While we’re all busy building the web sites and businesses we have, many of us are looking out for what the next “big thing” is going to be.

One of the keys on the interent is to get in first wave. Having a website built and running months before a niche or sub-niche gets hot counts for so much, and can help see off all the newer more monied sites with all their investment in SEO.

Several of my sites are in the health niche, in very competitive areas. As they were established many months before the competition, they’ve held their positions on search results. This is despite the “opposition” looking as if they’ve spent loads on SEO – I’ve still kept my top of page one rankings.

Getting in to those niches was a bit of inside knowledge and luck. For ever site that’s got to page one, two haven’t. But, the profits of those one in three sites far outweigh any loss in setting up the other two.

The problem is we don’t all have inside knowledge, and the money to invest in buying domains and throwing up sites, in the hope that some will stick.

This is where a new tool, nothing like I’ve seen before, comes in.

Imagine if you could get to hear of the next hot trend, in whatever niche you want, weeks, months before even Google sees it.  Do you think getting in first, buying a decent domain name that isn’t hyphenated, is a .com, is short, will help? Get some content on that domain, host it, do a small bit of backlinking, and a couple of months later have a page one site for that niche. Looks good?

Well, this software was just released in June 2011, and having tried it out, I have to say it’s helping me spot niches and trends I couldn’t have done before.

Simply, you give the software RSS feeds from the top news sources for your niche. Then, the software drills through those feeds to spot trends.

Here’s a video from the developer:

With these tool you can discover at the minimum some valuable domain names that you can flip in a few months. Or, develop some yourself and either flip some valuable and hot web sites or keep for yourself as another income stream.

Knowing these trends also means you can get your articles and blog posts out, ready indexed for when the rest of the world discover what you already know!

You can find out more here: Feedname Domain Trending Software.

Just to be open here, I’m an affiliate. But know this, I only promote stuff I use or really believe in.

Enjoy!

Vic Carrara
MasterWebSoftware.com

The fact that brand names continue to dominate Google’s result pages is obvious. This makes Google look biased for bigger brands and is quite discouraging to small regular business and website owners. But is Google really biased toward brand names?

The truth is that it is. It may not be company policy for Google to show bias towards big brands, but the nature of search makes their algorithm inherently biased. What does this mean?

It simply means that the same factors that search engine algorithms view to be favorable are the same factors that big brands already possess.

The objective of search engines like Google is to provide useful, relevant, trustworthy, and authoritative results for each query entered by their users. Brand names score big in these points since they have been spending big bucks for years, usually decades, building their name. Naturally, search engines will recognize the fact that brand names are already trusted by their users, and as consequence would also trust information they find on these big brand’s official websites. Following this logic, it is not surprising that you’ll see lots of big brands dominating Google’s results pages.

So if this is the case, does this mean that it is futile for small businesses and websites to do search engine optimization?

The answer is no. The truth is that you won’t be able to compete with big brands relying solely on SEO.   However, even if you can’t snag that number one spot, SEO will still help you at least rank respectably. What you can do though so that your SEO efforts won’t go to waste is to not focus too much on highly competitive keywords and try to rank better with long tail search queries. You won’t get as much traffic as big brand websites do, but you should at least get a reasonable amount of traffic, hopefully enough to keep your business afloat, even grow.

Once you get the traffic that Google sent your way, it is now your job to make sure you keep them, and get them to come back, even refer their friends to you. You can do this by focusing on the content of you website. However, even useful content is sometimes not enough. If your content is solid but it offers nothing different or new from the “more authoritative” sites, then your visitors will just opt to keep coming back to the other site, not yours. Find ways to offer something extra to your visitors to keep them coming back. You should also make it really easy, even desirable, for them to refer you to someone else. You can do this by offering promos or bonuses for referrals. You should also make linking back to you a breeze by offering buttons they can embed on their own sites and blogs. Once you start getting traffic, it should keep on coming if your website is worth visiting. And once you’ve got the vote of confidence from countless visitors, then your ranking in results pages will also improve naturally.

Vic Carrara
MasterWebSoftware.com