Stop! Hammer search! MC Hammer launches his own search engine
I’d forgive you if you didn’t believe this headline (I had to check April Fools Day hadn’t come early myself!), yet it’s true – the Hammer-pants-wearing entrepreneur has launched his very own search engine.
It’s called WireDoo and MC Hammer is hoping that it will revolutionise search in the same way that Google has. The concept of WireDoo isn’t bad – Mr Hammer calls the way it works a ‘deep search’ and hopes it will return results based on relational topics.
MC Hammer, real name Stanley Kirk Burrell, discussed this in more detail at the Web 2.0 Summit inSan Francisco. He explained that today’s search engines work by connecting keywords (search terms) to one topic (not an entirely accurate view I must add). However, MC Hammer believes that when you search for a home, you will want to see information about the surrounding community, schools and crime statistics etc. And this is exactly what WireDoo claims to achieve, hence the tagline is “Search once and see what’s related.”
The rapper didn’t reveal much more about the how the search engine will work in practice and we’ll have to wait a little longer to try it for ourselves as it is currently in pre-beta. You can however sign-up to get access to WireDoo as soon as it’s ready.
Taking on Google will no-doubt be a tough one for MC Hammer and if he wants to prove he’s ‘Too Legit to Quit’ he’ll have to be prepared for a rough ride. Toppling Google has so far proved difficult for big-hitters such as Yahoo and Bing and many other failed projects (who remembers HotBot, AltaVista and Infoseek?).
However, if MC Hammer’s project does take off, eSterling will be the first to let you know. You Can’t Touch This!
Search Engine Optimisation 101
I was talking to a client the other day about the factors that Google uses to order the SERPs, it made me think that this information could be useful for our blog readers. So here we go, a brief SEO 101.
On page Techniques:
- Use of keywords in your Title Tag, preferably at the start.
- Use of keywords in the root domain name, in otherwords a keyword domain.
- Use of keywords in your H1 headline, preferably at the start.
- Use of keyword anchor text in internal site links, preferably contextually and not just on your navigation.
- Use of keywords in the first 100 words of the page.
Factors the Search Engines are looking for:
- The level of trust and authority held by your domain, so PR factors like domain age, links, references on the web, returning traffic and so on.
- The number of links pointing to your page.
- The keywords used in the anchor text of the links pointing to your page.
- The keywords used in the text of you webpage.
- The amount of traffic and the click through rate from the SERP’s for your domain.
Things to avoid:
- Malware on your website.
- Buying links rather than building links – avoid known link brokers.
- Links from your site to spam sites.
- Clocking by user agent, JavaScript or any other method.
- Server down time and unreliable hosting.
“Link baiting” – Just another term for building a good website?
SEO has its fair share of buzz words these days (we are marketers after all), one that is particularly common of late is “link baiting”. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of this term before or if you’re not sure what it actually means because it’s quite simple really…
The term “link baiting” refers to a simple strategy for naturally increasing the number of links to your website, and as we all know the more links you have coming in to your website the higher your page rank and the better your site will rank in the SERP’s. Link baiting is a completely natural approach to link building and will leave your site with genuine, organically built links; it does not involve buying links, endlessly commenting on blogs, using any automated posting software or anything wacky like that. With this system other people will build links to your website for you and best of all it is so simple that any website owner can do it.
So what is the catch and how does it work?
Ok, lets get down to brass tacks…link baiting…lets think about it. The clue is in the name – so we are laying bait to promote people to link to our sites. I guess the big question is, what is the bait?
The bait can be anything that engages people, something they like, use, need or enjoy – something so engaging and attention grabbing they just have to link to it. So what type of content can cause enough of a fuss that people, without being asked, decide to link to your website? Well the first question is probably what kind of people are you looking to attract and what will engage them? This is when market research and a good knowledge of your customers comes into play, the answer is very different depending on the type and role of your website.
Common types of “link bait” include Interviews with industry guru’s, useful industry tools, great articles, specialised reports, contests, reviews, controversial opinions, free resources and tools, “how to” articles and videos, and anything else that you think might appeal you your audience.
In short, what you are looking to do here is build a good website. If you build a high quality, well thought out, engaging website that is focused around the user then you should never need to build a single link to your website – given time they will come to you.
To go back to Google phrase from time gone by, “content is king”.