The Power of Topical Search EnginesWritten by S. Housley
What are Topical Search Engines? Simply put, topical search engines are search engines focused on a specific industry, sector or topic. While many marketers are scrambling for links, any links, an area that is often overlooked is topic-specific search engines. What many don't realize is that these engines do produce traffic, and they often contain traffic that is very targeted. Anyone who has taken time to analyze weblogs and track sales sources will likely see that targeted traffic converts at a significantly higher rate than non-targeted traffic. A savvy online marketer realizes that often, quality of visitor is far more important than quantity of visitors. Web marketers should focus their energies on attracting targeted traffic whenever possible. For example, if you sell saddles, advertising on a site related to horses or advertising on a topical search engine like http://www.horse-stall.net will bring significantly more sales than advertising on a generic web site or search engine. Niche engines are considerably smaller than general search engines but they can still be quite lucrative. The small size of a niche or topic-specific engine ensures that there are few competitors, and advertisers are generally willing to pay a little more for focused traffic. Advertisers appreciate unique benefit of reaching a very targeted audience who have a higher likelihood of purchasing their product or service. As a result, topic-specific search engines and directories are a burgeoning market. There is far less competition in niche directories and dominating a specific market segment and establishing brand recognition is significantly easier. It is virtual suicide to attempt to compete with behemoth search engines like Google. Web-surfers are interested in simplicity and efficiency, which translates to as few clicks as possible. This is an area where Google really cannot compete with a topic-specific search engine. Creating a simple, clear navigational structure of related content while cross-promoting related products or services will increase site's value.
| | Cable vs DSLWritten by Bradley James
Okay, so you are finally tired of those slow dial-up internet connections, and you want to go broadband. Good deal. But first, you may be wondering which type of broadband connection is best- DSL or Cable? Or, at least, which of two gives you more speed for price? Here we take a look at these two popular broadband connections and try to determine which one is better: DSL vs. Cable.Cable Speed vs. DSL The most common question that comes up is which type of connection is faster, DSL or Cable? To answer this, it is important to compare both upload and download speeds. Now, so you have something to compare these speeds to, your average dial-up connection is about 28 - 56 Kbps. Most often, however, you won't be able to get 56k through dial up, as most services can not handle this speed. The average speed of a DSL download is 1.0 - 1.5Mbps. That's megabytes per second - about 20 times as fast as fastest dial-up connection. This is fast, but consider Cable, which can give you up to 2 - 3Mbps. Thus, at least for downloading, cable can give you almost twice speed of DSL - that's impressive. On upload side, however, cable and DSL are pretty evenly matched. They both provide about 100Kbps - 400Kbps. It seems that cable has won this battle.
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