How to Create Search Engine Friendly Title and META Tags (Part 1)

In this article, I'm going to show you step-by-step how to create search engine optimized Titles and META Tags. This is a two part article. This part discusses the Title Element, also known as the Title Element.

The TITLE Element

TITLE elements, (commonly called TITLE Tags), are one of the most important factors that search engines "look" at when it comes to determining the relevancy of a web page against a search query. In their ranking algorithms, nearly all the major search engines attribute a high relevancy weight to the content of the TITLE tag.

In the HTML code of a web site, TITLE tags look like this one for a fictional florist:

[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]

(Please note that square brackets [ ] have been used in place of open and closing tags < > to prevent this page code from breaking. You'll need to replace all square brackets with open and closing tags.)

To view the HTML code of any site, choose "View, Source" from your browser toolbar or right click anywhere on the page and choose "view source code".

The META Description Tag

META Description Tags are designed to describe the content of web pages. Search engine robots will gather up this information when indexing web sites and often use it when referencing web pages in the search listings.

While not all search engines continue to utilize the META Description Tag, a majority of search engines rely on the content of this tag (together with a site's visible content) to provide information about a site that they can match with search queries. It is therefore important for webmasters to include keywords and phrases in the META description that they would expect searchers to use to find their site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Description Tag looks like this:

[META name="description" content="Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida."]

You can view the META Description Tag of a site by viewing the source code.

The META Keywords Tag

While only indexed by a small handful of search engines these days, the META Keywords Tag is still worth including within a site's HTML code, if only to provide those search engines with as much information as possible about site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Keywords Tag looks like this:

[META name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother's Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida"]

The current lack of support for the META Keywords Tag by so many search engines can be attributed to increasing spam abuse by ignorant webmasters. These webmasters thought the keyword tag was a good place to stuff hundreds of keywords in the hope of achieving a higher search ranking, thereby "spamming" the search engines with useless, non-relevant data. This prompted many search engines to filter out the META Keywords Tag or lower its importance within the ranking algorithm.

You can view the META Keywords Tag of a site by viewing the source code.


Create Your Own Optimized Tags

Now, it's time to create optimized TITLE and META Tags for your own site. Let's start with the TITLE Tag for your Home Page.

Create Your TITLE Tag

Take the list of target keywords and phrases that you want your web site to be found for in search engines. You should have already allocated them to the appropriate pages of your site to be optimized. I use a spreadsheet for this purpose but you should use whatever works for you.

Now, open a text file in Notepad or something similar. If you like, you can use an existing sample TITLE Tag as your template. Let's say our existing Title is:

[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]

Now take your list of keywords for the home page and put them in order of importance, with the ones you want to rank highest for at the top. For our fictional florist these are:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets

Now you are simply going to combine these keywords into a sentence or short blurb so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available. Always try to use as few words as possible in your Title Tags, because each additional keyword dilutes the ranking relevancy of all the others.

In this case, I would initially combine the keywords as follows:

Florists in Miami Florida specializing in wedding bouquets.

Notice how I've got the keywords in the correct order for the search queries? I've tried to include the most important keywords towards the start of the tag. There was no need for me to repeat the keyword "Florists" more than once because the sentence I've used covers both "Florists Miami" and "Florists Florida". Most search engines will ignore "in" as a stop word, so it shouldn't matter that we've included it.

Although it's tempting to put a comma between Miami and Florida, on some search engines commas act as a keyword separator, so we don’t want to use one here because we don't want "Florists" and "Florida" to be separated.

Now, there is just one problem with this draft Title. Our 3rd keyword phrase "wedding bouquets" is right at the end of the sentence, meaning it may lose some relevancy weight (search engines consider keywords closer to the start of the tag as the most important). How do we fix this? Let's try this:

Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.

We don't want to use a period after "Florida" for the same reason that we don't use a comma. But a hyphen should not make a difference to search engines yet still allow the sentence to read logically to a searcher. So now we have our three target keyword phrases covered in a very short space.

In fact, the above sentence now covers the following keyword combinations:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- florists in Miami
- florists in Florida
- florists in Miami Florida
- wedding bouquets
- Miami wedding bouquets
- Florida wedding bouquets

When integrating your keywords, remember that their order is important. If you want your site to have the best possible chance of being found for the search query "Miami florists", you need to put the keywords in that exact order and not "florists Miami", because the spider searches the keywords in exact order. Unless they are stop words, also try to avoid using extra words between your keywords.

If you wanted to, you could integrate your company name into the Title tag, but (unless your company name is super short or includes a keyword), don’t sacrifice a keyword to do so. Instead, try placing the company name at the end of the tag so you can be sure that all your important keywords will be indexed first.

In the case of our florist, let’s imagine their name was Funky Florists. We could easily accommodate the name into the beginning of our optimized Title as follows:

[TITLE]Funky Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.[/TITLE]

It may reduce the keyword relevancy impact very slightly, but including your company name enables you to brand your page, which may be more important to you.

The content of the Title Tag is also what gets saved in a person's Favorite’s list when they bookmark your site, so having your company name included is worth considering from a branding perspective.

In Part 2 of this article, I will show you how to create your optimized META Description and META Keywords Tags.

Microsoft Releases IIS 7.5 Express

Thanks to a new move on Microsoft’s part, ASP.NET development may get cheaper and easier (again).  This week, Microsoft released Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 Express, a tool that’s supposed to help developers build and run ASP.NET sites and applications.
Here’s part of the official overview highlighting its advantages: “IIS 7.5 Express enhances your ability to develop and test web applications on Windows by combining the power of IIS 7.5 with the convenience of a lightweight web server like the ASP.NET Development Server (also known as Cassini).”
Then, to be more specific, benefits are supposed to include the fact that “[t]he same web server that runs on your production server is now available on your development computer,” and “[m]ost tasks can be done without the need for administrative privileges.”
Plus, “IIS 7.5 Express runs on Windows XP and all later versions of Windows,” and “[m]any users can work independently on the same computer.”
That’s a pretty nice list of perks.  It looks even nicer, too, when you factor in this tidbit: IIS 7.5 Express is free.
So IIS 7.5 Express is definitely likely to see some use in the ASP.NET community.  If you’re interested, you can download it here in any of ten languages, and the transfer should take no more than ten minutes even for dial-up users.

Optimizing Your Site For Foreign Languages

My online business has recently started receiving unsolicited orders from clients in a couple of foreign countries, so I’ve decided to create translated websites for each of those countries to see what the demand is like. The problem is, I’m not sure exactly how I should optimize these sites properly so they’ll rank in the foreign language search engines, especially since I don’t speak either language! Any advice?

Dave’s Answer:
First off, congratulations are due for deciding to take the step into the foreign language internet! I think you’ll find that, once you’ve gotten over the language and cultural barriers, marketing your business online in foreign languages is actually easier than in English, since there’s less content online in other languages, and therefore less competition.
Depending on which countries you’re aiming to target, there will be different search engines for which to tailor your SEO strategy – for instance, in Japan Yahoo! is the most popular search engine, while in China it’s Baidu. Each search engine has slightly different rules – Yahoo! likes a higher ratio of keyword density to Google, for instance – but there are three simple rules that will help you to rank across all search engines: Keywords, Location, and Links.
Keywords: Your first step before you begin to build your translated websites is to work out what your foreign language keywords will be, as these are the fundamental building blocks of your SEO strategy.
There’s a simple three step process to this: Translate, Research, Analyse. First off, take your list of English keywords and translate them into the foreign language. You can use a dictionary for this, but you will get better results using a native speaking translator, as sometimes the most effective keyword can be slang term, an adoption from English or any other term. For example, the literal translation of ‘weekend’ in French is ‘fin de semaine’, but this is only used in French Canada – in France, they use the term ‘le weekend’.
Once you have your translated keywords, brainstorm a list of alternatives by searching for synonyms in a keyword research tool such as Wordtracker, and by checking the websites of competitors in the local market to see what terms they are using. You can either do this yourself using Google Translate, or outsource to a translator or multilingual SEO professional.
Last, but not least – analyse. Use the relevant keyword research tool for your search engine to check what levels of traffic each keyword receives, and decide on a list of both long and short tail keywords. For instance, if you are selling baseball caps to the French market, you might use short tail keywords such as ‘casquette’ and long tail keywords such as ‘vêtement hip hop Paris’. You should now optimize each web page on your site for no more than two keywords, by including the keywords in your page titles, introductory paragraphs and Meta Data.
Location: Most search engines – Google in particular – now place a lot of emphasis on location when ranking search results. So, if we take the aforementioned example of your business wanting to sell baseball caps to the French, then it will help your rankings greatly if you have a French country-code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) such as www.yourcompany.fr hosted on a server in France.
This may not be financially feasible, however, so you can also create a subdomain off your main site for the French language – in this case, you should use the Google Webmaster Geotargeting tool (or the geotargeting tool for the appropriate search engine) to set the location of your French pages as France.
In either scenario, it will also help to have location pages within your site. Let’s say that you have done your market research and discovered that the greatest demand for baseball caps in France is in Paris, Marseilles and Lyon. In this scenario, it will help to have separate pages on your site optimized with region-specific keywords such as ‘acheté casquette Paris’ or ‘acheté casquette Marseilles’.
Links: The final essential element of SEO is to gain back-links to your site. Google in particular relies heavily on evaluating the number and quality of back-links to a website when judging that site’s relevancy.
The easiest way to get back-links is to find out what the respected online directories and catalogues are in the local internet and posting business profiles there, with a link back to your site – for instance, www.pagejaune.fr (the Yellow Pages) or www.lesannuaires.com in France. Alternatively, you can write content that is related to your topic (for instance, an article ‘How to choose the right baseball cap size’), translate it using Google Translate and post that article to article directories in the local web, including a back-link to your site.
The more complicated (but also more effective) version of this strategy is to pitch expert articles to respected blogs and websites in the local web, offering original content in exchange for a back-link. This increases both your back-link ratio and your brand exposure, but it requires both language skills and experience in writing and public relations, and is an activity best undertaken by multilingual online PR professionals.
I hope these tips have been of assistance – and good luck on your forays into e-commerce in the foreign language internet!

Gmail Labs Get Search Feature

The point of a laboratory is to facilitate testing.  The average chemist might not get too far if he was just presented with a jumble of beakers, however, and similarly, Gmail Labs has been getting pretty messy.  A new feature promises to fix that issue.

Greg Bullock, a software engineer at Google, explained the problem on the Gmail Blog.  He wrote, "Have you ever found it just a little bit tricky to find what you were looking for on the Gmail Labs Settings page?  Scrolling was ok when there were a handful of Labs, but now that there are over 50 it's another story."

Next, Bullock continued, "A lunchtime discussion made us realize that having to rely on the browser's search function or endless scrolling makes it hard to find the Labs features you want.  So another Gmail engineer named Manu [Cornet] and I decided take an afternoon and address this.  The result is an addition to the Settings page which filters the visible Labs as you type."

A Classified Way to Drive Business to Your Website

There are more than 105 million of them in the United States. Worldwide, there could be at least 250 million of them. Them, according to statistics from the Nielsen/Net Ratings service, is the number of active Web surfers. 250 million in the whole world? The figure is more than the populations of Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and a few non-English speaking countries combined. That's a lot of them!

With so many active surfers around, you would think Webmasters and site owners have an easy time attracting them. Actually, they face an uphill battle to bring visitors and, more importantly, consumers to their Web sites. And a Web site without traffic is like a store built in the middle of the desert. You could have the greatest products and most attractive Web design around, but they're worthless if no one visits them.

There is one way, however, to turn your Web site into an oasis of business, a way to drive as much traffic to your site as your server can handle: a classified ad.

More on that later. First, all Web builders and site owners should know the basic and time-tested ways to attract traffic to their Web site. The key to all of these methods is to attract the right Web surfers. You want what experts call "targeted visitors," or people who are actually interested in what you're selling. To guarantee that this happens, you should follow this checklist of Web traffic golden rules:

Step 1: Optimize your Web pages.
Webmasters in the know take the time to set their meta tags. These tags, or codes, are hidden keywords in the Web page that tell search engines like Google and Yahoo exactly what your site is all about. A meta tag, for instance, could be "designer handbags," "sporting equipment," or whatever else you happen to be selling. These keywords tell the search engine to direct all handbag or sports shoppers to your site.

Step 2: List your site with every search engine out there.
For this step, you simply need to surf over to Google, AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines. Click onto their customer service page, where they allow Web builders and site owners to manually submit their site addresses.

Step 3. Spice up your site with interactive features.
With articles, newsletters, offers, promotions, and discounts, you give your targeted visitors a reason to stay at your site once they find it. More importantly, you give them reasons to come back and tell their friends about the site. Word of mouth is one of the best, and cheapest, forms of advertising on the planet.

Step 4. Exchange banner ads with friends and with other companies that you do business with.
Banner ads are those eye-catching designs at the top and bottom of Web pages. They're like the billboards of the Internet superhighway. But with these online billboards, a simple click transports the Web surfer directly to your Web site.

Step 5. Exchange Web links with friends and business associates.
This, Webmasters and site owners, could be the most important way to drive Web traffic to your site. All of the major search engines rank sites by measuring how many links come to and leave from your Web site.

So links are a way to measure how worthwhile and how legitimate your site is. The better this measurement, the better chance your site will have to show up well in Web surfers' searches. In other words, these links could be the difference between your site being listed on page 20 of a Google search results, or on page 1.

Building better Web links and search engine results-that's where classified sites come into play. Some of the most savvy classified sites on the market now offer Web links in their ads. These links lead right to your business' home page.

Not only are these links convenient one-click ways for more customers to reach your site. They also boost your search engine rankings.

Of course, for business owners, classified sites have so many other benefits, too.

• Unparalleled exposure. Classified sites are like online malls. Not only will you get exposure from shoppers coming specifically to find your goods. You get "spill over" attention from shoppers who came for another item but then start browsing through all of the other ads in the classified "mall."
• A new arsenal of Web sites. Having online classified ads is like setting up multiple new Web sites across the Internet. Unlike your own original site, these classified ads come with low-cost IT support, security, and advertising.
• Incredible growth opportunities. Businesses and individuals selling on online classified sites pull in more than $1.95 billion a year, according to the statistics firm Kelsey Group. That figure does not even include money from eBay.
• Money for nothing. As valuable as classified sites are, many of the best ones charge very little or absolutely nothing to set up your ads.

Add up all of these numbers-250 million active Web surfers in the world, $1.95 billion in classified sales, and $0 cost-and your Web business is sure to come out in the positive.

Improve Your Websites Performance

How well is your website performing? Are you satisfied with the amount of customers who view your website? Do you get enough business through your website? By reading this article you will be in a position to do something about all three questions.

It's all very well having a nicely designed and appealing website for your business but it's of no use if you don't get the customers to visit it. The number one term you will find associated with this is search engine optimisation. You will find endless sources on the Internet telling you to optimise this and optimise that but what does it all mean?

Search engine optimisation simply means making your website as friendly to search engines as possible. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN provide your business with the ability to reach a huge amount of customer's, they are by far the most successful method to boost sales for your business. If your website is nicely optimised then you will have a greater chance of appearing higher up on the search engines.

Most customers will type in a phrase into the search engine and view the first couple of websites that it finds, they will usually be successful in finding what they were looking for on the first page of results. Statistics show that customers very rarely look further than the first page (90% don't look past the first page) so what good is it if your website was on page 10? This is where search engine optimisation comes in, it will give your business a greater chance of being on that first golden page in the search engines.

There are many methods that all contribute to a higher ranking but some are more influential than others. The first factor is having a well built website. This is a standard feature that all website design companies should offer.

The second method is keywords. Keywords are the words that are associated with your business, the idea is to include these words in your website so when a customer types in a phrase in a search engine, your website is more likely to appear. Keywords should be chosen carefully to target the correct market for your business. It's no good targeting the word "Fruit" if your business sells website design.

The third factor that contributes to a high search engine ranking is back links. This simply means a link from someone else's website to yours. The more links you have to your website the better. Search engines view your back links as a sign of popularity and obviously the more popular you are the more successful you appear.

One of the best methods for this is to submit your website to online directories, not only will you get a back link but you are also likely to get a lot of customers coming to your website from that link. Make sure that you select trusted directories and one's that can relate to your business, there is a chance that you will get penalised by search engines if you sign up to link farms (websites that collect lot's of spam and poor quality links).

Finally, having a website that is constantly updated also gives you a boost in terms of search engines as they like to see fresh content. This is also likely to draw customers back to your website as they know they are likely to see something new. This in turn will boost the amount of traffic you get to your website which will also help in gaining a higher search engine rank.

These are just some of the methods in which you can improve your website performance, there are many other factors that contribute to a high search engine ranking. Most are an on-going process so it is very beneficial to your business to continually try to improve your performance as there is always someone competing against you for that top spot

10 Reasons To Submit Your Articles To Ezines Directory

Getting your product or service delivered to your targeted audience is one of the most important success factor in internet based business. There are many technique to deliver your content to your targetted audence. Submit good articles to high traffic ezine directory is one of the technique which is relatively simple and affordable for build up your online business. Below are lists the benefits.

1. You'll brand your web site, business and yourself by submitting articles to e-zines. You could include your name, business name, your credentials, web site address and e-mail address in your resource box.

2. You will become known as an expert on the topics you write about. This will give you and your business extra credibility which will help you compete against your competition.

3. Your article might also be placed on the publisher's home page. If they publish each issue on their home page this will give you some extra exposure.

4. You might get extra exposure if the e-zine publisher archives their e-zine on their site. People might want to read the back issues before they make the decision to subscribe.

5. You will get free advertising. This will allow you to spend your profits on other forms of advertising. You could buy advertisements in other e-zines that don't publish your articles.

6. You might get extra income from people wanting to hire you to write other articles, books, or even ask to speak at seminars. This is a great way to multiply your income.

7. You could allow e-zine publishers to publish your articles in their free e-books. Since people give them away, your advertising could multiply all over the internet.

8. You will get your article published all over the web when you submit it to an e-zine publisher that has a free content directory on their web site. They'll allow their visitors to republish your article.

9. You'll gain people's trust. If they read your article and like it, they won't be as hesitant to buy your
product or service. You will then be able to increase your profits.

10. You could get your article guaranteed to run in an e-zine. You could agree to run one of their articles in your e-zine if, in exchange, they run yours in their e-zine. It's a win/win situation.

The above list is a great start if you are thinking of starting a business on internet. It is relatively simple and very affordable.

What NOT to do with RSS

Everybody is hot on using RSS to increase their traffic, promote their sites and do their marketing. Why?
Well, it's newish - at least within the internet marketing segment. Not as new as it was a year or so ago, of course. Getting significant results is a little harder as the competition increases.
With the profusion of blogs and spam blog-pinging to attract the search engine spiders to index static pages, the utility of this approach has been seriously impaired by unscrupulous overkill.
Pinging every 3 minutes is - even to an idiot - absurd - or at least it should be. Why not just scream, "I AM AN AUTOMATED SEARCH ENGINE SPAM PROGRAM." Lovely footprint, very hard for even a seriously brain-damaged bot to identify.
Still there are a lot of sites with RSS feeds that are real feeds being produced as pages change and new content is added. So, yes, RSS feeds still work. Maybe not as fast and maybe they are less powerful than they were, but RSS remains a valid and increasingly necessary part of site promotion.
Techniques do get abused and the early rapid response tends to decline as a result. If people were a little clearer about what they're doing and why and how it all works, the frenzied search for new approaches could, perhaps, be a little less daunting. And if the quick buck artists were less successful at misleading people into doing things that are bad for everybody in the long run, then . . . but that's how it is, was, and apparently will be forever more.
One thing about a real feed - it's for more than getting bots to index your pages. If that's all you want then you can stop reading here.
For the remaining readers (if any), consider the single most critical element of any marketing or website promotion effort. You can have the most magnificent site, the greatest ever-changing content, beautiful and valid feeds in all formats -- and very little in the way of traffic. Unlike the search engines who have all those lovely spiders we are so hot to gain the attention of - most blog/RSS search engines and directories do not send out bots in search of RSS feeds.
Nope. You have got to submit to them. I know. I've done the smart thing - submit to a bunch - and the incredibly unspeakably stupid thing - letting the submissions slide because, frankly, it's a horrible boring tedious and extremely boring (did, I mention how boring it is?) job. That's not a very pretty admission, but there you are. I have a limited ability to tolerate severe boredom - even when I know I'm hurting myself.
And if you don't do the submissions, you won't get the traffic you could have. And that means fewer conversions, sales, opt-ins or whatever it is your site is about.
Ah, but there are answers to this problem. RSS submission services exist and so do RSS submission tools. In fact here's a new (still in beta) service that allows you to submit to 17 blog/RSS search engines - with more promised - for free. It's called FeedShot and you can find it at www.feedshot.com.
Now with FeedShot you need to enter each feed individually. However, with a tool like RSS Submitter you can enter from 3 (in the free evaluation version) feeds to an unlimited number in the SEO version. RSS Submitter then submits automatically to over 70 blog and RSS search directories and can also be used to do additional manual submissions with auto-form filling.
This tool is the purest gold for the serious RSS feed marketer. It works, it's easy to use and it saves you incredible amounts of time - and eliminates that nasty boring tedious repetitive work. Check it out and download a free evaluation copy through www.MarketingWithRSS.com/rss-submitter/
Just to be clear here you should realize that you can create and use RSS feeds without ever using any of the ping sites. RSS feed updates are noted by RSS readers/aggregators which check feeds for new content either on demand or on a schedule. RSS/blog search directories also check on a regular basis. Users find your feed through these directories. Again, if you want visitors, then no matter how you do it, you've got to submit.
Obviously, if your feed is produced by a blog, you'll want to notify ping sites when your content is updated. But you still need to submit the feeds. And you can also submit your blog URL to a whole host of pure blog directories, but that's a different subject.
The people who use RSS readers/aggregators in addition to or in place of a browser are the real target group for RSS marketing. When you consider how and what you want to market with RSS, keep in mind that this group tends to still be made up of relatively affluent, early adopters with some technical sophistication, a taste for new technology, a low boredom threshold and a keen appreciation of the value of their time. And don't forget to submit.

RSS Ego Searches

Ego searches are free and simple searches designed to monitor blogs and news portals for mentions of your company, product, competitors or other specific keywords. Conducting ego searches not only allows you to stay informed, but also allows you to maintain a strategic advantage over competing companies. A number of new Internet services are freely available that make these 'ego searches' painless and easy.
Dynamically created keyword based RSS feeds, update in your RSS reader or news aggregators, each time new information containing the keyword appears in the searched resources. The dynamic feeds match requests against new information, as it comes online in real time. The following free services allow for RSS feed ego searches.
Google News
Simply conduct a keyword search of Google News and then click the text that says "RSS" then save the url of the RSS feed in to your news reader. Every time a new article with that keyword appears in Google News the feed in your RSS reader will automatically update.
http://news.google.com/news
BlogPulse
Find out what is being said about your products, company or your industry in the blogosphere. Conduct a keyword or url search on BlogPulse. Click the orange RSS icon above the search results and save the feed in your reader. Each time the keyword appears in a blog indexed by BlogPulse you will receive a new item in your feed reader. Another feature of BlogPulse is it will graph the keyword occurrences, providing a picture representation so that trends can be easily visualized. Hovering over the lines of the graph will provide details of actual blog mentions.
http://www.blogpulse.com
PubSub
Search on a keyword, then save and add the feed to your RSS reader using the icons provided. Optionally with PubSub you can direct your search to only alert you of posts in specific areas of interest includin g Press Releases, SEC/EDGAR Filings, Newsgroup Posts, or Weblog Entries
http://www.pubsub.com
Technorati
Create watch lists, by entering the search term add item to the watch list and then scroll to the bottom click the blue RSS icon to obtain the url of the RSS feed that can be added to your reader. Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere. In order to setup a watchlist you will have to create a Technorati account.
http://www.technorati.com
Ice Rocket
Simply search Ice Rocket then click the RSS 2.0 button to obtain the url of the RSS feed that contains your search term. Add the url to your RSS reader or newsaggregator.
http://www.icerocket.com/
Find Articles
Traditional media channels can even be monitored using RSS. FindArticles routinely scans magazines and publications for keyword mentions. Conduct a search then click "RSS Alert" to obtain the url to the RSS feed. Add the feed to your reader to receive instant notification of new articles.
http://www.findarticles.com/
NewsTrove
NewsTrove indexes millions of news articles from a myriad of sources. Build an RSS feed on any topic imaginable. Enter your search words in the search box. Click 'Search' click the orange XML icon on the right side of the search results page and save the feed to your news reader.
http://www.newstrove.com
BlogDigger
BlogDigger monitors the blogosphere and generally what is said daily in the blogs. Conduct a search on Blogdigger and click the orange XML icon to retrieve the url of the search feed. The feed should then be added to your RSS reader.
http://www.blogdigger.com/
DayPop
Conduct a search and click the icon on the right that says XML, save the feed to your RSS aggregator. Only the most recent search results will appear.
http://www.daypop.com

Yahoo News
Conduct a search then click "view as RSS" in the right column save the feed in your aggregator. The feed will check Yahoo news for mentions.
http://news.yahoo.com/
Overall, ego searches are an excellent way to stay informed and maintain a strategic advantage over competitors. Knowing exactly what your online competitors are doing provides a competitive edge that can be used to your advantage. Keyword RSS feeds can be used to monitor key phrases for trademark abuses or monitoring the effectiveness of a specific press promotion.
Although they sound daunting ego searches are simply good business sense.

RSS... and WHY Its Being Considered The Newest Player In The VIRAL Marketing Game

I have a quick question to ask you... "Are you sick and tired of hearing about RSS(Real Simple Syndication) and how it can take your online business to New levels with VERY little effort on your part?"
If you answered 'YES' to the question above then stop reading this article Right Now!
If you answered 'NO' then your going to love what I'm about to reveal to you about RSS and WHY its being consider the newest player in the VIRAL marketing game.
But before I do I think its important you understand the mechanics of each(RSS and VIRAL marketing) and what there role is so there's no confusion.
RSS by definition -- RSS stands for 'Real Simple syndication or Rich Site Summary' and is used to syndicate news or information and is usually associated with Blogs because blogs use an RSS feed to distribute their content.
Next...
VIRAL Marketing by definition -- is any form of advertising and/or marketing techniques that "spread" like a virus without you having to do anything.
Now that you have an idea what the two mean and the roles they each play it's now time to tie it all together.
I have another quick question...(As you can see I like to ask questions.) "What do all website owners and portal sites need on a 24/7 basis to keep their visitors/readers coming back day after day?
If you answered 'Content' then give yourself a pat on the back because your absolutely Right!
And what do RSS feeds contain that update on a 24/7 basis?
CONTENT! Whether its News related or Articles.
And where do website owners and portal webmasters go to find these much needed RSS feeds?
You guessed it... 'RSS Directories' where hopefully You submitted your RSS feed(s) to.
The great thing about 'RSS Directories' is they are all categorized making it easy for whomever is looking.
And if your RSS feed catches their eye, guess what? They'll add your feed to there website where You'll gain all that FREE exposure at their expense.
Now, just imagine if 100 or 1000 website owners picked up your RSS feed.
Your traffic to your website would start to Explode effortlessly without you lifting a finger.
And the cool thing is all you had to do was set it up once.
The more 'Quality' RSS feeds you have out there the more opportunities you have of getting picked up by webmasters.
Do you see Now how RSS is being considered VIRAL? And this all happens while your sleeping.
It gets better So hold on.
Do you publish your own Content/Articles?
If you do you are also in for a real treat because guess what other directories are starting to incorporate RSS into their directories?
That's right, 'Article Directories'.
By submitting your articles to the TOP 'Article Directories' the same effect will happen as I outlined with 'RSS Directories'.
Remember this, people come online primarily for Informat! ion that will help solve a particular problem they are dealing with.
Websites contain 'Information'.
Website owners need Fresh 'Information' on a 24/7 basis to feed their readers needs.
RSS feeds deliver content, whether its News related or Articles, on a 24/7 basis or whatever frequency the website owner chooses.
How can you take advantage of this Right Now if you haven't already?
Simply set up a Blog at Blogger.com -- www.blogger.com -- and start posting to it on a Daily basis with your Articles, Product Reviews or News related postings related to your target audience.
Then go submit your Blogs RSS feed to all the top 'RSS Directories'.
Here's a link to a list of Top RSS Directories that you can submit your feed(s) to.
Go to: www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
Once you've done that you'll want to Ping your Blog to get the Search Engines to come visit and start indexing your Blogs pages.
You can do this by using this Free service called Ping-O-Matic.
Go to: pingomatic.com
Well there you have it in a nutshell.
I hope you see the true Power of RSS and more importantly... "WHY Its Being Considered The Newest Player In The VIRAL Marketing Game".
The only thing left for you to do is... Take Action!