Last Monday, Cuil (pronounced “cool’) was announced as the new search engine. Can this start-up search engine be the next Google? Cuil claims that it “has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.”

Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including search engineer Tom. Costello former Google engineers Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier. They picked up $33 million in venture capital to launch the search engine.

So how is Cuil different than Google? They’re claiming bragging rights for search index size: 120 billion Web pages. While Patterson says that’s 3X the size of Google’s index, most people acknowledge that size doesn’t matter.

The approach to search is different. Culi instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request. So Cuil apparently assesses the actual content of a page.

Was this Hype or Reality?
Rand Fishkin, CEO of seomoz.org did an interesting analysis comparing Cuil to the other major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Live and Ask). He compared the search engines on the basis of Relevancy, coverage, freshness, diversity and user experience. Cuil ranked dead last in this analysis

Cuil is supposed come from an old Irish word that means “knowledge”. Members of an online Irish language forum say the word is most often translated to mean “corner” or “nook,” but has sometimes been used for “hazel,” as in the nut.

It appears that Cuil was prematurely released to the public. Will they recover and take off? Time will tell.

Has your website suddenly lost rankings for its primary keywords? You may have been labeled a spammer by Google. There are steps you can follow to get your site restored. Google penalizes sites for using black hat SEO tricks, for exchanging links, for selling text ads or for using other deceptive.If you fix the problem and submit a Google Reconsideration Request, chances are that you can restore your website’s rankings.

1. Check for access issues: Log in to your Google Webmaster Tools Account. On the Overview Page you can see the last date that Googlebot successfully spidered your home page. You can also check whether there are any crawling errors including pages not found, unreachable URL’s, URLs timed out errors and URLs restricted by robots.txt tags.
2. Check for messages: Check the message center of your Webmaster Tools account. If Google notices that there is a problem with your website, they will sometimes send you a message detailing some issues which you need to fix.
3. Read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: If there are no crawling errors and you don’t see any messages, check to see if your site is or has at some point been in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines.
4. Fix your site: If your site is in violation, make changes to your site so that it falls within Google’s guidelines. Note any past problems that you may have already fixed.
5. Submit a reconsideration request: Now you can log into your Webmaster Tools Account and Under Tools, click on “Request reconsideration. Explain what you think was wrong with your site and what steps you have taken to fix it. You will receive a message in the Message Center confirming that Google received your request.

Pretty just isn’t enough for a business website. You may have a great Flash design that is professional, with powerful imagery and a logical sales flow. The issue is that visitors are unable to find your site in the organic search results. This type of site must depend on referral traffic such as paid sponsored links for visitors.

Penn State researchers did a study and found that over 80% of the searches went to organic search results. They found that consumers are suspicious of sponsored links and they favor organic search results as being more trusted.

Competition for first page Google results is fierce. It’s like building a high performance racing vehicle. Street cars are no match for top race cars. Race cars are carefully engineered, built to very exacting tolerances, precision tuned and thoroughly tested in order to get a top placement in a race. It is not different for a website to compete for a top search placement.

With Google now indexing 25 billion pages it takes special effort to come up in the first page of their search results. SEO design requires careful research and planning prior to the design process. Keyword research, site architecture, navigation schemes, wire framing and cross-link schemes need to be planned in advance. Focused content should be written to be keyword rich and have maximum marketing impact.

To get great SEO results, each page within your website will be individually competing for a position with the 25 billion other pages. Each page needs to be focused and optimized around the specific content on that page.

SEO Design requires a well thought out inbound linking strategy. These should be from highly relevant sites. Highly competitive sites will require multiple linking strategies to be a top performer.

Your business website design should reflect your marketing goals. You should be making decisions about your website to improve your marketing results. This usually means improve usability and optimize for search.

1. Define Your Goals: Start with your business goals for your website redesign. What do you need to accomplish? This could be to attract new clients, generate leads or to help brand your company as the premier provider in your industry.
2. Keep the Best: What does your current website do well? This could be servicing existing customers or converting visitors into paying customers. Preserve what you are already doing right and improve from there.
3. Website Styles: Just like fashions, website design changes. For instance, Flash intro pages were popular until web designers realized that users didn’t like them and they caused search rankings to plummet.
4. Branding and Image: When people visit your site, they see it as a reflection of your company. It is important for your site to reflect the identity and ideals (brand) of your company. Your company can appear as an industry leader.
5. Website Traffic: Your goal should be to get more visitors and more leads. Design your site with organic search in mind. Select relevant keyword phrases that will be used in page names, body text and link text. Websites should be built in XHTML / CSS to be search engine friendly.
6. Customers Expectations: Look at your industry, what is expected? A website in the financial products industry is expected to be very business professional. A medical website has a clean design and uses cheerful colors.
7. Watch your competition: Look at what your competition offers and stay ahead of them. Look at the image your website gives your business. Is your information searchable? What features do your competitors offer?
8. Attract and Convert: This should be your central focus for your site. What action do you want from your visitors? Build this into your navigation. Each page should have its own call to action.

You hired a designer to build your website and now you have changes to make. You can’t get a phone call back or changes take weeks or a months to get made. What can you do?

Most web designers are one or two person companies who work out of their homes. They focus on making new sales and then producing that website. Even though they have the best of intentions, they simply don’t have the bandwidth to service what they design. They many times are not the right choice for business website maintenance.

You need to align your business with a company that actively maintains and services websites, a website maintenance service. There are a lot of them out there. What should you look at? You need to match their services with your needs.

1. Company: Look at the size of the company; do they have multiple people doing this work? How long have they been in business? Are they local to you? Give them a call and ask about turn around guarantees. Were they easy to contact? How comfortable would you be in working with them?
2. Services: Look at the available services. Almost all will make text updates, replacing and updating images and adding new pages. Others will offer hosting, monthly back-ups for your website, web design, fast response on changes, text writing, SEO services, fixing current web applications, building new database programs or even web marketing consulting.
3. Hosting: It is a good idea to host with your website maintenance service if they provide quality business hosting. This will usually give you access to regular website backups. Your maintenance service can then give full technical support for your website.
4. Contracts: You will usually have a choice between by the hour service or a retainer maintenance agreement. Pay-by-the-hour service is usually the best choice if you only have occasional changes to make. Prepaid agreements usually give priority service and discounted prices, but you pay for the hours whether you use them or not.

Website maintenance is an important part of your business marketing. Choices shouldn’t be made based on lowest price, but on the best value to your marketing effort.

Many of principles taught in the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie can be applied and used in business blogging. Blog marketing is a powerful influencer. Blogs build an interactive conversation with your reader. Applying Dale Carnegie’s principles to your writing builds relationships and loyal readers.

Building Relationships

1. Be Positive: Avoid being negative and criticizing others. Focus on building others up and on how the best do something. Give tips, advice and solutions.
2. Be Interested: Be genuinely interested in your reader and their perspective. What are they interested in? What do they want to know?
3. Focus on solutions: Talk about solutions to problems that interest your reader. Ask questions and encourage discussion.

Selling Your Ideas

1. Motivate your reader: As you write each posting, consider: “Why would someone want to do what I’m asking?”
2. Dramatize your ideas: Effective story telling and real life examples help to make your ideas visual and memorable.
3. Avoid arguments: Even with readers make negative comments, stay objective. Be thankful for new opinions and be respectful.
4. Start with agreement: Respond to comments by first identifying areas of agreement. Try to view things from your reader’s point of view.

Leadership

1. Admit mistakes: Be open to discuss mistakes you have made. This can be motivating to others who are facing the same problems to see what worked and what didn’t.
2. Ask questions: Try asking questions or suggesting alternatives instead of telling people directly what they should do.
3. Benefits: Focus on the benefits the other person might receive from your ideas.
4. Be Respectful: By respecting others capabilities and their situation, you will help them to succeed. Use encouragement to try new ideas and to empower action.

Pay per Click can give you almost instant traffic, but studies show that organic traffic gets more attention and converts better. When doing search, most people look at the top organic results first. The top three organic results receive the most visitor traffic for each targeted keyword search.

Eye tracking studies done on Google search results (see image above right) by Enquiro and Did-it.com shows that the top three organic listing receive the most attention by searchers. Visibility dropped quickly with organic rankings, starting at a high of 100% for the top listing, dropping to 85% at the bottom of the “above the fold” listings, and then dropping dramatically below the fold from 50% at the top to 20% at the bottom.

Rank 1 - 100%
Rank 2 - 100%
Rank 3 - 100%
Rank 4 - 85%
Rank 5 - 60%
Rank 6 - 50%
Rank 7 - 50%
Rank 8 - 30%
Rank 9 - 30%
Rank 10 - 20%

Here are some of their other findings:

1. Searchers typically visit only the top three search results.
2. More than 80 percent stopped after looking at three results.
3. 54 percent viewed just one page of search results per visit to the search engine.
4. Only 19 percent went on to the second page.
5. Fewer than 10 percent bothered with the third page of results.

Penn State researchers did a 2005 study and found that over 80% of the searches conducted went to organic search results.. “Consumers have a bias against the links that businesses pay search engines to provide,” said Jim Jansen, assistant professor in the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST).

Blogging has changed how businesses communicate with their customers. Instead of talking to them, businesses engage, interact and converse thru blogs. Business blogging is a more personalized and more effective in getting the attention of your target audience.

What does it take to be successful? There are several important keys to success in blogging.

1. It takes time and commitment: There is no getting away from it; blogging takes time, discipline and commitment to make it work. The majority of bloggers put in less than an hour a day. The important thing is that they put in time each and every day reading, researching and writing.
2. Read: The more you read the better writer you will be. By reading blogs, you begin to understand the mind of the blogger, how to present information, how to get your point across in interesting ways.
3. Soak up knowledge: Dive into your subject, learn, read, and present information and your point of view. You might not be an expert now but you will become one. Blogging keeps you aware of your surroundings and the latest news in your niche.
4. Be Interesting: Write informally. Readers want fresh, valuable and remarkable information. Don’t just report facts, share your enthusiasm and make it contagious.
5. It’s not about you: You are writing to engage your visitors and create loyal readers who return regularly to read what you have to say. Which topics create the most interest in terms of traffic and comments? Dig deeper into these with follow-up postings.

If you continue to write great blogs that engage your readers, more and more people will want to listen to what you have to say. You will build a loyal following that will help reach your goals of fame and fortune.

How old is the Internet? In about 1993 the Internet became open to general public use with HTML websites and email with about 1 million computer connections. In 1984, the Internet was formally named and changed to using TCP/IP for its messaging. It was largely on a private network with about 1000 computer connections. The original pre-Internet (ARPANET) started in 1969 with just 4 computers being connected.

How big is the Internet? This is a hard number to measure since anyone can connect their computer or add their website anywhere in the World. Netcraft crawls the Internet looking for websites and they reported 172 million websites that they discovered in June 2008. This is up 44% in the last 12 months. There is 2.8 billion IP addresses reported worldwide which is a measure of the number of connected computers. (DomainTools June 2008)

How many people use the Internet? In the United States 218,302,574 people use the Internet, which is 72% of the total population. This is up from 70% of the total population 12 months earlier. This is according to Internet World Stats as of November 2007. Worldwide there are 1.4 billion people who use the Internet which is about 21% of the world population.

How many searches are done? There were 15.4 billion total searches done in the United States in May, 2008 according to Comscore. This is up 110% in the last 12 months. Google accounts for 57% of all searches, which is 3.7X its nearest rival Yahoo.

MarketingSherpa data puts the average ecommerce shopping-cart abandonment rate at 59.8%. Why do nearly 60% of online shoppers abandon their carts at some point in the process? The answer is that they lose trust, are surprised with unexpected charges or become frustrated with the process. Here are ways to improve your business web design and make the shopping experience easier for your customers.

1. Show Shipping Prices: No-one likes hidden or surprise fees, especially as they have their credit card in hand and waiting to pay. Allow customers to see shipping charges up front by entering only their zip code.
2. Eliminate Registration to Purchase: Remove Member Registration until after the sale is completed. Permit an anonymous shopping experience. In a JupiterResearch Consumer Survey 19.3 percent of respondents didn’t want to register to make a purchase.
3. Promotion Code: According to a study done at Vanderbilt, the presence of a promo code causes people to leave. People without codes feel like they are paying too much and leave at a 20% or so higher rate than if no promo code field exists on the page.
4. Build Confidence and Trust: Streamline your checkout process. Let customers know how many steps there. Display a progress indicator to let them know where they are, and how much further they need to go. Clearly identify each next step.
5. Provide Purchase Options: Offer phone numbers or an online chat assistance. Some visitors may be uncomfortable with completing a purchase online and want to place an order by phone or mail in an order with a check.
6. Re-assure Shoppers: Prominently display text that says “Returns are Easy” that is linked to your returns policy. Add security icons to overcome consumer security concerns. Use third party services like Hacker Safe and VeriSign.
7. Product Thumbnail Images: Make it easy for visitors to remember what they are purchasing. Display product thumbnail images next to the product names in the shopping cart as a visual reminder. Remember, visitors don’t know the product names as well as you do.