Index Stats

The following terms may be entered into google search to give you some useful basic statistics about your website:

"site:www.domain-name.com" - will return the pages of your site that have been indexed by the google bots.

"link:www.domain-name.com" - will return a search of sites that link to your index page.

"cache:www.domain-name.com" - will return the cache of your index page, giving the date that the index was last crawled and a representation of how the page looked at that time.

"info:www.domain-name.com" - will return a page with a list of searches as in the following example:

Show Google's cache of www.cassette2cd.co.uk
Find web pages that are similar to www.cassette2cd.co.uk
Find web pages that link to www.cassette2cd.co.uk
Find web pages from the site www.cassette2cd.co.uk
Find web pages that contain the term www.cassette2cd.co.uk

"related:www.domain-name.com" - will return a list of sites similar to the domain name you have used. In fact this search comes up with no results when I use my own domain name - I must be unique! If you enter google's own UK domain (www.google.co.uk), you get a list starting with google domains for other countries.

This of course, works for any domain you choose as long as it is actually indexed by google bots. You need to enter the bold phrases above (without " marks) into a google search to get the desired results. Using these terms will very quickly flag up the sites who have genuinely given you a reciprocal link, so worth trying if only for that...

Try it out and let me know what you discover

Write About Us – free linking

We discussed getting your site indexed via linking to another site with a higher PR in the post entitled SEO - Indexing .One site offering such a service is Write About Us , they offer free or paid links to websites and blogs. In exchange, you are required to write an article about them – a return link is appreciated but not a requirement. Write About Us will post your URL on their front page for as long as it takes to get 60 more submissions, as soon as you become link no. 61 on the page, you drop off the end. If you go for the paid service, there are 100 links and they are arranged in order of the highest bid. They even supply you with ‘resources’ you can quote so that you don’t even have to tax your brain too much. It’s a no-brainer, why wouldn’t you do it? Read more about it here

Adwords

Now, it occurs to me that I have liberally discussed Adsense here and on other blogs and forums without really explaining how Adwords (it’s ‘other half’) operates. Most bloggers would just be interested in the potential earnings from Adsense and by-pass the whole Adwords program. It actually helps to know what Adwords is about as this is really the engine that drives Adsense.
Advertisers choose keywords that are linked to the service or product that they are offering. The keywords are ranked in popularity and you pay for the words you want. For instance if you were selling house insurance, you would no doubt find that the keyword ‘insurance’ will have been subject to a bidding war and costs for this particular keyword will be very high. What do you get for this charge? You generally customise a simple advert box with a few limited lines of text and your URL. When your search keyword is entered into Google search (and other related search engines), your advert will be displayed. The most common form is the advert box on the right-hand side of the search page, but you can also buy space at the top of the search page.
It pays to be clever about choosing your keywords and Adwords can even automatically search your site and generate a list of possible keywords for you. So, to take our example of house insurance, the bidding on the phrase ‘house insurance’ will probably be lower, but still significant. It pays to think laterally, how about ‘house cover’… Where Adsense comes in is that these same Adwords adverts are the ones that appear in Adsense banners all over the internet and especially in blogs. Knowing how Adwords works may be the key to getting Adsense to work for you

SEO - DIY

Basically what I am trying to say.... is that there is no need to pay anyone to submit your site to search engines, get quick google indexing, regularly update your keywords or offer reporting on rankings. You can do it all yourself for free, so why would you pay anyone? The truth is that the jargon used is off-putting to your average non-nurd! The whole internet is painted as if it is based on some sort of alchemey rather than a series of straightforward steps. Having said that, we all slip up along the way and make mistakes, sign up for programs that were useless and waste some time here and there doing so - but, at least if you have a go yourself, you will have learned something and you will not have been ripped off...!

SEO - indexing

The truth about SEO companies guaranteeing high search engine placements for $100 a month is that you can do a lot of this work yourself for free. We'll examine some of the things that these paid-for services offer, and offer a way in which you can do this yourself with very little effort.

Google do not charge for submitting a site for indexing, if you need to get indexing done quicker, then you will just need a link from a high-ranked page, check out what 'wikipedia' have to say about Craigslist as an example. Higher-ranked pages get indexed more regularly and can drive search engine bots to your site within a very short short space of time. If you can find a high-ranked index style site where you can post your URL for free you have just saved yourself quite a few dollars... and should have your site indexed in no time.

Click here if you are not sure how to see page-rank for sites you visit (discusses downloading the google toolbar)