Should I Trust Bing's Search Engine Results?

Bing has gone all out with it's marketing campaign, not only with online efforts, but also offline claiming itself to be the first decision engine, whatever that means. Before Microsoft came out with Bing, it was MSN Search, then Live Search and many people in the SEO field still believe their algorithm did not change significantly since live.com. In my opinion their algorithm does not even come close to the power of Google and Yahoo's search technology. This explains how beneficial the new business partnership of Bing and Yahoo is. Yahoo will have a wider reach, use more resources, and Bing will have a more powerful search engine and both increase their their combined search market share.

Let's do a quick search exercise on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Search Results on Google for the words: Google, Yahoo & Microsoft:

Google Results for the keyword Google

Google Results for the keyword Yahoo

Google Results for the keyword Microsoft

Clearly results are relevant, complete, and has tons of information on each keyword searched. The same seems to be true on Yahoo.

Search Results on Yahoo for the words: Google, Yahoo & Microsoft:

Yahoo Results for the keyword Google

Yahoo Results for the keyword Yahoo

Yahoo Results for the keyword Microsoft

Both Google and Yahoo showed sitelinks which should be normal for a very popular company with a very large website. Now take a look at the result of Bing below. This makes me question Bing's credibility in giving search engine results as the results seems to be biased to Microsoft owned properties.

Search Results on Bing for the words: Google, Yahoo & Microsoft:

Bing Results for the keyword Google

Bing Results for the keyword Yahoo

Bing Results for the keyword Microsoft

Wow, Bing gives pages full of information about Microsoft, and they only give 1 entry for Yahoo and 1 entry for Google. With tons of properties of Google, I can imagine something else should be in there, Gmail, Gtalk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Picasa, Blogger, or even just the tons of articles talking about Google. The same goes with Yahoo! Yahoo Mail & Yahoo Messenger are two very popular products that I am sure these are very keyword focused and has tons of links using the Yahoo keyword. If Bing cannot display them, it is either their algorithm really doesn't work or their results are skewed by hand.

Even less popular search engines such as Ask and Cuil are showing better results.

• Ask Results for the Keyword Google


• Ask Results for the Keyword Yahoo


• Ask Results for the Keyword Microsoft


• Cuil Results for the Keyword Google


• Cuil Results for the Keyword Yahoo


• Cuil Results for the Keyword Microsoft

Hat tip to an SEO friend of mine, web designer Alfredo Palconit, told me about this search on Bing result just yesterday showing that Bing seems to have skewed results. Thanks also to Sulumits Retsambew posted the result earlier.

MSN, then Live, now Bing - What do SEOs need to know?

Microsoft has remodeled their search engine over and over again. The Microsoft Network, or MSN whose origins started as an ISP and an online portal when Windows 95 was launched, grew into a search engine that was always trailing as the 3rd most used search engine behind Google and Yahoo in terms of search engine usage with the United States.

From MSN.com to Live.com and finally Bing.com, it is now branding itself as a "decision engine." Do they mean Bing has some unique decision algorithm in giving relevant results and that it can decide on what are the best sites for you to look at? Not really. It is a decision engine that gives you various types of results that may help you decide on what you are looking for. In my opinion this just sounds like Google Universal Search Results, they just gave it a new name (from Live to Bing) and slapped a full marketing campaign on various advertising mediums to spread the word of the Gospel of Bing everywhere.

Should I even care about Bing?

From daily SEO interactions with SEO friends working at an SEO firm, SEO friends on forums I interact with daily, to some SEO competitors who joined Sulumits Retsambew SEO Contest, a large percent of SEO professionals do not even care about Bing because they believe Google has the majority search usage worldwide. Based on some research data by comScore, last April 2009, Google websites receive about 8 times more search queries than Microsoft websites.



Is this the case forever? We cannot really say since Microsoft is really pushing their search engine in this all out marketing campaign for Bing. There are some sites showing Bing gaining in market share. As for the usage, several news sites and blogs are showing an increase in Bing search traffic but this can still be due to the campaign that makes everyone curious about Bing, thus everyone checks it out. In the end, it will still boil down to how pleased the search engine users are in being able to look for what they are searching for. So we still have yet to see in the next few months if Bing's traffic sticks, continues to increase or will drop again to being only the 3rd most used search engine again.



Going back to the question: should you even care about Bing? Well, if Bing is only 8.2% of all search queries, this can still be a big number. The US has 220 million Internet users and about 73% of those use search engines for shopping. That is an estimated 13 million people searching with Bing in the US. Still a large market to target. Ok, you can say my numbers are not accurate. My B2C Local Business Search data was from Nielsen back in September 2007, but even 50% of 13 million is still a significant amount of people using Bing.

I'm an SEO and what do I need to know about Bing?

Ok SEO people, what do we need to know? Since Live.com, we have been seeing Microsoft reach out to SEO people, when they came out with their own XML Sitemap submission area, with some basic top 5 backlink info, and making an MS Excel plugin for keyword research from Microsoft's AdCenter. Now with Bing, they have released a Bing webmaster guideline document for the SEO people that care about Bing.

Most SEO concepts are the same throughout search engines. Good SEO best practices are valid for most search engines. And in this 24 pages of information of Bing's webmaster guidelines, after reading all of it, I will try to sum it up into 3 key bullet points that may be unique to Bing:

1. Target Category Keywords that appear on the upper left of the SERPs. You want to make sure you appear on all of them that are good converting keywords for your business. People usually narrow down search results by adding in keyword modifiers and Bing suggest these, so that people do not have to think or type and may find it convenient to click. It is even placed on the top left sidebar where navigational menus people normally click on.


2. Optimize the Document Preview of your pages. All SEO people know that the Title tag and Meta description tag does not only help in the ranking process but if written well, these can be more compelling to click and increases CTR. Now aside from these two, Bing now has the Document preview which based on current observations it is pulling in the initial content found on the page. Thus, for your first few paragraphs, it would be ideal to write something very unique that compels users to click on.
   
   
   
   Having your address and phone number which is a normal practice for Local SEO is a good thing since Document Preview will try to look for this information and place it in the preview window.
   If you do not want this feature enabled, you can use the nopreview tag.
   <meta name="robots" content="nopreview" />
   


3. Implement SEO Flash Best Practices. Bing has expressed their sophistication in this technology by specifically stating the following:
   

   When titles and/or Meta descriptions don’t exist on an HTML page, at runtime Bing creates a best-effort caption from relevant external sources of reliable information to populate the caption with meaningful data for the searcher. Bing, in the effort to improve searcher experience and avoid empty captions, can even construct captions using keyword inbound link text from external, authoritative websites to help create basic captions where no publisher data exists.

   
   Initially this sounds good. But sometimes any information based on other websites may give you a limited amount of control. Every business has enemies and sometimes even if the enemies are a minority, they can sometimes be the "noisiest" online and could be creating a significant amount of negative publicity for your business. You do not want Bing to show this information thus as a precautionary measure: always do Flash properly.
   

Everything else mentioned in their webmaster guideline whitepaper is all standard SEO best practices applicable to other search engines, such as good content, unique title tags and Meta tags, avoid duplicate content, etc.

So if you know SEO already these are the 3 main differences you might want to look at when optimizing for Bing.

Cli.gs URLs Hacked Forwarding to lansner.freedomblogging.com

Cli.gs, (Cligs) a URL shortening/forwarding service has been hacked where several users have been reporting their older created forwarders were all going to 1 single location. Below is a screenshot within the Cligs user interface displaying some older saved forwarded URLs in my own Cligs account.

All of which were now going to:

http://lansner.freedomblogging.com/2009/06/14/twitter-hashtag-conversations/25613/

And all had the title:

Hashtag? How to join those Twitter

In the early days of URL forwarding, probably the most widely used service was TinyURL which has served well for people that were sending links via email or instant messenger because sometimes long URLs with tons of parameters get cut off in the sending process by human error, or technical error.

When microblogging came out, and Twitter gained a lot of popularity, more URL shorterners started popping out because of the limited characters allowed in a microblog post which is usually 140 characters. One of the popular URL shorterners is Cligs and the value added service Cligs had over the others, was the free web analytics bundled together with the URL shorterner. One more benefit that many others also had was the custom folder name, and the changeable URLs.

I am not sure if the changeable URL was a good idea, but URLs can always change, link in changing a domain, changing a CMS platform, and you would not want to have dead-404-shortened-URLs. But once someone gets to exploit a security hole on Cligs, this can be a vulnerability of losing all your created forwarders and will be forwarder to some place else.

From an SEO point of view... if any of your forwarding URLs get's posted by one way or another on some other site that has good search engine friendly links, Cligs forwarders are actually 301 redirects, thus giving link value. So who ever hacked into Cligs, must have had this in mind to steal some links in the attempt to rank higher.

Now the question is who has done this? That we really don't know. Although we do now that http://lansner.freedomblogging.com is owned by real estate bloggers Jonathan Lasner and Jeff Collins. Could they be responsible for this? What are your thoughts?

My Free SEO Webinar About Measuring ROI from Organic Search

On May 5th I will be doing a free SEO webinar about measuing the ROI from Organic Search. This presentation is based on my SES presentation but will be much more in depth (I only had about 10 minutes to speak at SES, The webinar is close to an hour). Please follow this link to sign up. The presentation is Wednesday, May 5th, 2009.

Sorry I have been lagging on the search cycle series of articles (the Webinar is focused on measuring and optimizing around the search cycle), but work has been unbelievably busy. I hope to start again next week. In the mean time, please mark your calendars for May 5th and my free SEO Webinar from BusinessOnLine.

Catfish

Measuring the Search Cycle: How to Improve the ROI of Search

My recent presentation at Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York afforded me the opportunity to talk about:

1. The importance of measuring the right data from each step in the "search cycle" and then,...


2. Taking action based on that data.

Many people get caught up in metrics and measuring all kinds of things that don't drive any tactical optimization activities. In an ongoing SEO campaign, resources for continued optimization need to be prioritized based on analytics data, so as to maximize ROI. Therefore, we need to measure the right data in each step of the "search cycle" in order to understand the proper allocation of those resources.

The "search cycle" is a five step process that illustrates how potential customers become customers through search:



Each of the steps in this process have certain metrics that can be leveraged to drive SEO strategy. Because of time constraints I was only able to discuss rankings and traffic at my presentation. For today's blog post, I will be discussing Search Rankings and Wednesday I will write about Search Traffic.

Search Rankings:

In the search rankings phase of the cycle, its obvious that the primary metric of concern is the ranking of a phrase. But it's important to note that where the phrase is ranked is not always consistent between users. Between localization, personalization, universal search results and ranking fluctuations between data centers, ranking #1 for a particular phrase in Google, Yahoo or MSN, isn't as clear cut as it once was. That isn't to say that top listings for competitive keyword phrases aren't important, they certainly are. But they are getting harder to measure accurately.

It's also worth noting that typically, an enterprise level Web site that gets thousands of search visitors a month, is not able to check rankings for every keyword permutation that they are interested in. Therefore they chose a smaller set of "fat head" keywords that are competitive and will in theory, generate the highest revenue or at least search traffic. But in reality, if you optimize a site for a three word phrase, you are likely also optimizing it for dozens if not hundreds more related long tail keyword phrases. And the resulting taffic from these long tail keywords for sites that target high traffic niches can be significant.

The main takeaway here is that rankings in and of themselves don't tell the whole story about your SEO campaign. So its important not to rely solely on rankings as the primary metric of success. It's certainly a key indicator, but the rest of the search cycle must be considered in order to both understand and improve your ROI from search.

So with that in mind, I gave some tips on how to use search rankings to drive SEO strategy:

1. You should create a "keyword map" in Excel that lists all of the keyword phrases that you are targeting as well as which URL you would like ranked for that URL. The keyword map serves a number of purposes.
   
   One, it is a permanent record of which pages have been optimized for which keywords. This is very helpful in both internal and external link development on an ongoing basis.
   
   Two, in the event that a different page on your site is listed for a particular keyword, it allows you to see the differences in what content you think is most relevant for that phrase versus which content Google thinks is most relevant. Often times this will provide excellent clues on how to improve your optimization.
   
   Additionally, you can then ensure that the messaging on the page that is ranked, is consistent with the page you thought was going to be ranked, thereby improving your conversion rate. In other words, if you sell a product and you have a blog post about the product, and the blog post gets more links and gets ranked higher than the product page, make sure you have a "buy now" button on the blog post.


2. The second way rankings can drive strategy is understanding that rankings in the top 10 are the only rankings that really matter, because they are the only rankings that consistently produce traffic. Therefore, it makes sense to monitor your top keywords to see which in are the top 30 or so that are not in the top 10. These rankings illustrate an immediate opportunity where a few small improvements can make a big difference.


3. Additionally, it pays to look at long tail keywords that convert well and add them to your optimization. Often times it doesn't take much optimization to really improve your ranking for a long tail keyword. And the difference in traffic between a #8 listing and a #3 listing can be substancial.

In summary, any ranking not in the top 10 represents an opportunity for continued optimization. There are usually more opportunities for more SEO (content, internal links, external links, etc) than there are resources. In that event, it is useful to prioritize based on which terms convert better, which terms drive the most profitable sales and which terms are in markets where the company has a competitive advantage. It is advantageous to have a keyword map that serves as a master gameplan for your optimization. This will allow you to understand if your visitors are going where you want them to and that they see messaging that will result in the highest possible conversions. Adding long tail keyword phrases to your map that convert well according to your analytics and then optimizing for those phrases can significantly increase rankings for those phrases.

Rankings are really just the tip of the iceberg as it relates to what you need to measure to maximize your ROI for your organic search campaign. In my next blog post, I will talk about traffic metrics, what's important, what isn't, and how that data should drive your ongoing optimization.

Hidden Content/Cloaking - Any day can be April Fool's Day

The Internet goes wild on April Fool's day. This year, you may have noticed some already from Google's CADIE, YouTube's mirror image and the one I liked was Reddit's pages were redesigned on various parts of their site that look like Digg, Fark, Slashdot and maybe more.

Here at BusinessOnLine, as mentioned in our last years April Fool's Day blog post, we work hard and we play hard. For some reason, everyone seemed so busy with client projects that no well coordinated prank was executed this day of the pranks in 2009.

But since we do play hard aside from work hard, any day here can be like April Fool's day. An earlier prank happened on March 4, 2009. This is the office cubicle of our HR manager.



And in this prank we did, blackhat hidden content. We cloaked the HR's office.



Too bad, all of us never saw Trevor's reaction that day. He usually comes in at 5:00am. Too early for the rest of the company.

Any day can be April Fool's Day here at BusinessOnLine.

My SES New York 2009 Experience: SEO Adventures 3000 Miles from Home

I just got back from SES New York on Friday where I was very honored to have an opportunity to speak and to contribute to an outstanding session called "Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers". Between myself and the other exceptional speakers including Cindy Krum, Founder and CEO of Rank-Mobile; Anne Kennedy, SES Advisory Board and Managing Partner and Founder of Beyond Ink; and Seth Besmertnik, CEO & Co-Founder of Conductor, Inc. I felt like we put on a very informative session and the feedback I got from audience members after the presentation was very encouraging. I will be presenting a separate blog post later in the week covering some of what I spoke about at the conference.

I was happy to have an opportunity to speak right after Guy Kawasaki's keynote speech which I thought was fairly well done and educational despite what some other people have suggested. I thought most people coming away from the keynote were energized and ready to learn more about SEO, SMO and everything in between. So I wasn't surprised that we had an almost capacity room of about 150 people.

After I was done speaking, I attended some of the sessions in the afternoon although I admit I skipped the session after I spoke to unwind and get some pizza. I have been to SES before so I wasn't particularly confident that the stock lunch menu would be to my liking (I was happily surprised that SES has definitely improved their food selection since last time I was there two years ago). Props to the SES New York organizers for taking care of the problem. However, I was more than happy to have some authentic slices of pie from Ray's Pizza around the corner from the Hilton where the conference was taking place.

While we are talking about the Hilton, let me say that the hotel is fantastic. The only complaint that I have (and it's a big one), is if your going to charge a $250 discounted nightly rate, don't try to weasel me for $15 extra a day for Wireless Internet. If nothing else, be smart enough to realize that at this conference its pretty much a given that almost everyone needs it. So bundle it in with the total package cost and let me be happily surprised that my laptop works as soon as I enter my room. That was a REALLY annoying part of the whole experience.

Overall though I had a great time. I thought that the sessions were really good for the most part. I thought Michael Gray had one of the better presentations that I saw, and was impressed with the amount of tactical advice that he gave people that could be implemented immediately. I am a big fan of sessions that teach people how to do things, rather than those whose speakers pontificate about high level subjects that make for interesting coffee conversations, but don't really help you make money.

For example, in the session titled "Universal and Blended Search: An Update", the people that were from agencies did an ok job discussing some tactical elements of Universal Search. But the search engine representatives seemed like they were giving a commercial about all their Universal Search properties. There was no real tactical advice and it felt like that they were all trying to convince people that their search engine was cooler than the other guys (and it wasn't hard to figure out how to spend advertising money with them... *lol*). Ironically, Google, who invented the phrase Universal Search, was not part of the panel. Thankfully for them. So that was a little disappointing.

But the session on video search was outstanding. It was probably the best session I went to (or at least tied with the "feed" session that Michael Gray was part of). It's amazing how the popularity of video has turned YouTube into the second biggest search engine in America. And goes to show you how important video content is to SEO.

I also learned a lot more about social media, especially with regard to how cool targeting ads can be with FaceBook. Actually there is a lot of cool stuff happening at FaceBook. If you haven't set up a page for your business on FaceBook, now would be a good time. Between the social media capabilities, the viral possibles, and the potential SEO benefits, a FaceBook page for your business should be a priority for your online marketing efforts.

It wasn't all business in New York (although mostly it was). The first night, Monday, I went to sleep early so that I could be well rested for speaking. Plus the 6 hour flight is always draining. The second night we went around the corner to a little New York bar filled with other SES attendees and talked a little SEO over a couple Heinekens. The last night I went to Dave and Busters in Time Square which was definitely the highlight of the trip. I got to hang out with my friend Heather and we were thoroughly entertained by the wisdom of Bruce Clay. Bruce is a fun guy to talk SEO with. His experience and his passion about the subject of SEO are almost unmatched in the industry. We both laughed when I reminded him that I met him six years ago. Time Flys.

So I had a great time, but after three days of intense SEO and meeting all kinds of amazing people (like Jefferey Eisenberg for example), I was VERY happy to get home (although not so happy with the extra hour of waiting for our plane to take off... *lol*). One fantastic thing about living in San Diego is your never really sad to come home. It's not paradise, but its pretty darn close.

And it sure is a lot warmer here than New York :)

Stay tuned later this week for my blog post about my session and some of the SEO tips that I spoke about. Have a great week!

Catfish