How does Broad Match Modifier?
For each keyword is simply a plus sign in front of it (eg + pants). This must occur in the search query exactly as shown or slightly varied. Variations include, for example, different spelling, singular or plural abbreviations. In contrast to conventional Broad Match option NOT is included synonyms, which reduces the number of impressions / clicks.

When does the new Broad Match Modifier?
Recommended is a new option for current campaigns, which currently only contain keywords phrase / exact match and for which one wants to increase the volume of qualified visitors through Adwords without driving the CPA (cost per action) too much in the air, as would be the case with Broad Match. For new campaigns, the Broad Match Modifier a very useful addition to negative keywords. On sensitive topics with a high risk of clicks on irrelevant search queries, the new Broad Match modifiers are in any case, use appropriate – Advanced Traffic facilities with minimum wastage.

Click here for the official German Google Adwords blog articles or for people that I prefer the English version as Adwords, to Google Adwords English blog posts.

Narrowing your search
This will help focus your results more accurately on what you want. Most search engines now allow you to refine your searching in many ways. (Check the Help or FAQ areas of your search engine for details).

Here are some tips that can make your searches more productive:

Avoid common words
Search for “used car prices,” not “cars”

Use Boolean expressions to focus your results

* To REQUIRE a term to be present in all documents, put a plus (+) immediately before it: +economy +China
* To EXCLUDE a term from search results put a minus (-) immediately before it: -local -games

Upper or Lower case?
Enter terms in all lower case unless searching for an individual. Example: +astrophysics +Eisenhower

Sequence your phrases
Enclose any phrase of 2 words or more within quotation marks to limit the search to that exact sequence of words.

Sites are examined and cataloged by a human editor
Descriptions of the sites are often included
Fewer search options are generally offered
Updates are less frequent
How do you know if you are using a subject directory?

In most cases subject directories offer users a list of broad topics — Sports, Entertainment, Education, Money — to you can click on and explore in increasing depth and detail.

Subject directories provide content ranging from general coverage of the Internet (such as Yahoo, World Wide Web Virtual Library) to topic-specific directories (such as Scicentral, Maritime History on the Internet, GardenNet). SearchEngines.com offers you a gateway to this fast-growing world of topically and geographically focused subject directories and search engines.

How up-to-date is the directory?

To determine how up-to-date or “fresh” a subject directory is, look for sites about recent political or social topics or current trends in a given research area.

 As you see, the number of results is astronomical (645,602) and those on the first screen are sites dealing mainly with travel, tourism and other general information about Brazil.

Let’s see how we can improve this search.

What you’ll need
Competitive analysis requires a basic knowledge of HTML. Although you’ll be looking at each site’s general features, you’ll also want to examine the HTML code for every page. (To see a site’s HTML code, use your browser’s View/Source or Page Source command.)

There are some software and web-based programs available to help you analyze competing sites. They’ll usually put the HTML code in simpler form and give you statistics for other factors that influence rankings.

Note: To read more about ranking factors visit our keywords section, which includes help on HTML titles,  meta tags,  ALT tags and other areas. Also check out our articles on link popularity and site popularity.

You can also learn more about advanced techniques, such as link text and heading tags, in our subscriber section.

What to look for in a competitor’s site

1. Look for doorway pages and bait-and-switch techniques.
Does your competitor’s site include pages with few images that don’t look like they belong to the rest of the site? They may be doorway pages , specially optimized to meet a particular search engine’s indexing requirements.

Some sites use a technique called “cloaking” or “bait and switch” to trick search engines into indexing a page that’s different than the one users see. Here’s are some suggestions on how to spot this:

* Look at the title – Is it the same as it appears in the results?

* Why was the page ranked high? – If you can’t figure out why a page ranks high, consider the possibility that the search engine’s spider saw a different page than you did.

* Use Google – Take advantage of Google’s cache feature, which allows users to view the page Google’s spider indexed. See if the page Google cached matches the one you reach by clicking the link.

2. Check the HTML code for keyword usage.
Analyze your competitor’s HTML title, meta tags, ALT tags and  keyword frequency and weight. See how many characters are used in each element, how keywords are placed in relationship to one another and what keywords are used.

3. Analyze link popularity
Find out how many links your competition has by running a link popularity check at linkpopularity.com. Identify your weak areas and refocus your search engine placement efforts.

4. Look at URL name and alphabetical placement
See if your competitor has keywords in his URLs. If so, find out whether his rankings get a boost based on alphabetical hierarchy. Set realistic goals for yourself by examining these factors.

Using what you learn
Once you’ve analyzed your competition’s pages for all of the above factors, you’ll have some ideas about how to beat them. Don’t copy your competitors’ HTML code, but do use their techniques if they can help your site. For example, if you figure out one of your competitors is scoring high on Hotbot because of how he uses meta tags, you can focus on refining your meta tags for Hotbot. (To optimize for each search engine individually, create doorway pages.)

Remember, competitive analysis is all about focusing your efforts. Don’t worry about tinkering with your code for any search engines where you hold a Top 10 position. Work on improving your standing with search engines that don’t rank you as highly.

An Overview

Competitive Analysis:

* Helps focus your efforts
* Involves examining factors that influence search engine rankings
* Lets you apply your competitors’ techniques

A step-by-step guide to choosing and using keywords is available in our subscribers’ section. To learn more, click here.

Some webmasters create spam after they learn which criteria search engines use to rank pages. For example, search engines give high scores to pages filled with keywords. Webmasters came up with a way to add more keywords without sacrificing a site’s appearance. They use invisible text ( the background and the text are the same color, so the text is not seen by the visitor). Previously, robots that indexed invisible keywords ranked those sites higher for keyword frequency and weight.

Search engines now know of this technique and define it as spam. Currently, sites that use invisible text are banned from most of the major search engines.

Our subscriber section includes a special report on spam techniques. We tell you what to avoid, how to work around common misconceptions and more.

The following techniques are usually considered spam:

* Meta refresh tags
* Invisible text and overuse of tiny text
* Irrelevant keywords in the title and meta tags
* Excessive repetition of keywords
* Overuse of mirror sites (same sites that point to different URLs)
* Submitting too many pages in one day
* Identical or nearly identical pages
* Submitting to an inappropriate category (for directories)
* Link farms

Frames, dynamic content and Flash intros
Although search engines won’t penalize for the use of frames, dynamic content and multimedia files, they will have difficulty indexing them. To learn more about frames and what you can do to work around them, click here.

Recently, some engines started to index dynamic content. However, most search engines are still unable to index multimedia and dynamic pages, and those that are, don’t index all of them. Here’s a list of files that search engines don’t index:

* Text in graphics (use ALT tags)
* Pages that require registration, cookies or passwords
* XML
* Java applets
* Acrobat files (PDF), except Google
* Dynamic content (URLs with “?” in them), except Google, Altavista, FAST and Inktomi
* Multimedia files (Flash, Shockwave, streaming video)

To see what kind of dynamic content is indexed by various search engines.

Workaround pages
If your site consists largely of files that search engines don’t index, create workaround pages. Workaround pages should contain the most important information about your products or services. Workaround pages should be optimized just like doorway pages. For our article on doorway pages, click here.

Search engines will index workaround pages even if they can’t index the rest of a site. Always link to these pages from your site map to make sure search engines spider them, and submit workaround pages rather than non-optimized pages.

An Overview

Mistakes

* Don’t use spam or frames
* Create workaround pages for dynamic and framed sites

Every search engine has its own preferences for page optimization and submission. For the most comprehensive, up-to-date guide to the major engines and directories.

Each engine decides what will be the most and the least important factor in ranking sites. Therefore, ranking formulas differ.

In the following tables you will get more specific information on search engines and directories:

1. Search engine partnerships – Find out what technologies search engines use. Make wiser optimization and submission decisions by learning more about partnerships.

2. What search engines want – This table was compiled from search engines’ Help and FAQ pages. Let search engines tell you what they are looking for and what they don’t want.

3. Exact search engine information – This table provides specific information for top search engines. For example, how many characters does Hotbot want the meta description tag to be? It’s especially helpful when creating doorway pages.

Click here if you need more information about factors that affect search engine rankings.

Some engines partner with other sites to become hybrids — sites that combine a search engine and a directory. All the major search engines are hybrids, and while some compile their own directories or databases, others buy these services from other engines.

Yahoo!, for example, is the most popular directory on the Web. It buys Google’s results for its “Web Pages” section. Other search engines also piggyback on one another to provide more complete results. Many use services such as Inktomi and ODP to enhance their results and make them more accurate by overlaying various technologies.

The following table provides information on partnerships among search engines. This information can help you understand how each search engine works and make appropriate submissions. For example, to get into AOL Search, submit to Inktomi (or soon to Google) and Open Directory Project, instead of AOL.

Search engine partnerships

Since meeting the specifications of all the search engines at once is practically impossible, let optimized doorway pages do the job. The following table provides comprehensive information about the major search engines. It even includes the number of characters that should be included in some tags.

For more information, check out the table compiled from search engines’ FAQ pages.

Important: All search engines use keyword frequency, proximity and weight in their algorithms. The “keywords” section in this table only highlights additional specifications. To learn more about creating doorway pages and keyword importance.

Specific requirements for top search engines

When it comes to doorway pages, it’s not the quantity — it’s the quality

What are doorway pages?

Doorway pages are pages specially optimized for one search engine and 1-3 keywords. They are also known as “gateway,” “bridge,” “entry,” “jump” or “supplemental” pages. Doorway pages stand on their own, separate from the rest of a site. They usually feature a logo, some text and a link that encourages visitors to enter the site.

No magic bullet
Thanks to innovations like themes, link popularity and click-tracking, doorway pages are no longer the “magic bullet” they once were. Search engines are getting better at looking at the whole picture, not just one page.

That’s not to say that all doorway pages are evil. Sophisticated doorway pages (those that contain unique optimized text) are still an excellent way to rank with the search engines. And if your web site has dynamic or otherwise unspiderable content, doorway pages may be the only solution.

In case of emergency

If you’re compelled to use doorway pages, never create more of them than there are “real” pages on your web site. Search engines understand that some pages can’t be indexed and will generally allow you to create one page pointing to each page on your site. As long as your doorway pages present unique and useful information, search engines won’t ban them.

Beware false promises

Many optimization services promise to create surefire doorway pages as part of their service packages. If you’re shopping for such a service, look out for exaggerated or unreasonable claims about the effectiveness of these pages. Beware of any company offering to create “50 custom pages that will rank high on all search engines” or making a similar promise. Such claims are usually unsubstantiated.

You should also be skeptical of any service that promises to create ten or more doorway pages without first finding out how many pages your site has. Remember, search engines frown on an excess of such pages. Any optimizer who doesn’t know that shouldn’t be trusted.

Avoid spam

Learn what tactics each search engine considers spam and refrain from using them for those doorway pages. Refer to the search engine statistics table for more information. Also, don’t forget to use unique content on all of your doorway pages.

An Overview

Doorway Pages:

* Can help your site rank high for any keyword in any engine
* Should be optimized for one keyword, one engine
* Should be tailored to each engine’s specifications
* Should never be used for directories