Search Engine Optimization

It is no longer a secret. The all new Microsoft search engine is now called Bing. If you go to bing.com you will be redirected to the coming soon page. The service is to go public sometime next week, followed by around $80 million advertising dollars on TV, Radio, Print, Online and every other form of media.

Microsoft does not claim Bing to be a Google killer this time, rather it is a step in a long term battle that will take years. The PR people have learned that all Google killer claims sink like rocks and it is VERY hard to move Google even 0.001% market share.

New Bing Features

From the review “Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results” it seems like Bing has improved search quality, several Google like features, but nothing more. There’s a new approach to search tabs, which are positioned on the left hand side, followed by related searches on the bottom. Search tabs offer related searches like quotes, images, videos, speeches, prices, etc. If searchers miss the tabs, Bing breaks down actual search results (example below):

Sometimes Google does similar options in search results, but I personally find them sort of annoying (will have to actually try Bing though).

Microsoft does the same thing as Google for local queries and news related searches. The big difference comes with travel queries. In this case Microsoft uses Farecast data, which is a travel search engine owned by Microsoft. Results yield a rich set of results, with options to search for rooms, hotels and even filter results by hotel brands, star ratings, amenities and more. In a way Bing turns into a travel search engine whenever you have travel related queries.

More articles on Bing:

• State Of Search: Google Will Stay Strong Despite Bing & Yahoo
• Meet Bing, Microsoft’s New Search Engine
• Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results
• Ballmer On Bing
• Microsoft’s New Search at Bing.com Helps People Make Better Decisions
• Woz-Bing! Apple Co-Founder a “Big Fan” of Microsoft’s New Search Engine
• Bing: What to Expect (Hint: It’s More Than Just a Live Search Rebrand)

Publicly speaking Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz stated that Yahoo is interested in Microsoft-Yahoo search deal. She also mentioned that Microsoft will need tons of money to buy Yahoo entirely. – source

It is not clear how the deal will be structured, and most of the information on the internet is pure speculation.

Bartz called search Yahoo’s key strategic asset and will not likely sell it. After search, Bartz named its homepage and multitude of services such as finance, mail and news as key properties to Yahoo’s business.

The deal with Microsoft may be structured in several ways:

• Microsoft will supply Yahoo with paid ads on search and content network.
• Yahoo will gain reach through Microsoft display platform
• Yahoo will keep its search in house and only partner to share paid side of the business.

MicroHoo Lite And Other Creative Speculation About Yahoo’s Immediate Future

More Speculation On Yahoo-Microsoft Ads Deal

Bartz Talks About MSFT Deal, Google & More At D7 Conference

The new version of Local Search Ranking Factors is out, and it is a must read for beginners, gurus and anyone in between. The document is structured in the same as Rand’s Search Ranking Factors, Wiep’s Link Building Factors and Local Search Rankings Factors 1. Top SEO Gurus are interviewed, and based on disagreement / agreement, each factor is given an importance score from 0 to 5, with 5 being the most important. Here I’m going to have a quick glimpse at some of the most important factors, but you should read the document itself thoroughly and bookmark it.

Most Important Local Factors:

• Claim Your Business Listing
• Feature Address in the City of Search
• Associate Local Business Listing with Appropriate Categories
• Put in Keyword and City in the Title
• Having physical address close to perceived city Centre helps
• Make pages relevant
• Make sure the business is listed with major local data providers
• Include full address on website contact page
• Include city and state in the page titles
• Have quality inbound links
• Location keywords in inbound links

Local Search Ranking Factors volume 2

Google made significant changes to the way it treats trademarks in US, Canada, UK and Ireland. The first change is the number of countries in which trademarked keywords are allowed. The second is how the trademarks are treated within the US.

• Any trademarked term can be used as a keyword
• Any trademarked term can be used in ad copy
• If the trademark holder asks Google to not allow others to use a trademarked term, then it will be disapproved from ad copy, but can still be used as a keyword
• A trademark holder can allow only certain companies to use their trademark in ads (but this is all or nothing, with no conditional usage) – Search Engine Land

If you sell, review or provide other services that involve a trademark term, you can now bid on it, use in your ad headline and copy.

The Consequences

Google’s decision to loosen trademark control is a very bald move. Many trademark owners do not like the fact that other companies and merchants can bid on their names, now it is even easier to do so. Despite the lawsuits , Google is looking to change the entire playing field by broadening the policy worldwide and making it easier for anyone to bid on trademarks. The strategy is in the scale and once it reaches a point of no return trademark owners (as well as companies who want to make a quick lawsuit buck), will accept broad trademark usage as a part of the game.

Merchants, review websites and affiliates will benefit by monetizing more keywords, while the Google will make an extra buck on all those extra keywords.

Search engines news that happened in the past week:

Ask.com is Becoming Desperate

Seems like Ask.com is becoming desperate for cash, showcasing full page ads on its homepage:

Additionally it features up to 7 ads on top of organic search results which on my resolution 1440×900 hide SERP completely below the fold. In contrast, Google features maximum of 3 ads on top, Yahoo goes up to 4 and Microsoft follows Google with 3 paid ads.

It’s quite obvious that Ask.com focuses on money, at the expense of relevancy and user experience. I personally think Ask will not last long with this strategy and will go out of business, selling assets to anyone willing to pay.

Google Features Links and Paid Ads in Google Suggest Feature

A new update to Google suggest. If you type in obvious navigational query, Google will give a link in the Suggest box. Another new feature is a paid ad is the same box for queries with some sort of sales intent.

Features are still being tested by Google, and might not last, but they’re pretty useful and original.

Google Streetview Tricycle

Streets in Europe are pretty tight. There are many places that a car cannot get into. What’s Google’s solution to this delima? Introducing all new Streetview tricycle spider, designed to index narrow european streets, which cannot be access by a car:

Microsoft To Launch New Search Engine Brand, Again…

Search Engine Land reports that Microsoft will soon be launching a long promised new search engine brand. It is not clear what brand it choosen, and we will only find out by the end of the May, however, here are some of the possible names:

• Kumo
• Bing
• Hook
• Sift

Personally, I doubt Kumo will be the new name. After being used in testing, any “thunder” with that name is kind of gone. Plus, I’ve seen plenty of people on the web ridicule that name as a new brand choice. Sift seems potentially tied to a Microsoft mobile platform, plus Sift.com is actually owned by someone else. Hook.com also is owned by someone else. Bing.com resolves to a blank page, is registered to Microsoft and uses Microsoft’s name servers. So that’s what I’d guess it’s going to be.

Will brand name change help Microsoft in the battle against Google? I personally doubt it. In order to leave a brand impression in people’s mind a brand must offer something no one else does. For instance, Google’s brand was earned purely on relevancy, when most of other search engine plainly sucked. The newly released Wolfram Alpha has already got itself a name in the academic circles and will most likely earn a title as a scientific search engine. SEO Book and SEO Moz earned their small brands by offering better SEO content that anyone else on the web.

What can Microsoft’s new name give us? There are definitely new features under the hood, but its not the features that earn the name – it’s the approach, that no one else did before.

Microsoft has used the same exact strategy when it unrolled Live search, designed to go against Google. It didn’t work. So why is it doing it again? I maybe mistaken and there is more coming to us than a brand name change, and I hope so, but if it’s only a name change I won’t surprised that Microsoft will not move an inch in this battle.

Danny long suggested dropping the whole Live, Kumo and other bling names, and just going with well know MSN Search or even better Microsoft search. Everyone knows Microsoft, and its a brand you can leverage, instead of introducing unknown names every couple of years.

We’ll see how it goes.

Wolfram Alpha has officially launched to the public Saturday May 17, 2009. Check the search engine for yourself:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Service Review

Wolfram Alpha is very interesting. If you missed out the news, it mashes data from various offline sources and presents it in a readable way, full of graphs, charts and comparisons. Data itself is gathered from various offline sources through partnerships, public access or purchases. It is then analyzed, cleaned, cross referenced and fed into the engine.

The engine itself is designed to compute complex mathematical equations and give instant results to questions that otherwise would take hours to answer, find out, measure and cross reference. The emphasis is on numbers and precise sciences, therefore Wolfram’s strongest side is in data that can somehow be mathematically manipulated.

The engine is perfect for students, scientists and researchers who need instant facts and complex calculations. I suspect Wolfram Alpha will soon be making its way to the list of essential tools used by academic community worldwide, just like Google once did.

On the other hand, Wolfram Alpha still has a lot of trouble understanding search queries and gives empty results for many attempts. It will improve as more and more people use it, but it will take some time.

Here are some interesting search queries:

• distance from sun to pluto
• number of fish species

Google Webmaster tools have undergone a major redesign by the Google team. To see new design, log into your Webmaster Tools and click on the top link that will say something along the lines “New Design, Click Here to See it”.

Here’s a snapshot from the dashboard. Right away you can see search queries.

• see full list of changes on the official Google blog
• more on the topic on Search Engine Land

Let’s not call names, but someone in our office just broke Google! =))) For any query anyone attempted to make from our computers we got this message!

It looks like we’re making too many queries from the same IP address and Google is thinking we’re an automated robot. We use general SEO tools, but nothing that should frustrate Google too much. We probably made too many searches at once and Google did not like it!

In search of effective link building methods, techniques, companies, experts and advice I came across multitude of useful articles that I am going to share with you in this post.

Link Building Resources from across The Web

Here you can find advice from professionals such as Eric Ward, Aaron Wall and others. I am still in the process of studying the materials, since there’s a lot to digest

Get started:

• 21 Tips to earn links and tweets to your blog post
• SEO: Do link builders need to know it?
• 6 Real linkbait examples and the lessons learned
• How NOT to request a link via email
• Increase online visibility for sales and links
• 10 linkbait strategies to build links and drive traffic
• Optimizing anchor text and titles
• Guest blogging for (a lot of) backlinks
• 15 Ways to measure (and GROW) your site’s linkability
• Twitter is incredibly valuable or utterly useless for link building
• 16 ways to measure a link’s marketing value
• Temporal nature of link building
• Sustainable link equity
• 10 Link opportunity segments that increase link acquisition efficiency and conversion rates
• A link builder is born: learning to crawl before you walk
• Is link building a PR function?
• Integrating marketing campaigns with link development
• Who owns link building?
• 7 Reasons why link building needs patience
• 55 Link opportunity qualifiers within large scale link prospect data sets
• Essential qualities of an exceptional link builder
• the value of anchor text optimized internal links
• several link building tactics, including a few examples of some of these tactics
• squeeze the most link juice from your suppliers’ websites
• 11 Experts on link development speak out
• The fundamentals of link building
• Link building: the future of relationships
• Rachelle Money interviewed Eric Ward
• Eric Enge interviewed Debra Mastaler
• Eric Enge interviewed Eric Ward
• 44 Killer tricks to hunt down any webmaster
• The definitive list of 75+ link building techniques
• 35 Powerful ways to get noticed
• Link building notes of an SEO kindergartner
• Interviewing a potential link developer
• A guide to getting maximum link value from your content
• Link building secrets revealed by top linking experts
• A guide to one-way link building
• Link Diagnosis
• Link Value Factors
• Link Building Strategies: 69 solid tactics for 2009
• The 4 types of authority links (and 11 ways to get them)
• Building link targeted content that works
• Where do you start your link marketing campaign?
• Link building ideas for small businesses
• Building relationships is more important than building links alone
• Incentivizing links
• Link marketing and Pareto’s Law are connected
• Social media links can translate in organic rankings
• 10 tips for effective guest posting
• What the economic situation means for link building

Ever wondered how the Googleplex looks inside? Apparently Googlers taped a video of their environment called “Googleplex in 200 seconds” Check out the video here.

Here are some more pictures of the Googleplex:

• Googleplex on Youtube
• Googleplex on Flikr

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Wolfram Alpha is the new search engine launching in May 2009. The founder of Wolfram Alpha brands it as “computational knowledge engine” which allows easy answers to any questions. I have not had a chance to review it first hand, but submitted an application for review.. For now, we’ll look at Danny’s review of the search engine on Search Engine Land.

Amazing Data

Wolfram Alpha promises to deliver amazing data to queries, as opposed to traditional set of blue links. In a demo demonstrated to Danny Sullivan, Wolfram Alpha gave detailed answers to queries such as |newport beach”, “what is the GDP of France” and more (Screenshot below).

The results look very impressive, however the big concern – are the queries pre selected for the demo? If so, then will the search engine survive uncontrolled flow of queries, where the team doesn’t have the luxury of choosing the best looking results for presentations sake. This is the real test that search engines must withstand, and I hope Wolfram Alpha gets through (details discussed in Danny’ article).

Where Does Wolfram Alpha Get Data?

Wolfram Alpha does not spider the web like other search engines. Instead it gets data from various sources and then sorts it out. Wolfram also employs 150 staff to ensure quality control:

“Sometimes there will be data that’s incredibly wrong, ” Wolfram said, giving an example of a lake database with latitude and longitude coordinates that, when Wolfram Alpha plotted it against a map, turned up some surprises.

“Someone did the obvious test and plotted the lakes and found lots of them in the middle of oceans. Things that people have never checked, as we start to do visualization and analysis, it’s remarkable how often we find things that were obviously wrong but not noticed before because they were in printed form or not looked at in aggregate,” he said.