It goes without saying that the world of search engines is heavily dominated by Google, but at the same time, it’s obvious that while Google typically provides some of the best results, they’re far from perfect. After all, how can you possibly trust a search engine that doesn’t have this blog as the number one result for “John Chow.” In this way, it could be better to look into a meta-search engine like Atnio. Here is their review.

Meta Search Engine for Mega Results

It’s obvious enough where the people behind Atnio got their inspiration for creating the world’s most powerful search engine. Unlike Google, however, Atnio does not have a mega-sized database of its own, relying instead on the amalgamated results of several search engines. For those of you who don’t know, this is the very definition of a meta search engine.

It’s a matter of perspective how you would view the search engine results. When you enter the search term “John Chow” in Google, you get 946,000 results. By contrast, when you perform the same search on Atnio, you get served up with “about” 17,400,000 results. That’s nearly 18 times the results, but realistically, you’ll only look at maybe the first 50 or so. You might not even navigate beyond the first page of results.

On a side note, John Chow dot Com sits on top of the Atnio SERP (search engine results page) for “John Chow”, in case you’re wondering.

Looks Like Google, Complete with Ads

From the user interface to the layout of the results page, the Atnio meta search engine looks an awful lot like Google. The main page has a blue background, but when you get to the results, it reverts to mostly white. Moreover, depending on the keyword search term, you may also get served up with sponsored results on the right. Atnio isn’t nearly as big as Google, so they don’t have as many advertisers.

The aesthetics will feel familiar, but the Atnio ads are not bid-based. Instead, getting in on the “sponsored results” comes in at a flat fee of $7.50 a month. This gets you a single listing and you can enter up to 8 keywords or keyword phrases. This effectively eliminates the concern over click fraud, just like the flat rate advertising on John Chow dot Com.

Online Bookmarking

One feature that sets Atnio apart from other meta search engines (and search engines in general) is what they call “My Folder”. This is where you can save any searches that you have done. When you conduct a search on Atnio, you can click on any of the “save result” links to save the search in My Folder. This saves the actual link, as well as the search that brought up that result.

From My Folder, you can send selected listings to any email address, assign a personal rating (out of five stars), and add a personal note, as well as delete individual entries (of course). This can come in pretty handy, but it’s a little strange that Atnio does not appear to have any sort of registration process for this service. Instead, it looks cookie-based.

Pictures, Videos, and News

Beyond the usual text-based search, you can also use Atnio to search for images, news, and videos. The pictures come from all over the web, whereas the video results seem to come only from YouTube and Yahoo! Video. To be a better meta search engine for video, it would have been better if Atnio also included popular sites like Revver, Google Video, and so on.

It’s nice seeing thumbnails for the videos, but the rest of the information is severely lacking. It wouldn’t take much to pull something as integral as the video’s title. Otherwise, users are simply guessing the content of the video based on a single frame.

Is Meta Really Better?

I appreciate the value of Atnio’s My Folder functionality and the relatively inexpensive sponsored results, but I have my gripes too. The image and video results could use a little more information, and it’s a little disconcerting for parents that the family filter is switched off by default. Moreover, the very name of the site — Atnio — is easy to forget. It’s easy to mistake it for Antio, Antoi, Atnoi, and so on.

So, what’s my answer to the question above? I’m going to go with “Not really.” Atnio has done a good job with creating a meta search engine, pulling results from at least six different search engines (Google, MSN, Ask, Fast, Yahoo!, and Entireweb), but there’s not enough here to pull me away from relying on the big G just yet.

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Copywriting. This word strikes fear into the heart of anyone who has little understanding of what it means; but had you thought that taking an hour to study it could improve your blog, net you more subscribers and therefore help you achieve your objectives?

What Is Copywriting?

Most people think copywriting is the process of writing content for someone else with very strict guidelines; word limits, tone, etc. Whereas this is true for professional copywriting it’s not even half of the story.

Understanding How Content Is Read

One of the most important aspects of copywriting is formatting. You can have the best content in the world but if it’s displayed in an unformatted lump it becomes very difficult to read - and on the Internet that means it doesn’t get read.

Use Useful Subheaders

When you’re writing your content you need to break it up into sections - although you probably do this naturally even if you’re not using subheadings already. This allows readers to scan down the page and gather an understanding of what you’re discussing. 10 subheaders gives you 10 chances to capture the reader’s attention - which is a much better prospect than just relying on the title.

Useful Subheaders As An SEO tool

Don’t forget that if you’re using subheaders, it’s a great opportunity to mark them up as h2/h3/h4/h5 (depending on your design) so that search engines can add more weight to them.

Remember That Sex Always Works

I bet that sub-title got your attention. It’s well documented that using sex in a title, caption or quote captures readers’ attention unlike anything else. Don’t force it in; your content will become unreadable if you’re trying to cram it full of sexually suggestive statements (although that sentence itself is filled with it).

Shorter Paragraphs

People find it easier to read shorter paragraphs; reading 100 lines of unbroken text is a daunting prospect for a lot of users and many will just navigate away from your site - and that’s not what you want at all. So break your content up into shorter paragraphs (with useful subheadings too) to allow people to get the most from your content.

Understand most readers have an information requirement Once your content has slipped into your archive, search engine users will become your key demographic. Users from search engines will reach your content because they were told the answer to their question is on your page. These users need to find a specific part of your content, so making it as easy to scan is beneficial.

Be Careful About Your Wording

Good content doesn’t need to be challenging to read; after all most users don’t want to need a dictionary while browsing your blog. Furthermore, using deliberately complicated language can make your readers feel stupid for not understanding and that’s just going to alienate part of your demographic.

In Conclusion

Copywriting isn’t a scary concept, nor is it difficult to get a working knowledge of it; yet the gains from formatting your content properly can be massive. Have a look at Copywriting.com and this post on Copyblogger for a bit more information. Just don’t neglect it, excellent content has no value without someone to read it.

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RSS by Email is a great option to enable in FeedBurner if you’re trying to increase your RSS subscription base. If you haven’t turn this feature on already, you need to do it. Giving your readers more than one way to subscribe to your blog is never a bad thing.

In my post about my RSS competition with Shoemoney, I made the mistake of saying RSS by Email is always counted, even if the subscriber doesn’t check their email. I’ve since found out that this is not true. FeedBurner knows if a subscriber opens their email or not. They accomplish this by embedding a 1 pixel tracking image into the emails. If the subscriber doesn’t open the email by a set amount of time, the subscriber is removed from the RSS count.

The above is a screen shot of my RSS subscribers for yesterday. Out of the 15,424 subs, 4,646 of them access the feed via RSS by Email. However, when you look at my RSS by Email subscription management page, you’ll see I have a lot more subscribers.

In all, there are 5,357 people subscribed to my blog by RSS by Email. However, FeedBurner counted only 4,646 of them because 711 subscribers no longer check their emails and didn’t unsubscribed. By making sure subscribers open their email in order to be counted, FeedBurner gives a lot more accurate reading of the RSS count.

This is actually a very good thing because there was a service started a while back (when I wrote that RSS by Email was always counted) that offered to increase your RSS count for a fee. The service just subbed a bunch of fake emails to your feed so you can show a big number. However, that number will go right back down after a while because those emails are never opened.