Google isn't the only search engine on the planet. I guess you've probably heard of Yahoo! and Microsoft? They have their own search engines and you can also give them a helping hand to discover that your new blog or website exists.

In the case of Yahoo I went to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. If you're not already a Yahoo member you'll have to sign up first. With that done the procedure is similar to Google. I typed in the full URL of this blog (http://wwwgurus.blogspot.com) and clicked the "Add My Site" button. I then clicked the "Authenticate" button and scrolled to the bottom of the page to find the verification meta tag. Copy it, then paste it into the blogger template in the same way as for Google. I had a problem when I tried to save the updated template. Blogger complained that "Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed". Compared to the Google meta tag, it looked like Yahoo had forgotten to put in a "/" just before the last ">". I typed that in and saved the template again. This time Blogger was happy. I returned to Yahoo and clicked the "Ready to Authenticate" button. Yahoo was happy too and informed me that "Your site is pending authentication". Finally I let Yahoo know about the site feed. I clicked on the "Manage" button next to the blog URL, typed "feeds/posts/full" into the empty box and clicked the "Add Feed" button.

Microsoft's search engine is catchily entitled "Live Search". In a post on their blog Microsoft say "we aren't ready to start consuming sitemaps quite yet". At least this makes the task a bit quicker than for Google and Yahoo. To give Live Search a bit of a helping hand indexing us I went to http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx. First I had to fill in the captcha box to prove that I'm not a computer, then I typed the blog URL into the box at the bottom and clicked the "Submit" button. Job done!

I did all this three days ago, and it seems to have had some effect. We are now ranked 28 on Live Search for the keyphrase "web gurus". We are even ranked 873 for "Internet gurus". Google now have us ranked 258 for "adsense gurus" too.

I have now got our website at http://www-gurus.com up and running (as you can now see!). At the moment it consists of just a home page and a single blog post (Not any more - Ed), which for some strange reason looks remarkably similar to one of the posts on our original Blogger blog!

Technorati has found this new blog too. Since the new site has a link to the Blogger version we now have a Technorati authority rating of 1.

Another search of Google today reveals we are now number 1 for "wwwgurus" (out of 33). It's always nice to be top of Google for your own name, at the very least. We have also gone from nowhere to number 47 (out of around 2,530,000) on a search for the keyphrase "web gurus".

Now it's safe to say that there aren't too many people on the planet searching for "web gurus", but it does at least give an idea of what's possible if you target long tail keywords. There are however enough people searching for a "web guru" for the Google AdWords keyword tool to reveal that there are at least a few advertisers targeting that phrase, and to give those advertisers traffic estimates.

(Note that the link above is to the public version of the Google keyword tool.  You need to open an AdWords account before you can see all the advertiser information)