netParticles - How-to

How-to Use: Bing Webmaster Center Tools

Richard Tea — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:40:00 +0000

Previously, we showed you how-to submit your sitemap to Bing without giving you much detail about the full range of features from Bing Webmaster Center Tools. This web application from Bing (Microsoft) was designed to address important questions from webmasters, such as whether your website has been indexed or blocked by Bing or if there are website crawling issues.

In other words, Bing Webmaster Center Tools gives a look to make sure that your website is working well with Bing's MSNBot (The Bing web crawler, a program that scans websites and indexes their content, such as text, documents, images, and links, for searching).

How to: Submit your Sitemap to the Top 5 Places Where They Need to Be

Richard Tea — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:45:00 +0000

If you are looking to submit your URL because you just launched a new site, you might have a bit more work to do today than in the past. Search engines have evolved and even collaborated on some standards to facilitate their job of indexing the web.

You now have to do more than to submit a single URL and have the crawler do the rest (you can do that but it does not guarantee your important pages will be found. There are five places where you need to submit your Sitemap (no time and know how to ping? jump to the summary):

Google - The top search engine with roughly 65% market share
Bing - From Microsoft, formerly MSN and Live, will soon own 25% of the search market share
Yahoo! - Still an important player while it is being replaced by Bing
Ask.com - With 2.5% market share, still an important search engine
Moreover - a premier provider of real-time news and business information on the Web (serves many Fortune 500 companies)

We assume you have already created your sitemap using your content management system or a Sitemap generator and that you are ready to send it out to lead the web crawlers to your page.

How-to: Stop Wasting Your Time Checking Your Website Stats

Richard Tea — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:00:00 +0000

I do it too, and I am sure many of you reading this are starting to realize the problem (as highlighted by DailyBlogTips). If you know someone that wastes hours of his or her time checking stats instead of being productive, send them to this page.

Now, you must tell yourself, it just takes 2 seconds to check that number, it does not hurt right? Wrong! There are two main problems with checking your stats all the time:

It interrupts whatever you are working on right now
It wastes time, and that time cumulates quickly

Let's try some calculations, let's say you check your stats 10 times a day and it takes 5 min every time (could be a conservative estimate for some of you), and that you are up for work 8 hours a day. You are effectively wasting about 10% of day looking at stats numbers.

HOW-TO: Use Six Essential SEO Techniques to be Search Engine Friendly

Richard Tea — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Previously, we have seen how you can removed unwanted pages from Google, now we will hit the main topic of this website (promotion) and show you six essential SEO Techniques that will put you in good terms with search engines and get listed! Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a gray area for webmasters since there are many conflicting information and unproven methods. Thankfully, there are a set of SEO Techniques that do not fall in this gray zone since they have repeatedly been proven to create significant improvements to your search engine visibility.

HOW TO: Quickly Remove Your Unwanted Links from Google's Search Results

Richard Tea — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:00:00 +0000

In the past, requesting a page to be removed from Google was a long and untracked process where you had to send a request by using a feedback form. Since 2007, Google has rolled out an new set of tools to speed up the URL removal process on domain names you control through Google Webmaster Tools. As not many people know about this process, here is a quick how-to to avoid your website promotion efforts to result in a 404 from Google.

Why Proactive Link Checking of Google Search?

Links is the technology that makes web as we know it, but as the Internet, your site may evolve fast. Through this, there may be human-errors or required changes that may cause unwanted or broken links to be displayed in a Google Search of your site's content.

Dead links can negatively impact your website's promotion and brand in several ways:

How to Research Two Strategic Marketing Essentials with Google Ad Planner

Richard Tea — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:30:00 +0000

Google Ad Planner is one of my favorite free media planning tool that can help Advertisers find which websites their target audience visits to make better-informed advertising decisions. Since the Google AdWords team recently redesigned the user-interface to facilitates research, it prompted us to write this article for you. Unlike other 3rd party non-Google tools, you can display data using a combination of demographics, geography, Google Search keywords and commonly visited sites.

This is one of the first full articles I will write on promotion strategies, make sure to bookmark this site for further reference!

Using Google Ad Planner as Publishers and Bloggers

Google Ad Planner is rather limited for publishers (website owners, webmaster, bloggers, etc.), there is a variety of other tools for their purpose but here we will show you that you should not completely ignore this tool.

You can use this advertiser tool to can gain some valuable information which can help you better position your website, frame your target audience and know who your competitors are. Therefore, we will split this article in two sections:

Audience Targeting and Profiling: Who is your audience? I mean, really, their age, gender, income, etc...
Competitive Analysis: Who are your competitors? We like to call them related sites.

As example to guide you through this, we will be using Digg.com since it is a very popular platform aimed at technology geeks. Disclaimer: The following is not intended to be a full or professional analysis of Digg's marketing position. The data represented are estimates and may change by the time you read this article.