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5 Reasons Why SEO’s and Clients May See Different Search Results – A SEO-News Exclusive Article

By Alesya Krush in Featured

I bet all SEO’s have faced this problem at least once – a client looking up their target keywords on the Internet and seeing different website rankings than the ones stated in the rankings report. How do you explain to clients that you are not trying to cheat them?

Users may get different search results for one and the same search term because of their:

1. Web History

Personalized search results are no secret to anyone. We know that nowadays search engines (particularly Google and Bing) custom-tailor your search results based on the queries you make, websites you visit and search results you click. What’s interesting is that your results get biased by default, unless you specifically opt out.

Search engines collect users’ browsing history in 2 major ways:

(1) by tracking signed-in users’ activities and
(2) by planting cookies into signed-out users’ browsers.

Google (and Bing) Love Anchor Text Link Spam

By Jill Whalen in Featured

While many bloggers and the media are calling Google’s search results out lately, most of the focus has been on the somewhat low-quality pages that show up for informational long-tail searches. My concern for Google’s search results is different, however. As I touched upon in the last newsletter, I’m tired of Google (and Bing) returning sites that use anchor text link spam to get on the first page of results.

For those who don’t know what anchor text is, here’s a quick explanation:

Anchor text is the words in the clickable part of any link. For instance, when someone links to my site, they typically use either my name or my company name in the anchor text, which looks like this:

Jill Whalen is an SEO consultant.

Or…

Visit ‘High Rankings for SEO consulting.

But those links are not all that valuable in SEO terms. What would be better (for search engines) is for the links to be more like these:

Facebook *Likes* Bing and the Feeling’s Mutual

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Following on from their recent partnership with Facebook, Bing have introduced some new social search enhancements to their search results this week.

Now if you conduct a search on Bing and your search results include a specific link that has also been “liked” by your Facebook friend Jane Doe, a “Jane Doe Liked This” message will be highlighted within the Bing search results page.  From Bing’s official blog post:

“Over the last several weeks, we introduced the new *Liked* results feature that uses the basis of your query to surmise your intent and surface relevant stories or websites  that your friends on Facebook have liked with a nice answer, called out somewhere on the page. Based on the positive customer feedback, we are taking this feature a step further expanding the results to include even more sites.”

You can see the feature highlighted in the attached image (click to zoom).

The feature is part of Bing’s new approach to integrate social signals into their algorithm to enhance the searcher’s overall experience.

Updated Bing Webmaster Tools

By Darren Dunner in Featured

Today, Bing launched the redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools. The updated tools are a result of feedback from webmasters and SEO communities, where Bing learned that transparency, more control and more information are what webmasters want the most.

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features include:

• Silverlight 4 Capabilities: To offer a richer customer experience, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data.
• Index Explorer and Submit/Block URL: Both features provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes sites.
• Index Explorer: Index Explorer gives Webmasters unprecedented access to browse through the Bing Index in order to verify which of their directories and pages have been indexed.
• Submit/Block URLS: Submit URLs gives Webmasters the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to its Index and Block URLs allows you to block specific URLs from appearing in Bing Search Engine Results Pages.

For more information about the redesigned tools, check out the Bing blog post. Additionally, this morning, Satya Nadella, SVP of Bing Engineering, provided an informal update on the Yahoo! transition on the Bing Community Blog.

Bing Proves Power of Facebook Advertising

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

In a single day, Bing has increased the number of fans of their Facebook page by 500 percent. How? By using clever social media advertising embedded within the popular Facebook application Farmville.

The advert appeared yesterday inside the game Farmville, encouraging players to become a fan of Bing in exchange for free farm cash (the virtual currency used within Farmville). As an incentive for players to act, Bing positioned themselves as the ideal search engine to help them win the game with tips and solutions for how best to use their crops and animals. Probably the cleverest part of the promotion was the fact that users could fan the Bing page without interrupting their game.

As a follow up, Microsoft’s social media team then set about creating dedicated updates for Farmville users on the Bing Facebook page.

The Bing Facebook page started the day yesterday with around 100,000 fans and that figure is now well above 500,000.

An Overview of Bing Webmaster Center

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hands up those of you who have verified your sites with Google Webmaster Tools? Ok, good. Now keep your hands up if you’ve done the same for Yahoo Site Explorer? Hmmm a few hands dropped then.

Now keep your hands up if you’ve verified your site with Bing Webmaster Center? Oh dear.

Seems quite a few webmasters are concentrating on Google and forgetting about the other major search engines. If you want to understand how search engines interact with your site and find potential issues before they impact your traffic, you really need to verify your site and sitemaps with the big 3 and monitor your stats regularly.

Most people are familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer, but today I want to give you a brief overview of Bing Webmaster Center.

To add a site to Bing Webmaster Center, simply login to your Bing account (or create a new one) and then type in a URL and a sitemap if you have one. You will be prompted to verify your site via either a meta verification tag you place in your home page header, or an XML file that you upload to your server.

Once you’ve verified your first site, you’ll see a dashboard that looks quite similar to Google Webmaster Tools, with the following tabs:

• Summary – lists the date Bing last crawled your site, the number of indexed pages, your domain score and the top 5 pages of your site.
• Profile – lists your URL, the verification process you used and the email address associated with your site.
• Crawl Issues – lists any issues Bing discovered while crawling and indexing your site, such as 404 errors, malware infections and long dynamic URLs.
• Backlinks – lists which webpages (including your own) are linking to your site.
• Outbound Links – lists the web pages your site is linking to.
• Keywords – allows you to see how your pages are performing in search results for specific keywords.
• Sitemaps – provides various ways for you to notify MSNBot of new sitemaps or when you change an existing sitemap.

The following additional tools are available when you’re logged into Webmaster Center:

• Robots.txt validator
• HTTP verifier
• Keyword research tool

So don’t ignore Bing Webmaster Center. Remember that Google is NOT the Internet.

Microhoo Deal Given Thumbs Up to Proceed

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Microsoft and Yahoo announced today that their planned Search Alliance has been given the go-ahead by the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission without any restrictions.

The exact implementation is yet to be announced, but will involve Yahoo shifting their organic and paid search operations to Microsoft. Yahoo will then display primary search results from Bing and enhance them with Yahoo content.

From Yahoo’s official press release:

“Implementation of the deal is expected to begin in the coming days and will involve transitioning Yahoo!’s algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo! becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally. Once the transition is completed, the companies’ unified search marketplace will deliver improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetization opportunities for web publishers through a platform that contains a larger pool of search queries.”

Advertising for both companies will be managed by Microsoft’s adCenter platform (meaning the closure of Yahoo Search Marketing) and prices for all search ads will be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.

According to a memo sent to all Yahoo advertisers today:

• Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers will log into one place – Microsoft’s adCenter – to manage campaigns, for greater efficiency and a better ROI.
• Yahoo is hoping to transition advertisers and partners in the U.S. prior to October 2010, but may wait until 2011 for efficiency reasons.
• Advertisers will reach users on Yahoo! and Microsoft sites as well as other premium partner sites, with a single buy on adCenter.
• Yahoo will give Search Marketing advertisers 3 months warning of any changes to take place.

The two search giants have created a web site dedicated to the partnership and Yahoo has implemented a Transition Center for advertisers.

What does it mean for the search industry? To use a silly dinosaur analogy, (because who doesn’t like those?), it means that Bing the Triceratops and Yahoo the Brontosaurus have just combined to become an aggressive Tyrannosaurus Rex that’s going on a hunt for the Google Gigantosaurus.

Should be quite a spectacle.

How Google Helped Haiti

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

No doubt you’ve heard by now of the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti this week.

If you’ve visited Google.com since then you’ll see they’ve given up some home page real estate to highlight the tragic event. The home page now features the following sentence:

“Information, resources, and ways you can help survivors of the Haiti earthquake.”

The sentence links to an information page about how the public can help disaster relief in Haiti, complete with donate buttons for UNICEF and CARE, processed by Google checkout.

As well as using their popularity to spread the word, Google has announced they will be donating $1 million to the relief fund.

Not to be outdone, Yahoo and Bing also feature Haiti on their home pages. Yahoo highlights an article about texting to support Haiti as their lead story and also includes a small link for donation options. Bing features two small links labeled “How you can help Haiti” and “Get the latest earthquake news” below the fold, at the very bottom of the page.

If you want to donate to Haiti disaster relief, you can visit the Google link above or contact one of the many charitable organizations in the region directly.

Forget Yahoo and Bing, Google Now Targeting Apple

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Google’s worst-kept secret phone finally launched yesterday.

Despite the fact that details about the phone have been leaked all over the web for months, the Nexus One was officially revealed at a good old fashioned press conference at Google headquarters in Mountain View.

Be #1 on MSN Bing by Christmas. Really!

By Michael Small in Featured

MSN’s new counterpart Bing is rewriting search engine history. Touted by Microsoft as the first ever “decision engine” it’s picking up steam like Yahoo in its heyday and is in place to give Google a serious run for its money.

Speaking of “serious”; it’s important to mention that MSN and now Bing are the search engine of choice for most credit card carrying adults. In fact, MSN Bing is the default search engine on every new Windows PC sold. That’s Big! A lot of people go to Google for playing around but stick to Bing when they mean business. And that’s great for you!

I recently obtained ten (out of 10!) top five placements on MSN Bing using a simple formula I can share right now. It took me only a few hours to do all the work, including the domain purchase and setting up hosting. Here is that magic formula:

• Focus on just one keyword for the site. Make it your most important.
• Use the exact keyword phrase as your domain name and be sure it ends in .com, .net, or .org. It is fine to use dashes between each or any combination of words in the domain name. They are treated as spaces by the search engine and are typically much easier to get than domains without dashes.
• Pay for two or more years when you register the domain. They appear to be using Google’s trick of checking registration dates and giving preference to those registered for more than one year.
• Post just one or two pages. If you need more than a home page, add a contact page or something else light on text. Note: You can use your site as a landing page and create links to all of your main site’s pages.
• Keep your home page text between 250 and 400 words. If you need to say more, add images that contain the text you want displayed.
• Put your keywords in the headings but do not use “head tags” or “strong tags.” Just make the text big and bold using the “bold tag.”
• Use your keyword phrase up to two times per one hundred words of text, but do not go over five full mentions for the entire page of text (plus up to two more for headings.)
• Mention your full keyword phrase once toward the beginning of the first paragraph and again within the first one third of the page text. Then use it once near the end of the page text. The other mentions can go anywhere in between.
• If you decide to go the software route to get faster results (still using these tips), stick with one that works well for MSN Bing. Many do not. Note: I developed the method above by using the tool I found at http://www.SEOeliteWeb.com.

Results: Here’s one example… I took one local client’s main keyword phrase of “richmond auto repair”, separated each word with a dash and registered the dotcom version. Within two weeks it became number one on MSN Bing for that keyword phrase and has stayed there as a gateway to the main site. It’s been four months now and I’ve done this for dozens of keywords, with my last experiment yielding 10 for 10 using just the tips listed here.

You can do it too.

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Mike Small is the SEO Specialist for Marketing Considerations, LLC. Based in Richmond Virginia, Marketing Considerations helps clients from all over the US, Japan, Germany and the UK with their search engine optimization needs.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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