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Increase website traffic with Google Zeitgeist

Unusual Branding with Powerful Features If you have heard of Google’s feature rich service called Google Zeitgeist which attempts to open a window into the future,you are among a lucky few because Google Zeitgeist hasn’t received the press it truly deserves. In German, the word Zeit means time and Geist means spirit.

That would translate to the �?spirit of the times’, �?the spirit of the age’ or even �?world view’.

 

What Google does as a part of this free service is to collate patterns of searches on its flagship search engine and come up with the most popular search terms and phrases for the year. For example, in 2008, the word �?Obama’ figures prominently in the top ten things searched on Google.

Various Search Options on Google Zeitgeist
Historical search data is available on Google Zeitgeist in one of several ways:

Google Trends

You can enter up to five search terms to view their relative popularity over a time period. This provides an idea of a broad trend of searches with respect to these search terms.

Trends for Websites

You can type in a website address and get traffic details for that site. See how site visitors classified by region and by related sites visited that site. This is an excellent tool for competition analysis and also provides valuable trends data at the same time.

Insights for search

This is specially useful for marketers. For example, you can get data across regions, time zones, topic or other parameters that you may specify. You can make lists of the “most popular” and “fastest rising” search variables to arrive at a clear understanding of where your business is heading.

Hot Trends

This option catalogs the 100 fastest rising search queries on Google. This data is available currently only for the US. However, it is updated throughout the day.

Features and Attributes of Google Zeitgeist

Spend thirty minutes on Google Zeitgeist and you will notice right away that it might just be Google’s best kept secret:

1 It is a new age product. Even its archives are available for browsing, only from 2001 onwards.

2 Each year’s information is available on a monthly basis as well.

3 It also provides results based on searches that feature images, books and other Google search engines.

4 It is possible to access the Zeitgeist repository by country, so you can get to know what was on top of the mind of people in a specific country.

5 It is divided into broad categories such as country home, top of mind, politics, trendsetter, showbiz, sports and around the world.

6 It allows you to enter terms to check for their general popularity. For example, in 2008, �?slowdown’, sub prime’, and �?credit’ were amongst the most common search terms.

7 Trendsetters are not necessarily people but also products or processes. For example, the hybrid fuel based car. So if you  search for trendsetters it would return “hybrid fuel based car.” This feature can help you to spot trends early and thus stay  ahead of your competition.

Google Zeitgeist and your Online or Offline Business

Google Zeitgeist can help you in more ways than one:

1 Marketers can better understand the purchasing rationale of people in countries and regions.

2 It is a wonderful way of comparing yourself to what others on the Internet are thinking and searching.

3 Trendsetters would again tell others the direction in which people are moving.

4 Zeitgeist archives can update you of recent search patterns very accurately. It is a tool of great value to social scientists.

5 You can see what people in other countries are thinking of and compare it with people in your own country.

6  If you are traveling to a particular country or region, you could look up Zeitgeist and be ready with small talk. Perform
some research on Google Zeitgeist and surprise friends in other countries.

Increase Website Traffic with Google Zeitgeist

Google Zeitgeist is one research tool you should have in your SEO and SEM toolkit to generate qualified and targeted traffic to your website. As is evident here, the data that Google Zeitgeist contains is worth its weight in gold provided that you use it intelligently to tweak your website and learn how to respond to emerging trends. Zeitgeist is essentially a brighter shade of keyword research with huge potential. Use it to plan your online strategy and predict customer behavior through trends analysis.

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Google Alerts and Website Traffic

Google Alerts Overview
Google Alerts is by far the most powerful monitoring tool on the Internet today. Like most of Google’s services, the price is right because it is free.It allows you to monitor competition, follow major news events that can impact your business, and locate valuable learning resources each time a new resource appears on the Internet.

Google Alerts automatically sends you an e-mail message when it encounters fresh results for search items you have defined. At present it is a beta product in spite of which it is very widely used by millions and is extremely popular.

Setting up and Managing a Google Alert

Creating a Google Alerts is easier if you have a Google Account but it is not absolutely necessary. All you have to do is go to the Google Alerts home page:

http://google.com/alerts

and sign up. Having a Google Account means that you can use Gmail, Reader, Docs and other popular Google products. The sign up user interface is extremely user friendly and the FAQs on this page are very informative. The six different Google Alerts variations for alerts are as follows:

News Alert

A News Alert is an e-mail compendium of the latest news articles which feature your search items and are in the top 10 results of a Google News search.

Comprehensive Alert

A Comprehensive Alert is an aggregate of the latest results from News, Web and Blogs that are automatically integrated into a single e-mail to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.

Blogs Alert

A Blogs Alert is an e-mail of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top 10 results of a Google Blog search.

Video Alert

A Video Alert is an e-mail of the videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top 10 results of a Google Video search.

Web Alert

A Web Alert is an e-mail message of the latest web pages that have your search items and appear in the top 20 results of a Google Web search.

Groups Alert

A Groups Alert is an e-mail of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top 50 results of your Google Groups search.

e-mail messages with these predefined search results can be configured to arrive in your inbox either once a day or several times a day depending on your preference settings. You can define these preferences while setting up your alerts. You will receive alerts if fresh items are found. If nothing is found, Google Alerts does not return a “not found” report. As you can tell, Google Alerts can be extremely useful when researching your niche, evaluating potential competition and formulating future strategy for your company.

Features of Google Alerts

Extremely accurate and reliable with an impressive coverage span
Alerts often carry valuable information from unusual and unexpected sources
Video search results have to be received in html but others allow normal text code
Video alerts and News alerts can be invoked from Google Video and Google News respectively
Google Alerts has an Advanced Search facility that enables refined searches
Benefits of using Google Alerts

The business intelligence and other pertinent information you have the potential of receiving from Google Alerts is worth its weight in gold:

You don’t have to search for relevant information on an ongoing basis.
You can keep tabs on widely diverse topics simultaneously.
You can set up hundreds of alerts on primary and secondary keywords.
Google Alerts has a privacy policy which does not allow it to divulge your email ID, so rest assured that you won’t receive spam when you set up Google Alerts

Increasing Website Traffic with Google Alerts

Since Google Alerts puts you at the receiving end of information, you can generate qualified traffic through this valuable Google tool by using it mainly as a research and analysis modality. Use Google Alerts to explore the popularity and growth potential of your niche. Set up Google Alerts using the primary and secondary keywords of your niche. Leverage the business intelligence thus derived to articulate winning traffic strategies for your online business.

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Increase Website Traffic by Submitting to Google News

Google News Overview

Google News was launched in 2002 as a part of Google’s overall initiative to serve the global community with objectively sourced information. It does not require you to register for its services because a link from Google’s home page can take you there directly.

It is a news aggregator that is totally automated much like an auto pilot service on the Internet or an auto responder.It gathers news from websites with a high trust and authority factor that it has allowed into its directory as well as from sources like Associated Press (AP), Reuters and other traditional news agencies from which it acquires content.

Besides English, Google News is available in a number of other languages like Chinese and Hungarian. It provides region specific news as well and can be easily customized according to your news preferences. Simply set it for your own country and read the news from your community and region in real time. Google presents its news feed with a clearly marked time line which helps you to determine how recently a news event occurred.

Google News Features

Google News provides an RSS and Atom feed

This enables you to get context specific news which you can customize. Configure your RSS feed reader to cull relevant news items of your choice using Google’s News syndicators.

e-mail Alerts

You can receive email alerts for news categories that you flag. To achieve this, you should use Google Alerts and drive results to your inbox.

Receive the entire front page as text only

Using the text only attribute not only helps the page to load faster into your browser but also provides a relatively clean interface ideal for quick reading and scanning. It is also screen reader friendly in terms of accessibility. This means that you could read through a whole lot of content in comparatively less time.

Google News Front Page

You can also configure the front page as an image that would allow you a rapid view of the main stories. The front page contains an abstract of an article and a link to the main article. The main article could be a paid website in certain cases, but that is clearly indicated by Google News.

Front page articles would be at best a month old, usually less, just a day or a few days old.

200 years worth of Archived News

Google News provides an archive service which dates back two hundred years. Besides searching for particular news items, you can look up news items in a particular year. You can customize a Google News page by dropping items or including some. For example, you could drop all stories from the Sports category, or you could add a new section. This custom built page is stored as a URL which can be sent to others. Set up a Gmail mail account in order to use this feature.

Google News Benefits

You will have access to diverse sources of information
Google News is updated continuously
If you have a news website it would be well worth the effort to try and get included in Google’s directory. (See below)
Advantages of being Included in Google News

You will notice a significant increase in traffic on your news website once you set it up
Your site will be viewed as an authoritative site
Your website will be indexed immediately by Google News and will quickly find its way to the top of the main Google organic results page
How to Participate in the Google News Gold Rush

If you do not have a news website already, set one up. It is well worth the expense because the traffic rush to your website will amaze you. You can not only generate income through banners, text links and other forms of advertising but also drive traffic to your flagship website where you sell your products or services. You can monetize your news website through reciprocal link building and link exchange as well. Expect to see a high page rank for your Google compatible news website in only a few months since Google News generates traffic in the millions every day. You can source the news in one of many ways:

Hiring a freelance newswriter to create newsworthy content in your niche
Reproducing free content from press release websites
Borrowing content from news sites that do not copyright their material
Drawing from a rich repository of articles from article directories such as ezine Articles, Go Articles and Article Base for your features section
Soliciting contribution from your readership
Reproducing content from blogs, newsletters and ezines after seeking permission
Try not to link to other websites as much as possible. Keep the traffic constructively preoccupied on your website. Visit Google’s News Help page for instructions on how to create a Google News friendly website:

Google News Technical Requirements Article:
http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68323

Good luck with your Google News escapades!

Increase website traffic with Feed Burner

Acquisitions Galore from Google

What do you expect a cash rich and perhaps the most successful company of the century to do with rich coffers? Buy up other companies? Google has been doing precisely that and for a very good reason. There is synergy in numbers and the customer is always the winner. FeedBurner is a comprehensive set of highly potent web applications that manages feed distribution and targets specific audiences.

It was released in 2004 and subsequently purchased by Google in 2007. No doubt, Google understood its immense potential. Whether you are an ardent blogger, a dedicated podcaster, or even a regular web content publisher, FeedBurner can provide you with enhanced feeds, and tools to manage them.

Along the way, you can leverage FeedBurner and its various applications to increase website traffic exponentially. Here, we not only describe the amazing features that you can play with after opening a FeedBurner account, but also the benefits that you would gain using its wide range of features and attributes.

What Would FeedBurner Do for my feed?

AT Google Traffic Guru, we tell you how to maximize your website traffic using Google’s impressive arsenal of tools, services and web applications.FeedBurner is no exception. It will make sure that your subscribers have a richer feed reading experience, tell you what exactly your readers like, catch more subscribers, and also generate revenues for you in the process!

In short, you will be in the feed heaven.

We are assuming at the outset that you know what an RSS feed is. An RSS feed is a feature of the Internet which culls relevant content from the web that you specify and organizes it for you to read. There is an excellent report on RSS feeds on Wikipedia which you might want to read first just in case you are unsure of precisely what RSS feeds are and how they can enhance website traffic for you. Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

Bouquet of Services from FeedBurner

Optimize

• Posts links from major social bookmarking sites like Dig, del.icio.us, Magnolia, Stumble Upon and others into your RSS feeds

• Allows your subscribers to e-mail, share, and tag your RSS feed content

• Encloses images, podcasts, and video casts as standard media attachments

• Ensures that your feeds are technically compatible with the subscriber’s feed aggregator

Analyze

• Estimates the number of subscribers and viewers of your website according to various time intervals such as the number of days and months

• Provides an account of the feed readers, e-mail services, browsers and bots used by your subscribers

• Tracks the number of enclosure downloads that have occurred on your website

Monetize

• permits ads from the Google AdSense program to be displayed on your RSS feed

• Shares a portion of the revenue from the advertiser’s network based on CPM

Publicize

• Displays Feed Count for you and for your subscribers

• Lets you cross-post your feed in an html code on any affiliated site which boosts qualified traffic to your website

• sends out immediate e-mail notifications to update the feed as soon as you create new content on your website

• Enables your subscribers to receive feeds through the option of e-mail subscriptions which is especially relevant to those subscribers who do not use RSS feeds

Myriad Benefits

Brand Identity

The Feed Image Burn allows you to ad your logo at the top of your feeds. Now, you can successfully develop brand awareness of your brand among your subscribers by adding your logo and even your theme colors to the various distributed feeds.

A Robust Revenue Model

If you have a large subscriber base, your server is going to be overwhelmed by regular feed update requests. FeedBurner can re-host your feeds thus saving you from the nightmare of slow server performance and large bills. Moreover, you are free to display ads within your feeds, bringing you a nice piece of the revenue pie.

Targeting and Boosting Website Traffic

The “Analyze” tab of your FeedBurner account does for your feeds, what Google Analytics does for your website. You receive a substantial quantum of data to analyze and determine who and how many subscribers have read your feeds, what headlines do they click on, etc. You can then concentrate your efforts on optimizing your feeds which in turn will generate more traffic for your website. .

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Using Google Knol to Build Website Traffic

One of the youngest babies of Google’s family of products, Knol is a reference site that contains articles penned by the contributors on a plethora of subjects. Knol is a project of Google, released on July 23, 2008, and is currently in a beta stage. According to Google, Knol means a unit of knowledge.

The term “Knol” is used to refer to the project as well as any article published in it.This might be a bit confusing, but you’ll gain a better understanding of Knol once you visit the website. In order to learn how you can increase website traffic with Google Knol, you will first have to understand how Knol works which is precisely what we intend doing here.

A New Kid on the Encyclopedia Block

Is Google Knol any different from the usual knowledge hubs like Wikipedia, Squidoo Lens, Helium or Hub Pages? You bet it is! Google randomly authenticates the author’s identity and credentials through e-mail and phone calls. It is also different from the other knowledge repositories in that the levels of scholarship Knol strives to achieve are lofty. Many submissions are even five thousand words long. They are substantiated with tons of references pointing to a variety of online and offline sources.

Feature Rich and Highly Informative

Google Knol’s stated mission is to present to its readership accurate and relevant information that is of very high quality. Other features of Knol:

Places special importance on the author’s view and perspective in the article
Enables multiple articles to be written on the same topic
Hands over the editorial control and responsibility to the author
Allows for hosting AdSense banners based on a unique revenue sharing model
Invites feedback from readers through ratings, comments, suggested edits, and reviews
Over 100,000 submissions to date in Knol
We believe that in order to find multiple articles with identical titles on Knol, Google’s famous search function should be used rather than monotonously browsing through the titles.

Google has left all the editing options with the contributor. The author can close any editing, allow the co-authors to edit, or enable the public to edit.

Have something to say about the Knol that you just cannot keep to your self? You are free to provide feedback, even if the Knol is closed for editing. This is done through rating, comments, and reviews.

Content Submission Guidelines

Google has released specific guidelines that address what can and cannot be published as a Knol. It prohibits material that deals in pornography, violence, discrimination, intolerance and copyright violation. These are things you shouldn’t be doing any way if you wish to Increase website traffic with Google Knol.

Nofollow Policy

Google marks a number of pages with in the Knol project with the “nofollow” directive. This implies that the links with these web pages are not crawled by search engine spiders. This policy has changed into a “follow” directive for a number of trusted authors. More on this in a moment.

A Truckload of Benefits for the Knol User

Take a look, and you just might be surprised!
Pages and pages of rich content with no end in sight
Ability to earn quick cash with your Knol submission through Google AdSense
Better quality articles at your fingertips
Personalized pieces with the focus on authorship
Plenty of choices among different articles on a single topic
Freedom for you to rate, comment, or suggest an editorial intervention
The power of Google behind each Knol
Watch out Wikipedia and Others
Knol has been compared to About.com, Squidoo Lens, Associated Content and Hub Pages. It is also a possible rival to Wikipedia and Scholarpedia. Unlike sites such as Wikipedia, you can truly benefit from the personal insights of the author along with the Knol submission made by the author. Adding the author name to Knol content lends a unique personality to the article. This is in direct contrast to Wikipedia that carries a neutral point of view. The policy of uploading multiple articles on a single topic will encourage better quality standards, as different Knols will compete for higher ranking in Google results. Wikipedia, on the other hand stresses on one page per topic.

The option of maintaining closed Knol, or Knols editable only by co-authors eliminates the threat of defacement of content. Needless to say, this threat is always there in peer-driven reference sites. Now, you don’t need to worry about any one editing your Knol without your knowledge even if your primary objective of contributing to Knol is to increase website traffic with Google Knol.

Knol the Robust Traffic Builder

Google Knol carries the enormous potential of being a first rate traffic builder for your website. However, there are a number of caveats. First, Google has openly stated that the nofollows will be used abundantly on all submissions unless the author builds a large following and a positive reputation on Knol. Google Knol may not be able to generate valuable back links for you in the first round. However, building and boosting high quality targeted website traffic is a whole different story. The resource box at the end of each Knol has the potential of becoming a traffic block buster. Remember, most Google Knol pages carry a PR rating of five and if you make it to the front page of Google Knol, the PR is a mighty seven! Contract the services of a top notch content developer to write a Knol for you if you don’t believe you are qualified to do justice to your niche through thought provoking and insightful submissions. Therefore, do consider Knolling at least once to see how many new traffic numbers you can touch in one go!