Weekly SEO news: 27 July 2010

Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

Yahoo is starting to display Bing results on the search result pages. Bing results are going to deliver a lot of traffic in the near future. Is your website prepared for that change or will you lose a lot of visitors?

In the news: Ask.com relaunches its search engine, AOL is looking for a new search partner, Google enhances dictionary results and image search and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO
1. How to prepare your website for the Yahoo-Bing change

Last week, Yahoo announced that the organic search results on Yahoo will be powered by Bing beginning in August/September. Yahoo is already testing Bing results on some result pages.

Yahoo and Bing

Is the Yahoo-Bing change relevant to your website?

According to the latest comScore data, Yahoo and Microsoft sites had a combined search market share of 31.6% in June 2010.

Yahoo sites had 3.2 billion search queries and Microsoft sites had 2.2 billion search queries in June 2010. That's a total of 5.4 billion search queries in one month.

If your website is listed for the right keywords in the Bing results, you will get a lot of website visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.

Getting visitors from Bing will also make your website less dependent on Google.

How to optimize your web pages for Bing

Optimizing your web pages for Bing is not much different from optimizing your web pages for Google. Just like Google, Bing requires optimized web pages and good inbound links if you want to see your website on the first search result page.

The difference is the weight that Bing puts in the different ranking factors. Things that work well with Google might not have the same effect on Bing and vice-versa.

Here are some tips that will help you to get the best possible results for your website:

  • Optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your site for Bing. By targeting the exact algorithm of a search engine, you increase your changes of getting listed on the first result page.

  • Do not optimize the same page for more than one keyphrase. It is much better that a web page is highly relevant to one keyphrase than somewhat relevant to many keyphrases.

  • If possible, optimize each page of your website for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination. The more targeted the optimization, the more likely it is that the web page will be listed in the top results.

Check if your web pages are ready for Bing

If you want to make sure that your web pages are perfectly optimized for Bing, analyze them with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer. The Top 10 Optimizer will analyze the content of your web page based on Bing's current algorithm and it will tell you how to change your web pages so that they will get top 10 rankings on Bing.

The Top 10 Optimizer also analyzes the backlinks to your page and it will tell you how to change the links so that you get better results. In addition to Bing, IBP's Top 10 Optimizer also works with Google and the local variations of these search engines.

Yahoo and Bing

You will lose a lot of traffic if your web page currently has high rankings on Yahoo but not on Bing. Yahoo's own results will be dropped after the transition to the new Bing results. The sooner you start to optimize some of your web pages for Bing, the better.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com
2. Search engine news and articles of the week

Aks.com Ask.com relaunches its search engine

"We're launching a new look and feel to our site as well as offering some exciting enhancements to our users' question and answer experience. [...]

We've put more emphasis on our popular questions section and made the Question of the Day available to everyone, even those who chose a custom theme. We also listened to your feedback (thanks!) and rolled in new product enhancements, like improved site navigation."



Google enhances dictionary results and image search

"We added implicit triggering, which means you can simply search for [flummox] and find the definition, you don't have to search for [define flummox] or [what is flummox]. We've also improved the definition result snippet to show more details such as parts of speech and pronunciation. Stay tuned for more enhancements here, including an expanded mobile experience. [...]

We have introduced a new design for Google Images. You'll now see a dense, tiled layout that makes it easy to view many images—up to 1,000—on a single scrollable page. In addition, we made the thumbnail previews on the results page larger, so all you have to do is hover over an image to get an even larger view."



 Big Money: AOL's beauty pageant with Google, Microsoft for new search deal

"[AOL's] long term Google deal expires in December. And from what we hear both Microsoft and Google are gunning for AOL's search traffic.

Why? AOL is the fourth largest U.S. search engine, but they have just 2.5% market share. If Microsoft could add AOL’s searches, though, they’d be, with Yahoo’s share, above 30%.

Search volume brings more advertisers, and more advertisers means a more robust bidding system. Microsoft needs that 2.5%. But there’s more.

AOL visitors tend to click on search ads at more than twice the rate that people click on ads on Google’s search engine. So that 2.5% market share is really more like 6% of total search advertising market share."



YahooYahoo says brief outage wasn't because of Microsoft tests

"Yahoo was out for some users today, but the company says the outage wasn't part of tests the company is conducting with Microsoft. Bloomberg News The Internet company says the brief outage prevented some users from accessing some of the company’s Web properties and was due to 'issues' at a third-party Internet service provider."



Yahoo Japan to switch to Google's search engine

"Yahoo Japan, Japan's largest Internet portal operator, said on Tuesday it will adopt Google's search engine instead of teaming up with Microsoft like partner Yahoo Inc. [...]

Yahoo Japan, which currently uses Yahoo Inc's search technology, and Google together would control the bulk of Japan's search market."



Search engine newslets

  • Is your AdSense code used on other websites? (discussion)
  • Google improves maps for Android.
  • Google's sway on Web policy feared.
  • Tracking AdWords clicks from mobile devices.
  • Google's first employee speaks to hometown crowd.
  • IAC's Barry Diller: Not everything has to be Twitter.
  • Google's John Mueller about hacked websites.
  • Google's Matt Cutts about hacked sites (video).

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com
3. Success stories

"IBP has been one of the best SEO investments I have ever made!"

"I have been using IBP for a couple of years now and always achieve top rankings. I have recently shifted my online focus from products oriented to advertising oriented.

The flagship of my new focus has achieved top rankings after being registered for just a couple of months. IBP has been one of the best SEO investments I have ever made!"
Matt Johnson, www.whitelaptop.org



Tell us how IBP helped your business and 250,000 readers will see YOUR website

Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better.

Click here to tell us your story.



IBP

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

4. Previous articles

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

Do you have a minute?