Posts tagged SEO
Can Microsoft and Yahoo knock Google off its throne?
Feb 19th
Steve Ballmer has described the approved partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo as a “milestone”, while Carol Bartz claims it to be a “breakthrough”. But why is this ‘alliance’ so significant?
The decision has been resting on the shoulders of the US Department of Justice and the European Commission for the past seven months. Japan, Korea and Taiwan are still yet to approve what will surely be a threat to Google’s ten year reign over the search market.
Google, which has a 85.78% share of the global search market, has sat on its throne quite comfortably this past decade as every competitor that has entered the market has still failed to even make a dent in Google’s audience. However, with a combined market share of almost 10%, Yahoo and Bing are proving serious in their bid for leadership of the search world.
Both CEO’s Bartz and Ballmer suggest the ‘alliance’ is a bid to boost innovation. More simply, it’s about creating more competition and boosting revenues.
The global search market is estimated to be worth around $33 billion. In the US alone it is said to be $4 billion and in the UK, marketers spent £1.75 billion in 2009 alone.
Yahoo is hoping to see some of that spend on its bottom line next year – it will be taking 88% of all search revenue generated from its partnership with Microsoft.
The question on everyone lips now is just how long will it take the pair to increase their share.
The deal will not be implemented straight away. In fact, it will take almost until the end of this year to know whether or not the alliance has been a success.
One thing we can be sure of though, is that it will certainly force Google to rethink its strategy (namely its Adwords platform which has in the past gathered criticism) and also keep it on its toes to innovate and offer bespoke offerings (not like Buzz!).
Poor Google. If you come in at the top there is only one place to go.
But Warren Cowan, CEO of Greenlight, writing for UTalkMarketing.com, is not convinced that Google’s grip on the search market will be strained.
He says that the idea that a Yahoo/Bing merger will create a search player with close to 30% market share (as quoted in AdAge) might be accurate for the US, but not in the UK – or western Europe for that matter.
Google is simply too big. But then again, isn’t what they said about all those banks that went bust (too big to fail)?
The big challenge now, however, is tempting away loyal Google users who have, for the past ten years, used little else when it comes to search.
Can PRs do SEO?
Feb 17th
Charley Hayes is a public relations practitioner and social media strategist at Onlinefire, says that SEO is becoming more and more important to PRs.
SEO PR or ‘Search Engine Optimisation Public Relations’ is a term which has been banded around for a number of years, but it is only recently that the PR industry has adopted the practice in earnest.
This is mainly because there’s been a lot of controversy over who should own SEO, but fundamentally, SEO and PR go hand in hand. They work together to dramatically enhance a brand’s online presence and positively influence search.
Specifically, the aim of SEO PR is to increase brand visibility and conversation when consumers search for your products or services. After all, the first few pages of Google should return only the most relevant and positive news, reviews and commentary. You want your brand to be at the top of that list.
Link building is another important area where SEO and PR work together. Incoming quality links are a vital part of success on Google, and the value of these links to a company website cannot be underestimated.
Brands have relationships with a plethora of organisations, and PRs spend much of their time helping to promote and nurture these relationships. To successfully build your brand position on Google, it is essential to encourage relevant and high-ranking sites to link to you. This is where SEO PR again plays a pivotal role.
Whatever you believe about the debate - PR and SEO are working towards the same end goal; to achieve positive brand exposure to future potential customers.
Charley Hayes is a public relations practitioner and digital PR specialist with wide ranging client experience; from technology to travel and sports to drinks, in both business-to-business and consumer sectors. A social media strategist at Onlinefire, Charley has worked across online PR campaigns for Virgin Media, Panasonic and the Post Office.
Why web filters could be bad news for internet marketers
Jan 25th
We always hear of talk that web filters are hindering some businesses. SEO key words aren’t always so simple, or so innocent as one magazine in Canada has just found out.
The news that Google was to pull out of China over mounting frustrations over censorship laws last week shocked the search industry.
Just one week earlier, Yahoo and Bing had announced it was to succumb to internet censorship pleas from the Indian government, banning searches for terms such as ‘sex’.
Such searches would return this message: “Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content. To learn more about SafeSearch requirements in your country or region, see How Bing delivers search results.”
While we may have been confused (because sometimes ‘sex’ is within context…for example ‘sex discrimination’) by the actions of the Chinese and Indian governments, now we can be a little worried about the impact these censorship rules given that the internet is more global than ever.
Canadian magazine ‘The Beaver’ has recently had to rename the almost 40 year-old title as it has been deemed as ‘vulgar’ in internet search terms.
An alternative meaning to ‘The Beaver’ is something crass that has no relation to the Canadian semi-aquatic rodent, actually.
And that alternative meaning causes web filters at schools and junk mail filters in e-mail programs to block access to material containing the magazine’s name.
Needless to say, has internet filters become more common place not just in certain countries and governments but also in the workplace, the past two years have posed a problem for the magazine.
A few years before Internet use became common, the magazine, which now has a circulation of about 44,000, sought its readers’ opinions and decided to stick with the name.
The last issue as The Beaver, which announces the name change to Canada’s History, was mailed to subscribers last week.
Filtering ISP’s is bad news for some businesses, and makes the marketer’s job a little tricky when it comes to key words and what classification their brands and websites might come under.
Some of possible repercussions of this censorship are:
1. This will result in significantly lower connection speeds (in the order of 80%).
2. As the filters will rely on a ‘black list’ provided by a government body, it opens the door to potential misuse or political interference.
3. Perhaps a veiled attempt to ‘Control the Conversation’ emanating from a growing and more vocal constituency via blogs and social media.
Do you think internet censorship will eventually affect you?
Google’s Living Stories: free SEO, but no ad dollars
Dec 10th
Will news survive in the digital era? Google says yes, and has launched ‘Living Stories’ to prove that it isn’t the news industry’s enemy, but its friend.
The ‘to pay or not to pay’ for news content debate may rage on but what’s most exciting about this is that it makes online news a more appealing – and more commercially valuable commodity – that publishers could charge for.
Google says that what has often been overlooked in the ongoing debate about the future of news is the nature of the news story itself and the experience of how it is read online.
On its blog, Google said, “We believe it’s just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways — ways that simply aren’t possible offline.”
Living Stories, in partnership with The News York Times and The Washington Post, is being tested through Google Labs and features new ways to interact with news online. (For more info read our news story here).
Living Stories takes a different approach to the way that news is traditionally presented and read, playing to certain unique advantages of online publishing. It unifies coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL and organizes information by developments in the story.
The software also knows where a user has clicked before by turning those stories a different shade of blue. “Living Stories automatically tracks user interactions with the story, helping users get the latest updates to the stories they’re following and sift through the coverage in novel ways,” says its blog.
Andreas Pouros, chief operating officer at search marketing agency Greenlight, believes that Google has essentially found a way to try and bring publishers on-side by offering them free SEO, and what in his view, would appear to be a win-win situation for all involved.
“This marks a significant collaboration between Google and some major heavyweights in the publishing industry,” he says.
But of course only time will tell of which approach will gain the most traction.
Money, honey?
Google thinks Living Stories can help newspapers adapt to a shift that is causing millions of people to get their news from online sources instead of print. But that’s a huge problem for newspapers because they make most of their money from ads appearing in print.
Even though the Living Stories page design follows the usual Google template – simple layout, plenty of white space for potential online advertising – the search engine giant has no plans to show ads during the experiment.
Is there anything besides ad placement in Living Stories that could open up a new revenue stream for money-starved media outlets? Not as far as we can see. Will Living Stories be a viable solution to save the media industry? I am thinking ‘no’.
SEO tips for Bing
Dec 2nd
Think you have a good SEO strategy for Google? You better adapt it for Bing
Following yesterday’s news that Microsoft’s Bing is gaining share on Google (its searches are up 7% for October), I thought I’d look into the company’s stance on search engine optimization (SEO) – you know, now that people are flocking to the site.
Microsoft’s stance on SEO doesn’t appear to be all that different from Google’s, however, users won’t get the same results on both Google and Bing, which is how to two can coexist in the first place.
The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy. Remember that Microsoft’s Bing is the “decision engine”.
Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam.
In a white paper for webmasters, Microsoft says: “There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing. However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog.”
Bing separates results into categories, which has so far worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up.
Bing also has the explore pane, which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google’s recent addition of “search options.”
Look at the keyword phrases you want to rank for, and see how Bing breaks it up. Let’s say “mobile phones” for example. Bing gives you categories like shopping, brands, buying guide, providers, accessories, images, videos, and local.
With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the results, it’s about getting to the top of the right set of results. Having quality and relevant content is the best thing you can do. Incidentally, this will probably help your cause in Google (and other search engines) at the same time.
“Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design,” says Microsoft, as quoted on Webpronews.com.
Curious About What Bing Looks for in Links?
Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently posted a pair of blog posts looking at what makes some links good and some bad:
- If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to them
- Don’t seek links from sites whose content isn’t worthy of your endorsement.
- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)
- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links
- Avoid “bad neighbourhoods” like dedicated domains or IP ranges that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges.
- Avoid hidden text
So that’s where Microsoft stands on SEO practices. Remember that when you are thinking about SEO and how to rank higher, the rules as they were set out on Google when we first starting talking about SEO have changes. Search engine marketing is about to become a whole lot more complicated.
Business networking strikes back
Nov 19th
Bruce Townsend, online marketing expert at ecommerce & EPOS supplier, Actinic (www.actinic.co.uk)
Only a few years ago, networking was the thing that greased the wheels of business. It wasn’t what you knew, but who you knew, that built the reputation of your company. Whether at exhibitions and events, or in the local Chambers of Commerce, pressing the flesh and chewing the fat with like-minded people was the way to put the word about. Handing out bits of free advice opened doors for the occasional sales pitch, and brought the business rolling in.
The worldwide web changed all that. The online channel became the new growth opportunity, and on the internet it wasn’t who you knew, but what you knew that counted. Early conversations were about HTML and Perl script and how to physically create an online presence. As technology became easier to use, and more companies went online, competition increased and the debate switched to PPC and SEO, and how to get your web site visible in search results.
Today, we may be on the cusp of another switch. In the UK, 90% of searches go through Google. For any given search, Google only offers twenty places in the first page of results, and ten of those are adverts. It’s getting crowded at the top, and harder and harder for new entries to gain visibility.
But fear not, because rescue may be at hand. And guess what, it’s good old-fashioned networking in another guise. More and more businesses are gaining a foothold and building a profile online using social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, and business-oriented services like LinkedIn and Plaxo. Even Twitter, the bastard child of blogging and social networking, is being put to effective commercial use.
Initially dismissed by business skeptics, these sites are finding their place in the armoury of business marketing tools. Is your business represented there?
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