Yahoo and Bing Holding Hands, Now What?

Yahoo and Bing have been hoping and praying that everything with their recent partnership would go through as smoothly as possible with no hang ups. Recently everything was approved for these two giants to be allowed to put their heads together and change things for the future of both businesses. With Bing really increasing in [...]

Yahoo and Bing have been hoping and praying that everything with their recent partnership would go through as smoothly as possible with no hang ups. Recently everything was approved for these two giants to be allowed to put their heads together and change things for the future of both businesses. With Bing really increasing in market share and Yahoo decreasing, it was an obvious marriage that had to happen. Don’t forget that Yahoo is still a very powerful website and one of the most trafficked websites in the world. How is this going to change things for SEO professionals who have been focusing on just Google for so many years?

The united pay per click advertising platforms of Bing and Yahoo will surely be a new force in the industry. As reported by the Associated Press they will be sharing ad revenues which is really going to change the way businesses market their websites outside the walls of Google. Bing is also working on a unique partnership with Facebook allowing almost everything in the social network to be completely searchable in the search engines. Pretty soon if you want to find something on a specific person you will be able to search in Bing and it will filter not just for their name but through their profile for items as well. It seems like many people are very excited to see this go through. According to a poll done by Search Engine Journal , 62% of voters think that this partnership is going to give Google a real run for its money. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Don’t be surprised if you see Bing making some serious moves that involve sacrificing revenues just for market share increase. I think these massive search giants want to do anything to just pull users away from Google and they are ready to use anything within their grips to make it happen. There has already been chatter in the industry how there will be a massive forward step to outperform Google’s algorithm in the newly combined search engine.

I think eventually we will see a shift as to how search engine marketing professionals approach their focus. Over time we will see an importance for businesses to be visible in Bing as well as Google. Everything that comes up must come down sooner or later and I don’t think Bing will take out Google but they might pull some of the focus off of it for quite a while if they play their cards right.

SEO is Kind Like a Credit Card

What I mean is that search engine optimization is open ended and always occurring. Much like a line of credit SEO is something that is always evolving and changing based on your activites. There is no set duration of time that SEO must be completed or once you finish optimizing your website it is done [...]

What I mean is that search engine optimization is open ended and always occurring. Much like a line of credit SEO is something that is always evolving and changing based on your activites. There is no set duration of time that SEO must be completed or once you finish optimizing your website it is done and completed. If every business was just able to optimize their website and then kick their feet up and wait to appear on the first page than the party would be very crowded would you say?

It is important to realize that optimization is something that businesses never stop doing. I think when SEO was created it should have just been called “proactive marketing” because essentially that is what SEO really is. Do you think large brands just marketed their business for 30 or 45 days and then took a step back and grew into the giants they are today? No. SEO is an ongoing effort that is always changing and evolving. There are no magical pills or universal steps to getting it done because every business is different and requires different steps to achieve their goals. Marketing is an effort that you never stop doing for your business which is why it is important to realize the connection between SEO and marketing. Yes rankings are important but rankings alone don’t grow a business into a large brand. Treating your website like a business is what will cause it to grow. Rankings don’t build a brand and keep customers long term. Being proactive and getting involved in social media and positioning your company as a leader in the industry is what will get your business to grow as a brand. SEO should always be approached with a quality versus a quantity approach. Spamming the search engines only to achieve high rankings is not going to help you or your business in the long run. Every website SEO campaign should be treated like a full grown marketing campaign. A well written press release topic announcing something very news worthy could go much further than one written just to help with rankings. The well written PR topic will also help with rankings because more websites will choose to link to it rather than just a keyword heavy press release designed to achieve rankings with little to no substance for the readers.

SEO does carry with it fundamental steps every business or website should take when first starting out marketing themselves online but soon thereafter that strategy will be vastly different from everyone else. Remember that SEO does not have a destination point. It is the process of building your business online while achieving rankings for certain keywords in search results. Keeping this mind you can quickly see how SEO is not a short term effort.

Social Search Beats Search – Name That Tune!

It’s not often you hear a search engine optimization person like myself say that social media provides better search results (at least not at the moment in the search industry), but I can see an instance where social search may of benefit to a searcher and where the big three search giants might fail. [...]

It’s not often you hear a search engine optimization person like myself say that social media provides better search results (at least not at the moment in the search industry), but I can see an instance where social search may of benefit to a searcher and where the big three search giants might fail. So this is a theory post, if any of you have ever actually tested social search versus traditional search to try to find a song or artist based on a song lyric, please let everyone know :)

If you are looking for the lyrics to a song and you can’t remember the artist’s name, the title of the song, the name of the album that song was featured in, or the lyrics. Let’s say you can hear the melody in your head and you can remember a part of the lyrics but not enough that when you search query what you think you remember you’ll get the results you want. Ever have that happen? You’re trying to remember a song lyric and can’t?

Well, with social search you can just send up what you remember and ask the crowd to help. Someone else may remember the song based on the butchered lyrics you provide and help you. That’s because humans possess intelligence and robots do not (or search engine bots looking for lyrics based on pages that it can or can’t locate on the web). So ask the question at Yahoo! Answers or within your Facebook or Twitter networks…you never know what you will get back as answers!

Seth Godin: Sliced Bread

Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers

Anthony Parinello: Your Price is Too High