16.08.2009
Search Engine Optimization
Ever since Bing launched and when they finally closed the deal with Yahoo, I’ve been itching to do this review on Bing’s results and the implications it has on SEO’s.
Now that Binghoo has been in existence, optimizing for Google’s competition is growing significantly. If Binghoo will be capturing 1/3 of the search market it’s definitely worth your efforts of grabbing that pie of your traffic.
Let me give you a brief walk through of a few interesting features that Bing has.
Document/Site Preview – Aside from the ordinary SERP’s you have, Bing helps users by giving them a preview of the page/site. According to the Bing team, “it helps searchers find the content they want faster, without leaving the SERP until they are ready.” As a webmaster, you can also disable the document preview feature for your site in Bing. (By the way I’m not affiliated in anyway with the featured websites on the searches.)
Quick Tabs & Related Searches – Bing gives you a neat list of related topical searches at the left panel of every search. In our keyword “dubai business”, we have related search options of “online businesses”, “dubai business directory”, “business opportunities dubai”, and so on.
Another feature I like on Bing is the Quick Tabs section which gives you filtering options on a broad scope of search. For example, I was interested in finding out for “Nike Shoes”, it gave me options for Catalog, Coupons, and Jobs. The Bing team aims to let the searcher to “fully explore their subject without losing track of their initial query.
Best Match – If I remembered it correctly, Microsoft branded Bing as a “decision engine”. The best match feature has made this statement clear enough. Bing highlights huge brands and names in their best match feature. It isolates the search results if you’re looking for official websites and leading brands.
You can see that aside from the single listing for the Google site, it also features the site’s search box which you can use directly, a “Similar to this” section which listed other similar results which you might have in mind. And then there’s the usual quick tabs, related searches, and search history.
You can read the rest of Bing’s features on the New Features Relevant to Webmasters PDF they’ve released last June 2009. They’ve also mentioned a little bit on Search Engine Optimization (but I still think Google’s SEO Starter Guide was way way more interesting and informative).
Disclaimer: The two websites that I will be reviewing in a while were picked by the fact that they have ranked number 1 during the time of search on Google.Com and Bing.Com. I’m not in any way promoting any of the sites featured in this review.
Let’s get down to the face-off. I did a search for the term “dubai business” (don’t ask me why and how, it’s a random keyword I thought of) on Google and Bing. For everyone’s information “dubai business” has a search volume of 74,000 for the month of July from Google Keyword Tool (this means the keyword is worthy of traffic).
And let’s go tally the results: read more
06.06.2009
Search Engine Optimization
So Bing and Google rode the waves of trend for last week. People still have some mixed reactions for Microsoft (should they be bothered with But It’s Not Google excitement). Although it’s too early to tell, it’s good to finally have that friendly (or maybe not) competition out there. I loved the part where Matt Cutts was bashing the Bing Team at Twitter.
Anyways, so last week, another interesting article came up on TheNational.Ae – “UAE internet users prefer global Google”. Husni Khuffash, Google’s Business Development Manager in the UAE, has an interesting take on UAE’s online business and end-users.
“It’s a big sign that we need more content over here,” he said.
Mr Khuffash was speaking on the second day of a two-day conference in Dubai aimed at educating advertising agencies about the possibility of search advertising and search engine optimisation to increase business in the region. He said he believed education was the key to breaking the Arab world out of its current pattern of having 5 per cent of the world’s population but only 1 per cent of its online content.
“Companies are not taking the right tools to be online and to show that you are there,” he said. “If you are not there, I cannot help you.” Some UAE companies, particularly in the technology and travel sectors, had been using search advertising in a sophisticated way, he said.
I also met Mohammad Zaher, author of Irrelevant Combinations, and I’ve asked him if I can feature an article of his blog here and he was generous enough to permit me. In his post, Google Survey in UAE, and an Agency Day, he has the following interesting stats:
- Search engines are the most used source of online research information (81% of respondents). Manufacturer websites (49%), Directories and local listings (27%), retailer websites (26%), and online auction websites (25%) are also very popular.
- Search engines are used most for research in relation to technology (67%) and travel (48%) products.
- Google is the preferred search engine in the UAE with (58% preferring google.com and 38% preferring google.ae)
- While one third of UAE respondents say the current economic crisis has not changed their shopping habits, an almost equal proportion say the recent financial turmoil has led to less of their shopping being done online. This may be related to the fact that many of their online purchases may have fallen more into the ‘non-essential/leisure’ categories (i.e. travel and event tickets) which people choose to cut out during difficult economic times
- In the UAE, English (76% of respondents) is by far the most popular ‘search’ language (likely to be related to the highly multinational nature of UAE society) vs. 23% preferring to search in Arabic.
So instead of replicating the thought of what I had in the previous post on Dubai needing SEO, I think I should lay down tips on how to increase search engine visibility for businesses online. These are not technical SEO / organic optimization processes but simple you-can-do-it-without-technical-knowledge kind of things. read more
01.06.2009
Search Engine News
Whew this month was a hell of a ride wasn’t it? I think May is enough to get us all hyped up for the next couple of months. We got an answer engine who looks promising, a “bling” search engine on the way, and a new real-time communication & collaboration product from the Big G!
New Competitors on the Rise
Last May 16th, Wolram Alpha was released. There was so much hype about it becoming the next Google Competitor. It still has some search errors but definitely a promising “answer-engine”. After its release, we’ve seen a mixture of reactions. Before it’s release everybody seemed to have anticipated it to be the next Google contender but unfortunately Wolfram found a niche of its own (or so I think it has). Matt Asay has an interesting say on Wolfram and its architecture of failure. While Rafe Needleman is quite positive that Wolfram Alpha Does What Google Can’t. What’s your take on this people, let me know your judgment.
Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s Vice-President, has announced that Twitter Search will soon be able to crawl links posted on the site as well as index the content pages which may result to their own ranking system. So real time search plus ranking system will definitely put Twitter Search on a spot against Google (in some way I think).
Windows Live Search initially announced that they will be releasing a new search engine under the brand name, Kumo (which in Japanese means “cloud” or “spider”). read more
