visitors ‘enjoyed’ these ads as they clicked on more of them as the month progressed. More testing over the next 6 weeks should give us better feedback.
3. Search earnings increased by 7-10%~. This increase may be related to the close proximity of the video ads to the search box.
4. The Search box is placed in two places on the site. At the top right of the page and also in the Footer. Tests have shown that many users scroll to the end of the page (seeking more information, perhaps) and use this Search box to look for the information rather than scroll back up to the top or hit the Back button.
5. Total earnings for both page impressions and Search increased by 12% approx. Is this good enough? Well, our tests were for a 15-days period in April. As we use video more, our earnings should improve
6. 12% over twelve months should generate an extra $4,000 revenue, which isn’t a bad return for 30 minutes work!

Over to you.

Have you tried the AdSense video formats? If so, what results did you see? If you didn’t, what was the obstacle or issue that stopped you for using video? Let us know below.

PS – Remember to sign up for our free newsletter and give us a Tweet!

Making money from niche blogs in an inexact science. What works in one blogs, fails on another. I’ve launched over 200 websites since 1998 (mostly ecommerce) and about 30 blogs (technical). If your blog has a technical slant, for example, its target audience is technical writers, analysts, architects, or others micro-niche areas, then use some of these search engine techniques will increase your traffic.

29 Ways to Increase Traffic to a Micro Niche Blog

1. Monthly Interview – do a profile every month or a day in the life of your target audience. Rule #1, people like to read about people.
2. Company Profile – same as above but focus on how the company developed, what it’s doing right AND mistakes it made. Rule #2, people like to read how others solved problems.
3. Product review – don’t do a short review. Aim for 1000 words. Look at this review of Camtasia Studio. This will live long in the Google index and generate more backlinks. Short reviews melt like dew in the morning sun.
4. Guest articles – do them and take them. I take guest articles all the time (send me text files, please not Word). Make sure these people have a brain, i.e. that they remember to share the buzz on their site, their twitter, their Facebook page, and maybe on other Social Media networks. I’m still amazed at people who take the effort to submit, write and publish an article but forget to promote it.
5. Be the Hub – make your site the hub for your niche. This means others in the field will flock here to see what’s happening, who’s been hired, rates, buzz, gossip – whatever rocks their boat. And it’s ok to throw in the odd joke to lighten things up. Don’t take yourself too serious.
6. Deep Link – instead of linking to the main page, link to a page within a site. This increases the number of trackbacks. You can also do a Google search for sites that offer back-links and add these to your ping requests.
7. BusinessWeek – has a professional network that that accepts links, i.e. yours!, which get indexed v quickly by Google. You can also connect your account here with LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanwalsh)
8. LinkedIn – you use this, right? If not, sign up and join groups that match your target audience. Get involved. Be active. Ask and answer questions. Check in once a week. Link your RSS/blog to your profile. More back-links for little effort.
9. Connect with Startup blogs – while everyone wants to get on C Brogan, you’ll get further if you connect with people starting out. They appreciate the value and will share the link love. If they don’t, well… PS: here’s the right way to add a comment to chris brogan’s blog.
10. Google Adsense – not very fashionable these days but it still pulls in $750 per month, which pays for the Frappuccino, Cable, and Brazilian waxes. Ok, one of those isn’t true. It’s cable, isn’t it?
11. Calendar – use Google Docs to get it up. Simple way to create high-traffic pages.
12. Add Photos – don’t be shy. Show us your mug! Take photos whenever you go to an event, conference or client. Let others into your world. Remember rule #1.
13. Use Creative Commons – share. Make it easy for others to get your message out there. Why don’t you share?
14. Setup a Newsletter – use Aweber, not Feedburner, if you are serious about making money & getting the news out. The money is in the list. Share useful information. No one cares about your cat’s dysentery.
15. Reach out to Other Bloggers – mention other bloggers, writers etc in your articles. Why? They might pop over and leave a comment or respond in their blog. Don’t write in a vacuum.
16. Add Short Video – use YouTube to increase traffic, cross-links, and to establish yourself as an authority.
17. Offer Incredible PDFs – create PDFs of your best work, upload it to Slideshare and index it in your Sitemap. Why? Google indexes PDFs. Include links back to your site + you’ll see the page rank increase.
18. Create Unique Twitter Lists – create unique and interesting twitter lists. As Twitter has become a wall of noise, people use lists to share, aggregate, and curate information. Make your list as specialized as possible. Then link to the list, not your twitter page. See the difference? Twitter followers will go thru the roof!
19. Twollow – use this to follow others by keyword, e.g. follow those interested in video marketing. AND use it to un-follow deadbeats that don’t follow back.
20. Ejunkie – use this to sell digital goods, information products, online training, or ebooks. 100 times better than Clickbank. $5 per month. How can you go wrong?
21. Optimize Money Pages – log into Google Analytics. Find your top 10 posts. Go into each of these pages and fine-tune them over more. Add 1 product to each page. These are your MONEY pages. Start making money here.
22. Google Analytics – learn how Google Analytics works. ‘I know how it works’. No, you don’t, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article! Spend 5 hours here. Do split testing, setup reports, check entrance paths, bounce rates and duplicate headers. All the heavy-weights do this.
23. Posterous – use this to publish your blog posts across all your Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Flickr, YouTube with one click. Now you can add tags and use Google Analytics as well.
24. Contact Journalists – identify 5 journalists in your industry. Tell them what you write about and why they should read your blog, i.e. to give them material for their articles. See your PageRank shoot up if you connect with one high-profile journalist.
25. Create 2 Sitemaps – add an XML site for Google to read and a HTML one for the humanoids. Check this with Google Webmaster Tools.
26. Title tags – don’t do all the hard work and forget to add the correct title tags to each post. It takes 5 min to get this right but it’s worth the effort. Use SEO in a Box plugin to do this.
27. Google Webmaster Tools – like Google Analytics, spend 30 min in here every week and see how Google in indexing your blog. Look for duplicate headers (i.e. pages with the same title tags) as these lower your PageRank. Also check for crawl errors and others horrors.
28. Leverage Facebook – forget pigville and join groups, fan pages that compliment your business. Add useful comments, not just high fives. Say something that others have overlooked. Add videos, photos and RSS feeds to your pages.
29. Create a Publishing Process – saving the last til best. Develop a workflow for publishing your material. Don’t just write and hit publish. Stand back and see how you can gather information, identify your audience, focus on pain points (i.e. their problems), develop content that will be evergreen, source photos, respond to comments, and get busy promoting. No one knows about your site.

Now, get out there and tell them.

Ok, that’s how I do it. What did I miss?

Photo: invisiblekid

Google Webmaster Tools is one of the hidden secrets on Google. Use this to add your site directly to its index, verify that Google sees your site (and sub-domains), and also fix the errors it has identified. Split testing has shown me that sites indexed this way perform better than sites that rely on xml sitemaps. FYI you can also add sitemaps here.

How to Get Your Site Verified By Google

Blogs created in Blogger are automatically verified in Webmaster Tools. However, older blogs, WordPress and Typepad blogs are not automatically verified, and should be verified using the meta tag method.

To verify your Blogger / WordPress blog:

1.    On the Webmaster Tools home page, click Add a site.
2.    Enter your blog’s URL e.g. (http://ivanwalsh.blogspot.com) and click Continue.
3.    On the Verification page, select the Meta tag verification method and copy the meta tag provided into your text editor.
4.    Sign in to Blogger.com (or WordPress).

For Blogger, open the Dashboard, click the Layout link for the blog you are verifying.

5.    On the Layout tab, click Edit HTML.
6.    Paste the meta tag  after the <head> element in the template HTML and click Save template.
7.    On the Manage Verification page in Webmaster Tools, confirm that Meta tag is selected as the verification method, and then click the Verify

For WordPress and TypePad blogs:

8.    Save the Google code to a HTML file.
9.    FTP it to the root directory.
10.    On the Manage Verification page in Webmaster Tools, confirm that Meta tag is selected as the verification method, and then click the Verify.
11.    If successful, a message appears. Woohoo!

Where is Google Webmaster Tools

It’s here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

Did this work for you? Let me know if you have any problems.

You find a blog you really like. You want to learn more. You’re thinking of buying from them. What do you do? Click About Us, right? Most people do. Now, pretend you’ve never visited your own site. Remember, you know nothing about you. Nothing. Look at your About Us page? Be honest, what’s the one thing that’s wrong with it?

Why Your About Us Page is the Second Most Important Page on Your Blog?

Video made at The Temple of Heaven, China during soccer practice …

Your About Page should NOT be:

• An Afterthought – something to fill with text, just to get it done. Written after the site is launched when you’ve nothing else to do on a slow Friday afternoon.
• In the third person — it’s your blog! Talk to me. Introduce who you are. Don’t talk down. Talk about your team, mention their names, show their faces, add pic and videos. Why not?
• Flat — read the first paragraph. Does it excite you? Does it make ‘you’ (i.e. the prospect) want to contact you, download your brochure, make an effort to connect?
• Same As— as every other About Us page. C’mon, you can do better. Pics, videos and mp3s. it’s so easy, try it.
• Stale — update it every 3 months. Every month you do something worth sharing. Put it here.

Your About Page should be:

• Kinda Intimate – share something that cannot be found anywhere else on the site. Photos, videos, examples of your portfolio, places you’ve been, events, conferences — anything that paints a picture.
• But Warm – make me feel ‘warm and fuzzy’ inside. You don’t need to go over-board, but share a little. Show why you’re more interesting that the rest.
• With 7 Compelling Reasons — give them 7 reasons (if you can’t think of seven, at least five) to cross the threshold and connect. For example, what do you stand for? What are your values? Who have you helped? What charity do you support? What makes you different (really different!) than the rest.
• For them to Knock on the Door – remember, it’s this page where people decide ‘will I, won’t I?’ So, it better be good. You want them to come in, right?

How To Sharpen Your About Us page

Your About Us page must have the following:

• Story – not your CV, but the story of YOU.
• Why did you decide to do this?
• How did you get here?
• What mistakes did you make?
• What you hope to achieve?
• Why the reader is important to you?
• Share links to your Social Media sites
• Contact form & email & tel number —make it easy for them. Put your contact details on every page.

Videos and Personal Branding

I use videos to help bridge that gap. You see me at work, at soccer practice, with junior, my pet crickets, and even when I’m struggling. Each of these helps close the gap between you and me. Maybe you don’t care for everything on the site, but your impression of me (and your memories of this site) are that much stronger.

Here’s a question for you?

Think of all the sites you visited this week. How many do you remember? Now, look at the video above. In a year’s time, you will still remember this video (for better or worse!) but all the blogs you read this week will be forgotten.

Why do you think that is?

PS – Rewriting your About Us page could result in a higher Google page rank and higher conversion rates for those who find it.

Ever wondered how some blogs appear on Google News and others don’t? Ever wanted to get your site on Google News. Google has published guidelines explaining how the process works. Do it right and you might be indexed. If you’d like a site to be included in Google News, you can also send them the URL directly.

How to Get Added to Google News

To be included in Google News, your articles (and their URLs) must be:

1. Unique

Each web page/blog post that display an article’s full text must have a unique URL. Google doesn’t include sites in its News that display multiple articles under one URL or that do not have links to pages dedicated solely to each article.

2. Permanent

Google can’t/won’t crawl pages (e.g. www.yoursite.com/news.html) if it displays a different story every day.  Make each post unique and permanent.
‘To ensure its links to articles function properly, each article on a news site must be associated with one unique URL, and that URL must be permanent (i.e., it can’t be recycled).’

3. Three-digit number

The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.

For example:

Google News can’t crawl this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html

Google News can crawl this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html

Add three unique numbers to each article.

Note: if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as:

http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html

…Google won’t be able to crawl it.

Exception: this rule is waived with News sitemaps

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68323

Google News: How to Recommend a site for inclusion

If you’d like a site to be included in Google News, send them the URL here.

http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40249

Recap: Get Added to Google News

Be

1. Unique
2. Permanent
3. Three-digit numbers

That’s it. Over to you.

Have you managed to get your blog indexed by Google for its news section? Was Bing easier? Share any tips you have below.

If Google Buzz is too much for you – the endless stream of live data clogging up your Gmail – you can always turn it off . Yes, the option is there and here is how you do it. This also explains how to filter Buzz and filter your fav friends with Buzz.

How To Turn Off Google Buzz

1. Scroll down to the bottom of your Gmail page.
2. Find the ‘turn off buzz‘ link
3. Click on it.

This turns off Google Buzz.

How to filter Buzz

You can also filter email alerts from Buzz.

1. In Gmail, click Settings.
2. Click Filters
3. Select ‘Create a new filter‘
4. Enter label:buzz in the Has the Words field

How to filter friends with Buzz

To restrict Google Buzz updates to your close friends, change their setting to ‘Private‘.

Know any other Google Buzz tips?

Google’s Wonder Wheel is Search and Mind Mapping combined together. The Wonder Wheel was introduced in May 2009 and is one of Google’s best kept secrets. This search/mindmapper tool shows search results in a Wheel with different Spokes for each associated search result. Fantastic tool for brainstorming, studying trends, and idea generation.

Last week I showed you how to use Google’s Advanced search features. This lets you drill-down and laser focus your search. Today, we’ll look at Google’s Wonder Wheel. How does it work? It displays a visual wheel of results, with related search items on each spoke. It’s more than a fancy trick. Keep working with it and you’ll see how powerful it can be.

Tip – make Google’s advanced search page your default. It’s worth the small effort.

How to use Google’s Wonder Wheel

1. Enter your keyword into Google to start the search.

2. Click Show Options (top left of nav bar). This expands the nav bar down the left side of the screen.

3. Click Wonder Wheel under Standard View. This creates a starfish-shaped circle with spokes to the related searches.

4. Click on the spokes (i.e. associated searches) to find more relevant key words and phrases.

You can click on the spokes to research different topics or return to the wonder wheel.

How ProBlogger uses Google’s Wonder Wheel

Darren Rowse’s video, “How to Use Google’s Wonder Wheel to Find Topics to Write about” shows how he uses the Wonder Wheel for idea generation. For example, to see what queries people enter into Google that he may not have thought of or to catch up with new trends. This helps focus your writing so that your content is aligned with what people are searching for. Make sense? http://www.problogger.net

FYI – Darren Rowse’s blog is compulsive reading if you plan to make a living online.

Does Google’s Wonder Wheel Really Work?

Does this help you find the search item you were after or is the regular way better? I use it when I get writer’s block and want to look at things from a fresh perspective.

At first, I found it gimmicky. But, the more I use it, the more ideas it creates. The trick is see where it can help and avoid deviating into topics that are not on your radar.

How about you? What do you think?

PS – You can learn How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain’s Untapped Potential here. An excellent introduction to mind mapping techniques.

Zachary M. Seward http://www.niemanlab.org writes that The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.

Put the Author’s name above a headline to get more clicks

Paul Berry, Chief Technology Officer at The Huffington Post, said Huffington Post editors have found that “placing the author’s name above a headline almost always leads to more clicks than omitting it.”

Also, The Huffington Post’s new social media editor, Josh Young, has also been soliciting better headlines from readers on Twitter. Interesting use of Crowd-sourcing?

Takeaway

The Huffington Post is considering separate East Coast and West Coast editions.

Why?

Take the Oscars, It’s old news to East Coast readers by noon, but fresh for the West Coasters logging on.

Read more here: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/10/how-the-huffington-post-uses-real-time-testing-to-write-better-headlines/

Will real-time rating lead to “better” headlines or more popular ones?

Does writing a blog constitute work? Forbes reports that the New York State Department of Labor recently declared a laid-off attorney ineligible for unemployment benefits as she was bringing in $1.30 a day from blog ads.

In April, Karin started a blog, called STL Meal Deals, where she wrote about local restaurant promotions. Since she received no payments from the businesses she mentioned, Karin decided to try generating some income by signing up for Google AdSense.

Google sends bloggers checks when their earnings hit $100–a level that took Karin three months to achieve.

Here’s what happened when the first check arrived:

Lawyer’s Unemployment Benefits Yanked Over $1 a Day From Blog http://www.forbes.com

Looking for a simple writing tool that automatically hides your desktop so you can concentrate on your writing? Anil Atluri on Digital Inspiration has this great tutorial on how to make Google Docs your perfect free writing tool.

Turn Google Docs into a Writing Tool

Follow these steps:

1: Create a new document in Google Docs and choose “Edit CSS” from the edit menu.

2: Paste the following code into the CSS Box and save.

body {

font: 16px “Courier New”;

color: #00ff00 !important;

background: #000 !important;

width: 800px;

margin: 10px auto;

}

3: Press Ctrl + Shift + F to remove the menu bar in Google Docs and then hit F11 to turn your browser into full-screen mode.

Read more at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-docs-for-distraction-free-writing/10538/

Free Google Docs writing template

You can get a nice writing template over here from the same team: http://docs.google.com/

Do you use Google Docs for writing your tech documents?

What’s the one thing that would make you give up using Microsoft Word?

For those involved in out-sourcing or off-shoring, Andy Rappaport discusses why outsourcing works for the IT industry but fails in the automobile industry. He writes that “the U.S. IT industry has been able to innovate over the past 20 years even while ceding leadership of component technologies and basic processes.”

For example:

1. Apple enjoys an unfettered supply of leading edge technology because its software, design, marketing, and retail prowess give it ultimate control over customer spending.

2. Amazon, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, AT&T, and Qualcomm have used their investments in software, services, infrastructure, and intellectual property to do the same.

3. All use their market power to force upstream vendors to invest for them to make the inputs to downstream innovations and transformations cheaper and more plentiful.

4. As long as they innovate sufficiently to follow the flow of market value downstream, all are able to limit the eventual return and market power accruing to these upstream innovations.

However, he warns that this model breaks down “where U.S. companies and innovators do not naturally control downstream demand. Take batteries for electric vehicles. The U.S. has ceded both innovation in the critical building block (the battery) as well as leadership in the integration of these blocks into downstream value (competitive automobiles).”

Full article here: http://blogs.harvardbusiness.com

I’ve started a small experiment. I use RSS to monitor blogs, gather data, and share information. What I’ve now started to do is share ‘the best of the web’ using Google Reader. This lets you track web feeds and share those you think other readers would be interested in.

My shared Google Reader is here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/ivanawalsh

I’ve also made an aim to share no more than 5 links, sites, blogs per day. This should help avoid info overload for those who subscribe and increase the quality of the material.

Why am I doing this?

Louis Gray explains it much better than I ever could.

When I hit “share” in Google Reader, a few things happen.

   1. The item is added to my shared link blog.

   2. The item is available for comments within Google Reader for approved contacts.

   3. The items are shared on my FriendFeed, Facebook and Social media.

Louis Gray: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LouisgraycomLive/~3/Sx0m6McdWY0/why-and-where-we-share-distributing.html