The latest social networking craze is Google+, the recent attempt to compete with Twitter and Facebook. However, this new social networking platform could significantly affect the way in which online businesses are found on the Google search engine. One important feature within the Google+ software is the “+1” button which is the equivalent of Facebook’s “Like” button. This determines the social and customer value of business sites and web content.

Explosion of Signups

Since its release on June 28^th, 2011, over 20 million individuals have signed up for an account. Due to the amazingly high number of users that have jumped on board, Internet marketing professionals and analysts are wondering whether the +1’s will affect the way in which businesses utilize search engine optimization tactics.

Utilizing the Best Aspects of other Platforms

Google+ takes the best of social network and wraps it into a neat little package. For instance, there is a video chat feature called “Hangouts” as well as a news feed that is defined by the user called “Sparks.” However, the most innovative feature of the platform, which is also the most relevant to SEO, is “Google Circles” which allows users to share content with specific groups of people or “circles.”

+1-ing

As users build their circles, they can see the websites of other members and +1 them in the search engine results. These +1’s then appear in the search pages for those logged into their Google accounts. Since this is at an early stage of integration, it is difficult to predict exactly how the +1’s will affect those who are not logged in. However, it is safe to assume that in the future the +1’s will be significantly influential on search engine rankings.

Adding Value

As search engines become more intuitive and social, “Likes”, “Tweets” and “+1’s” are becoming value-added activities. These functions are straight-from-the-consumer endorsements of websites, products or any other online entity. When a customer searches for a specific product, there is likely to be customer reviews and recommendations that will play a role in their decision-making process. Users tend to trust the judgment of strangers.

Optimizing these Recommendations

Traditional SEO cannot be used to optimize for customer recommendations. Instead, a new strategy must be implemented and Internet marketers must focus on providing the best customer online experience imaginable to influence +1 recommendations for all their products, services and websites.

Google continues to take the world by storm with their newest way to social network, Google+. With the most powerful feature being the “+1” button, they are sure to optimize their search engine to make it as “human” as possible.

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Original: Google+ Affecting SEO

Microsoft’s fairly new search engine, Bing, has drawn a great deal of attention from the SEO industry since its release. This is because Bing is expected to cut a sizable share from Google. Although this is not the first time a major player has stepped into the ring with Google, Bing appears to be different from other search engines, which is a major strength.

When using Bing, the most common first impression is that the search engine is different. There are plenty of graphical ruffles to please the eye and disguise irrelevant algorithms. Although this may have been the case with other search engines in the past, Bing is different. When you search for a specific term, Bing responds with relevant results. This is fairly rare among most current search engines.

The results are tremendously precise but different from Google’s results. Consequently, whether you search with Bing or with Google you will receive relevant results that are completely different. This proves Bing’s algorithm differs from Google’s. Therefore, it is important to pinpoint the difference between the two algorithms.

Since Bing is still quite new, there are no exact methods of optimizing your site for Bing. However, there are a few bullet points that must be taken into consideration including:

• Page rank matters less
• Bing is more Flash-friendly
• Inbound anchor text is significant
• Fresh content matters less
• Bing focuses on the authority of the site
• Backlinks are less important
• Link spamming does not help
• Onpage factors are more important

Page rank is one of the most important aspects of the Google algorithm. On Bing it is normal to conduct a search on a competitive keyword and see a few PR2’s on the first page. This is next to impossible on Google. Also, Bing loves Flash websites. Therefore, optimizing a website using Flash could significantly help your traffic. Additionally, the anchor text of inbound links is much more important than the quality of inbound links.

Furthermore, freshly written content is not as vital to Bing as it is to Google. This could be due to conservatism or perhaps Bing cannot index sites quickly. Bing also focuses more on the authority of the site which is not good news for smaller websites and blogs. This indicates searches favor older and larger sites. Additionally, backlinks are not nearly as important to the algorithm as they are to Google. At this time, it is unclear if nofollow is important to Bing.

Link spamming will not help you in Bing. Since the quality and quantity are of less importance to Bing, link spamming with have little effect. The final point is a highly debated, controversial idea; that onpage factors matter more to Bing than Google. At this point, it appears Bing values them much more.

These guidelines should help you optimize your website according to the requirements of Bing. Although Bing is still a large mystery to the SEO community, most of these pointers have been proven by professionals.

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1. Is Bing an Effective Medium for Generating Traffic?
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Original: Optimizing your Website for Bing

Have you ever noticed performing the exact same search gives you different results on search engines? This is due to the different algorithms used by search engines to find various types of information relevant to your search. There are many different factors that go into a search such as page ranking, content and other unknown factors that search engines, like Google, will not reveal to the public.

Google

There are various specific factors each website focuses on during a search. First, Google is considered an information engine. Therefore, Google loves sites that offer a large amount of information and content that is accurate and relevant. Good content is the key to high page ranks in Google. Furthermore, Google relies on Google Trustrank which is a method of separating useful webpages from those with filler.

Yahoo

Yahoo has branded itself as more of a social search engine. If you notice, Yahoo has many results featuring eBay, del.icio.us and Flickr results. Additionally, they attempt to incorporate Yahoo answers into as many results as possible.

MSN

MSN used to be a product engine featuring products for their results. However, they have rebranded and become Bing which is considered a living engine that learns as you search. Also, due to the changes in their algorithm, they are adding Wikipedia as much as possible.

Ask

One of the lesser used search engines, Ask is a clustering engine. This means the results provide all surrounding information for the inputted term. Their goal is to get the mindshare of the United States.

This is clear evidence that different search engines provide varying results for users. Which search engine is the best? This is a difficult question as it completely depends on personal preference and what you are specifically searching for. However, Google is by far the most popular search engine obtaining over 95% of all internet searches globally. Therefore, engines like MSN have had to rebrand themselves to stay competitive.

Search engine algorithms are continuously changing to be more complicated so the page rankings remain equal and nobody has an upper hand. In Google’s case, they simply wish to provide the most accurate information possible by weeding out all the junk that plagues the internet. Those in the business follow Google closely to determine what works and what doesn’t. Due to the constant change, this can be a difficult task which is why there are SEO experts.

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Original: Your Guide to Search Engines

Google is known for being the king of the search engines, always one step ahead of its competitors. Their advanced constantly changing algorithm and special Page Rank system has made them the most successful search engine history. Google is not only a search engine, but also one of the biggest internet advertising agencies in the world. All of this success occurred because Google catered to the interests and needs of their site visitors. By providing quality search results that are extremely relevant to search phrases. Likewise, Google tries to stay relevant with the times by changing the appearance of their home page on historic events.  However, recently, Google officially changed its name to Topeka.

Topeka?

Topeka, Kansas is a small town in the heartland of America that is on the verge of becoming a ghost town. The mayor of Topeka announced that he was going to formally change the name of his town to Google, about a month after Google announced plans for a unique contest. The mayor believed that this gesture would persuade Google to select the town for a contest that would let the winner test a new kind of ultrafast broadband connection. After seeing the benefits of fast broadband with his own eyes, the mayor of Topeka decided to enter the contest and give it his best shot. By changing the name he sent a serious message to a serious company, and his town became famous overnight.

A Historic Day

The event proved to be a tremendous publicity stunt for the town of Topeka, and it has certainly left its mark on history by catching the attention of Google for a day. Google said that they had decided to change their name to Topeka after browsing the City of Topeka’s Municipal Web Site. In fact, Google said they felt a kinship to the city the more they learned about them. Google did not announce any plans to change their name back to the original one that has made them so successful. After about 24 hours Google reclaimed its world famous name, leaving the town of Topeka with a special day in history. In fact, there has never been another case of a massive corporation trading its name with a small town in Kansas.

The Result

The day after the town received the highest amount of searches on Google in their town’s history. People from all over the world wanted to know why Google would choose this small town to trade names with. It seems as if Google may have given the town of Topeka a bit of an economic boost by creating a social stigma about it overnight. Google even changed the sign in front of their headquarters to read “Topeka”. Google has educated the world about hundreds of authors, artists, politicians, scientists, doctors, and leaders of all kinds. Pay attention to the design above the Google search bar the next time you are executing a web search.

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Original: Google Changes Its Name to Topeka?

Bing is Microsoft’s version of a search engine, similar to Google. While Google is the industry leader in the market today, Bing is trying to grab a piece of Google’s market share. Search engines primarily generate their money from internet marketers paying the company per click (or impression) to advertise their website by keyword.

Highly clicked keywords tend to cost more per click due to the amount of users that use the keyword in a search. The biggest part of search engine optimization is to create websites that can be found on the search engines within the first few pages. This increases the number of visitors and thus conversions.

This raises an important question: is Bing an effective search engine for generating traffic? If it isn’t then internet marketers shouldn’t spend time and money attempting to target Bing users.

To answer this question: Yes and no. Bing is effective in certain areas of the world and not in others. This all relates to their marketing strategy and advertising. In the United States, there are many more advertisements for Bing than for Google. The difference being that Google has become a household name and doesn’t need to advertise.

A few areas that make Bing an effective search engine are:

• Dominant in some territories
• Brings targeted traffic
• Graphical User Interface (GUI)

The primary advantage of Bing is that it is the dominant search engine in some areas of the world. In turn, this brings in much more targeted traffic. Consequently in an emerging market where Bing dominates, an internet marketer will be quite successful. Another advantage is the easy to use graphical user interface that makes transactions a breeze.

There are two areas that Bing is not effective including:

• Lack of overall traffic
• Slow at indexing pages

These are two extremely important areas. Google holds a huge chunk of the search engine market while others, such as Bing are trying to catch up. With a lack of overall traffic, it can be unprofitable to pump money into advertising nobody will see. Also, with slow indexing of new pages, this costs the web owner money since nobody knows the page is there during the index interval.

In general, Bing is effective when simply targeting a specific geographic area. With a lack of overall traffic, it may not be profitable to invest in Bing just yet. Microsoft is constantly working on this decision engine to improve traffic, so stick around; Bing might give Google a run for their money.

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Original: Is Bing an Effective Medium for Generating Traffic?

Finding the right domain name is often a difficult process that involves intense brainstorming, as well as the annoying procedure of trying to find a name that is available and suitable for your website. Once you have found a good domain, it is even harder to find another good one as the number of premium domains is quickly dwindling. In fact, there are barely any premium domain names available online today, as the market has become so saturated, and is expected to become even more saturated as we progress into the 21^st century.

Experts predict that all .com domains that are shorter than 7 letters and are relevant to a popular keyword will be gone by the half way mark of the 21^st century. This means that a good domain name is like prime real estate at the moment, and even though domains cost less than houses, their value is steadily rising despite the scare that the market experienced in the early 2000′s. If you are having trouble finding a good domain name for your other websites after being successful with one domain name, then you may want to consider using a subdomain. Subdomains are also excellent for search engine optimization.

Subdomains and Search Engine Optimization

The reason why subdomains are perfect for search engine optimization is because they are actually viewed as their won website by search engine crawlers. This means that each subdomain receives it’s own page ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Another distinct advantage of subdomains, is that you do not have to pay for another domain name registry or an extra hosting account. Instead you can simply use your existing domain name and establish an entirely new web presence with your subdomain.

Subdomains and Sub Niches

A great way to use subdomains for search engine optimization is to create subdomains on your site that are relevant to a main keyword or industry. Within each sub domain  you could place content that focuses on that keyword. For example, you may have a primary domain name that is called “highqualitywritingtools.com.” To further capitalize on this niche, and to enhance your search engine presence through diversification, you could open up several sub domains for free that pertain to a variety of sub niches such as: “ballpens.highqualitywritingtools.com” or “compositionnotepads. highqualitywritingtools.com”. By creating subdomains on your main niche site that target long tail keywords, you;re generating extremely targeted automatic traffic for your site.

Subdomains and Backlinks

Another advantage to subdomains is that each subdomain is considered to be another site in the search engines, which means you can link your subdomains to each other, and then link them all to your main site to build a backlink farm. This kind of internal link building, if done correctly, is a great way to get your site(s) indexed in the search engines quickly, and to get a higher page ranking with little effort. Remember that the most important aspect of backlink building is quality. Simply setting up a bunch of subdomains for the sole purpose of setting up backlinks is not going to benefit you, in fact it would prove to be detrimental to your site’s page ranking. Instead, you should make sure each page is populated with relevant and high quality content. Then once the site is populated with content you can begin building a proper link structure that interlinks all of your sites into a traffic generating network.

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Original: Subdomains and Search Engine Optimization

It seems as if the entire world has shifted their focus towards Google and has forgotten about the once ever-so popular Yahoo. Although Google has taken over the search engine industry, there are still a huge group of internet users that use Yahoo loyally, and excluding them form your marketing campaign can be extremely negative towards the growth of your online business. Even if 90% of your traffic is coming from Google, are you willing to throw away the other ten percent due to an oversight in your marketing venue?

You may be under the impression that all search engines follow the same rules when ranking websites but this is simply not true. Yahoo’s search engine standards vary slightly from that of Google’s so it is important to consider the difference when designing your website. The best approach is to build a website that appeases all of the major search engines, including Yahoo. The following information will give you an idea of what Yahoo is looking for.

Link Organization

When it comes to indexing of your website, Yahoo’s crawlers pay extra attention toward the internal structure of the site. Google focuses more on external links such as backlinks, which also matter  for Yahoo optimization, but not as much. In fact, it is possible to have  high ranking site in yahoo with hardly any backlinks! However if your site has  a disorganized internal link structure, then you are going to have a very hard time making it to the top page of Yahoo’s search results. This means you’ll need to devise a site map and submit it to Yahoo for maximum success.

Anchor Text

Instead of simply posting URLs, it is best to use anchor text containing keywords. Anchor texts that contain keywords will enhance your Yahoo SEO efforts by double. Make sure the keyword used in the anchor text is relevant to the page you are linking to.

Keyword Optimization with Title Tags

Of course this trick works with all search engines, but it is extremely important in Yahoo. By putting primary keywords in the main title tags of your web pages, you’ll find that many of your pages gain a very high page rank quickly. Yahoo pays very close attention towards tags of all sorts including meta tags.

Search Engine Optimized URLs

Make sure all of your site’s URLs contain relevant keyword. If you are using a good content management system then this step will be done automatically. A good way to optimize URLs to be search engine friendly is to place dashes between words on key phrases. For example, instead of using the URL “ example.com/lookatthislink” you could use the URL “example.com/look-at-this-link.” Using this simple trick will boost your search engine ranking in Yahoo greatly.

Quality Content

Yahoo places a high priority on the quality of the content. This means that stuffing your content with keywords and writing about anything will not work, in fact it will be very detrimental towards the ranking of your web page. To be successful ion Yahoo you’ll need to use quality content with the correct keyword density and placement.

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Original: Yahoo SEO: An Overlooked Yet Powerful Tool

Social bookmarking has become one of the best ways for website owners to draw attention to their site exponentially. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of social bookmarking; think Digg or Twitter. Any social site that users can place a link to a certain page on is considered a social bookmarking site. People use these sites to share information or media that they find to be useful or entertaining with their friends and family. These sites make browsing the web a fun and exciting experience because people can find out what is new and interesting without trying to find it themselves. By placing your site on a social bookmarking site, you’ll not only receive direct attention to your site immediately, but you’ll also receive search engine optimization benefits as well.

The Connection Between SEO and Social Bookmarking

Proper search engine optimization requires the use of many methods combined in a collective effort to bring as much traffic to the site as possible. The more traffic your site gets, the more popular it appears to be form the perspective of a search engine. Therefore website popularity is almost like a snowball effect, as the popularity builds the page rank rises and it becomes a progressive traffic generating cycle. Social bookmarking lets you expose your site to a wide group of people, many of which run their own blogs, which are indexed in the search engines just as regular websites are. If someone links to your site on their blog, they are creating what is called a backlink for your site. The more live backlinks your site has on the internet, the more popular it appears to be, and the more favoritism it will receive from the search engines. Perhaps the most important connection between search engine optimization and social bookmarking is that your site can receive popularity before it is ever indexed in the search engines, which ironically is an excellent way to get your site indexed!

Utilizing the Full Power of Social Bookmarking

Since there are so many social bookmarking sites online, it would be foolish to target only one of them. However submitting your link to each one manually can be a time intensive process. Fortunately there are ways to accomplish this without wasting time completing repetitive menial tasks. You have two options; you can outsource the work to another person, or you can use an application that will complete the task for you with very minimal input. The first option is almost self-explanatory – simply hire a freelancer, tell him to sign up to as many social bookmarking sites as you’d like, and then tell them to make a post about your site. You can also pay many freelancers a few pennies each to visit your site and vote it up using the social bookmarking buttons on your site. The second option is a bit more tricky but costs less and is equally effective if done correctly. Simply find an application, or have one made that will complete the aforementioned task automatically. You can find out about applications like these at online forums or by doing a simple web search.

Final Thoughts

While social bookmarking sites are a great way to market your site, they are also inundated with other marketers and spammers, so it is important to remember that this is a numbers game. The more amount of work you put int, the more results you’ll see. The key to improving search engine optimization with social bookmarking is consistency.

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Original: How to Use Social Bookmarking to Enhance Search Engine Optimization

Yahoo Search is great and Bing is quickly gaining ground as a worthy search engine.  When Yahoo and Microsoft combine their specialties, they could become the collective kings of the search world.  This partnership could bring forth great things for both companies but as it stands now, Google is dominant and its search engine is the one all webmasters optimize for.  While Google can definitely help deliver the traffic you desire, you need to make it a priority to ensure your site doesn’t end up in its dreaded supplemental index.

What is the Supplemental Index?

Writer Andy Greenberg’s 2007 Forbes article entitled “Condemned To Google Hell,” best describes the supplemental index.  The article explains how two online businesses lost traffic and eventually sales because their pages fell into the deep, dark abyss where URLs are buried.   A major focal point of the story was to determine what could cause something like this to happen, speculating that purchasing links and duplicate content were among the culprits.  This was clarified by Matt Cutts, Google spokesperson, who let it be known that the supplemental index does not mean a particular website has been penalized.  According to Cutts, the determining factor to whether a web page makes it in the main or supplemental index is its page rank.  Despite this clarification, the supplemental index is the not place where you want your web pages to end up, especially if your trying to promote your business through SEO.

Keeping Your Site Above Ground

To keep your web pages from falling into the depths of the Google supplemental index, we recommend following these four tips:

1.) Unique Page Titles – This is a basic step that often gets overlooked.  Put a little extra effort into your page titles as it helps in terms optimization, usability and more clickthroughs in the search results.

2.) Unique Content – There are many reasons why your pages may not be as unique as you think.  This could be due to a shopping cart or CMS flaw, but the more identical content you have at multiple URLs, the better chances you have of being tucked away in the Google supplemental index.  Go through your pages and make sure you have at least 100 words of unique content.

3.) More Quality Links – Trust has become a key aspect of quality link building.  By gathering links from a few trusted sites that are already ranked, you will show Google that your site can be trusted and is worthy of the main index.  If at all possible, try to get some links from high ranking sites.  Though some argue that this won’t do much in terms of ranking, it could be a winning factor in the way of indexing.

4.) Internal Page Links - Many sites have dozens of inbound links, but all of them are pointing back to their homepage.  In several cases, the homepage of the site makes it into the main index while all the internal pages are abandoned and swept into the supplemental file cabinet.  To avoid this issue, you may want to pick out your most relevant internal pages and get about four to five links coming back to them.  Even if you have previously left them unattended, don’t worry because the Google bot will typically revisit your site and crawl those internal pages again.  This time, they will make their way into the main index instead of being left behind in Google hell.

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Original: How to Avoid the Supplemental Index

Launched in March, 2009, Wolfram Alpha is a new answer engine designed to provide results on factual queries.  While this is certainly a unique and innovative concept, many are unsure of whether to call it a search engine or if it serves as worthy competition to the big three.  More importantly, businesses are wondering if they need to restructure their optimization efforts around Wolfram Alpha or continue to focus on the major search engines.

What Exactly is Wolfram Alpha?

Wolfram Alpha is described as a computational knowledge engine, one that aims to deliver expert knowledge and capabilities to the greatest range of internet users.  It is said to benefit all professions and education levels, generating powerful results and presenting them with the utmost clarity.  Because the results are not necessarily based on web pages and encyclopedic information like other search engines, it is widely assumed that Wolfram utilizes a combination of both to compute answers.

Wolfram Alpha is certainly advanced and could prove to be a vital internet tool in the future.  The big question is: what affect will it have on e-commerce?  We believe the current answer is a resounding NONE for the following three reasons:

1.) Doesn’t Appeal to Shoppers – One disadvantage of Wolfram Alpha is that it doesn’t offer results commonly sought after by online shoppers.  Although this isn’t the primary goal of the engine, it fails to deliver results on even the simplest terms.  This alone makes it a big turn off to consumers looking to buy items or average users simply looking for basic information.

2.) Insufficient Results - Wolfram Alpha is supposedly a data-driven answer engine that gives detailed, scientific answers to technical questions.  However, if you enter certain terms, Wolfram is likely to get many of them wrong and return results for entirely different words.  From an efficiency aspect, it is clear to see that Wolfram Alpha still has a long way to go in being a specialist at servicing technical queries.

3.) Can’t Comprehend E-commerce – Perhaps the biggest reason Wolfram Alpha isn’t suited for the online business world is that even after a few months, the engine still has no idea what the term “e-commerce” means.  In fact, when typing the term into the search box, the results come back as “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input”.  You can try to get cute with the other common term “ecommerce”, but the finished product doesn’t get any better.  The engine assumes that the term relates to the financial industry and provides results on a company by the name of Commerce Bancshares.  Whether Wolfram Alpha was designed with online shop owners in mind or not, tendencies such as this leads you to wonder if anyone can get much use out of this tool.

Conclusion

It is pretty easy to poke fun at Wolfram Alpha engine and its deficiencies.  However, you should keep in mind that the engine is in its beginning stages and like most web-based platforms, improvements are sure to come.  One day, Wolfram could be a powerful tool but as of now, it is simply irrelevant for most users.  You probably want all the visibility possible but optimizing your site for this engine would be a total waste at this time.

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Original: Should You Optimize for Wolfram?