Trish's Blog for Senior Computer Users

World Traffic Summit coming very soon!

admin — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 03:28:28 +0000

World Traffic Summit is 3 days of easy-to-understand teaching on the subject of how to get loads of traffic (visitors) to your website – no matter what you sell.

The World Internet Summit team are bringing in the world’s best traffic experts to show us all how they get people to their websites. Meaning you’ll know how you can do it too. They’ll make their lessons quick, simple and practical for you, even if you’re a beginner.

Which all means, that you’ll know how to get traffic to your website as soon as you leave the event!

You’ll discover the latest and greatest techniques … including a ton of FREE strategies … for:

· Video marketing

· Article marketing

· Social media like Twitter and Facebook

· Blogs

· Search engine optimisation (SEO)

· Paid traffic

· Joint ventures

· Traffic harvesting

· Affiliate marketing secrets, and more
If you are struggling with getting visitors to YOUR website, check out the World Traffic Summit here.

Gail Bottomley & Wordpress Plugins

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 01:26:54 +0000

For those of you who have got started with their own blog but still learning how to make it better, I recommend you head on over to Gail Bottomley’s site www.gailbottomleyonline.com – she is an amazing lady who gives away so much valuable information to her readers, that it’s a good site to visit often. Sign up too, so you get the news when something new has been added.

Gail’s latest posts are a prime example of the value she gives away – this time telling you what plug-ins you need on your wordpress blog and better still, many of these plug-ins are free. Have a look at this page to start with www.gailbottomleyonline.com/5-most-needed-wordpress-plugins and then head on back to her home page for more great info & links.

Best wishes
Trish

Bing Search Engine

admin — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:39:12 +0000

Bing, Yahoo and Google

Now, while Google still has by far the greatest amount of traffic at approx 62%, the agreement by Yahoo & Bing (Microsofts new search engine) to share resources, means that when their respective search shares of approx 19% & 13% is combined, it will provide much bigger opposition to google.

So should this concern you? Probably not unless your business uses search traffic to make sales. Lets assume for a moment that it does. And did you know that facebook search is powered by Bing?

What can you do to increase search traffic to your sites from Bing? Well first of all, you can submit your site to Bing here and submit a sitemap here.

Bing has just released their updated Webmaster tools, not as comprehensive yet as google’s webmaster tools, but definitely a step in the right direction. Open an account to access these tools using your Windows Live ID (or create one if you don’t already have one).

To see how Bing crawls and indexes your pages, you can add your sites to your account. How to do this is set out quite well in the section “Add a Site to Your Account” under “Sites List”. You can only add your own sites and you must verify ownership before they can be added – you don’t want other people looking at your results!

The only hitch I encountered was adding verification to a wordpress blog that didn’t reside in a public_html folder so meant I couldn’t just uploadÂ the xml file, as suggested in Option 1. Using Option 2, I had to search around my blog admin section to find the file containing the tag. In fact, it didn’t have one just like that, but it did have an in the file header.php, so placing the tag just before that worked fine .

If you need more details, proceed as follows:

In your wordpress admin area, click on Appearance, then on Editor. This will bring up an open file with the html code showing. Go to the list on the right hand side under Templates and find Header (header.php) & click on this file. Now, have a look in this file forÂ Â something like this:

Now paste the meta tag code copied from Bing in between these two lines and then click the Update File button at the bottom. Go back to Bing webmaster tools now and verify your site.

Newly added sites will take up to three days to begin showing data, assuming they are getting some traffic, of course.

Hope this helps someone.

Regards

Trish

More about Google

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 06:32:22 +0000

It must be Google day.

I had not long pulished my simple post about Google search when I received an email from Pot Pie Girl regarding her latest post.

Jennifer has also talked about Google & how they get their search results. Since her blog post is much more in depth than mine, I’d recommend to those who want more information, to head on over to this link.

http://www.potpiegirl.com/2010/07/how-google-works/

The Google Search Engine

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 06:16:49 +0000

When you want to search the internet, or â€œsurf the webâ€, youâ€™ll very likely use the Google search engine (http://www.google.com/) which is estimated to have 70% of the market at the present time.

Have you ever wondered just how this works?

Well, first of all, when you search on Google, you are not actually searching the web, you are searching Googleâ€™s index of the web. So the next question is, how does Google create this index?

They use software programs called spiders, or web crawlers, or web bots (short for robots) which start out searching a few web pages, then follow the links on those pages to more pages, continuing on and on and in a very short time, have reached millions of pages stored on thousands of machines all around the world. Google’sÂ index is based on all the words the bots find; not all search engines work this way, but today, we’re just discussing Google.

If you want to find some information, you type in the main words and Google goes away and searches for all the pages they have in their index that includes all your key words. For example, say you want to know how much an African Elephant weighs, youâ€™d type the words in say African elephant weigh and back would come a list of approximately 200,000 results for you to look through.

Itâ€™s interesting to note that if you type in African elephant weight, youâ€™ll get a smaller result and thatâ€™s because African elephant weigh will include results for African elephant weight, but not vice versa.

To get more specific information, you just type more key words (called keywords), such as African elephant weight at birth or white African elephant. Now, this last one is interesting, because we all know that the term â€œwhite elephantâ€ has nothing to do with real elephants, so if we really want to get information about a white elephant animal, we need to enclose the term in parenthesis, so instead of searching for web pages with all the words individually, Google will only search for all the words inside the ” “Â marks as well as any other words not inside them.

My trial search today brought up 376,000 results for white African elephant, but only 93,200 for “white African elephant”. Parenthesised search results still may not necessarily contain the phrase â€œwhite African elephantâ€, just the words in order, something like the following, which might not be relevant to your search:

Black & White African Elephant preview
Isolated, White, African Elephant
it’d make the whole enterprise something of a white (African) elephantÂ - this is a page about football kits

Google can search for images, maps, videos, news and more to help you refine your searches. Want to find a picture of an African elephant at birth? After you have typed in your search term, just click on the word â€œimagesâ€ at the top left hand side of your browser window (the search page you are on). You will get images related to the subject, including some that are not what you might expect.

People with websites naturally want search engines to find the pages they publish, so part of the web publishing process includes SEO (search engine optimisation) to make them Google friendly & thus get a Google ranking. There are probably millions of web pages that never get found at all.

Some other search engines you might like to try are:
Microsoftâ€™s relatively new Bing http://www.bing.com/
Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com/
Ask http://www.ask.com/
AOL http://www.ask.com/
Hotbot http://www.hotbot.com/
Answers.com http://www.answers.com/