Ask.com – WOW

When last have you been to Ask.com? It looks good and can really help you easily promote your site (more of that last one at the bottom)…

Themes

I haven’t been there in MANY months, but I REALLY like it! I mean, you can theme the home page, which is ALREADY a lot slicker than Google’s home page. Take a look at THIS shocking screen shot of the “Polka Dots” theme:

Then there’s the “Western Sky” theme:

And look how easy it is to do an advanced search! You just click “Advanced” and up pops your “advanced search screen“. Immediate, and simple:

Now, enough about the looks, what about the features?

Blog Search

One of the best features, in my opinion, is the Ask “Blog Search”. And, unlike Google where you first have to actually go to Google Blog Search, here, you just click the “Blog” icon and suddenly you’re searching blogs.

And, while you’re searching, unless you’ve turned it off, down pops the search suggestions, which are actually pretty accurate and helpful:

Not so secret Secret

Here’s a little secret that everybody knows about blog search: use it to find new blog posts about your blog/site topic, and comment on them. It will REALLY help you generate more traffic. I know from experience. I’ve tried it twice for 2 different blog posts, and it tripled the traffic coming into those posts. Of course, there are many other factors that could play a role in this result, but it’s something easy, and something worth it.

Once you’ve done your search and you’re on the search results screen, all the good stuff starts. My main suggestion is to use the “subscribe to this search” feature.

Subscribe to this search

If you have a post on your blog or a page on your site that is dedicated to an upcoming event, for example “Father’s Day”, you’ll want to keep commenting on other people’s blogs, and as often as you can. To make life easier, at the top right of the screen is the option to “subscribe to this search“. This drop down gives you the option of subscribing to the search using Google, BlogLines, and a couple of other options…

Before subscribing, change your search option to use “Most Recent” (at the top of the results) which will allow you to see any new blog posts related to your topic. Then every morning, in the time allocated to “promoting your site”, you can go commenting on other people’s blog posts.

The moral of this post? Go visit Ask.com