Using Social Media to promote your brand
If you think Twitter, Facebook, and other online social media communities are only for teens, you’re missing out on valuable and free marketing platforms for your brand (book, business or product).
Further, if you’re not on social media, you’re risking losing your potential clients/customers to those smart business people who are utilizing social media.
Which social media platforms you focus on depends a great deal on what your brand is. Here are seven excellent reasons why you must use social media no matter what you are promoting:
Reason 1: It’s the Most Cost-Effective Online Advertising
The current most popular social media platforms being used for business are free: Twitter.com, Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com. (LinkedIn does have an upgrade that costs, but it’s not necessary to get this upgrade.) And this is “relationship” marketing to targeted markets. “Free” is definitely more cost-effective than spending money on online advertising techniques such as Pay Per Click or banner ads.
Reason 2: You Can Have Global Reach With Social Media
The world is now a global marketplace. Why not reach this global market? Many of the most popular social media platforms have this global reach, and you can see this clearly illustrated on Twitter. At any time of day or night you can see real-time “tweets” from people in Japan, England, the U.S., India and many other countries.
For example, if you have a book that might appeal to anyone in the world who reads in English, why limit yourself to just promoting in the U.S.? Thanks to Amazon people outside the U.S. can buy your book even if it is only available in U.S. stores.
Reason 3: You Can Attract Targeted Groups of People as Potential Clients/Customers for Your Brand
Social media enables you to join groups of people with the same interests and goals. On LinkedIn and Facebook you can join groups as varied as Children’s Book Writers to eMarketing. If you choose groups to join based on your brand, you’ll be putting yourself in front of the exact groups of people you want to reach as potential clients/customers. This can pay off in increased sales for you.
Reason 4: You Can Form A Community by Using the Community Aspect of Social Media
Once you are active on social media platforms and have people who are your followers (Twitter), your friends (Facebook) and/or your connections (LinkedIn), you can start groups of highly targeted interests. You can create a niche market in your brand, book or business and share your knowledge with others who join your community.
These people can become your loyal followers, friends and connections - and they can help spread your marketing message to their followers, friends and connections.
Reason 5: You Can Use Social Media to Establish Your Expertise
People like to do business with people they know, like and trust. By sharing your knowledge for free online with the people in the social media groups you belong to, you can establish yourself as an expert. This can pay off in increasing potential clients/customers’ trust in you.
And you can also receive invitations for blog “interviews” or BlogTalkRadio show interviews or podcasts. And these interviews lead to more free exposure for your brand and more free exposure for your expertise.
Reason 6: You Can Use Social Media to Find Cross-Promotional Partners
Amazingly in the world of social media, people who would be considered competitors in the off-line world are teaming up to provide products and services to their combined clients/customers.
And these clients/customers are very responsive to these cross-promotions (often called joint ventures) - especially when introduced to a second expert by a first expert they already know, like and trust.
You and your cross-promotÃon partner can each get access to the other person’s “list” (the names of interested clients/customers collected at a website) and thus you’ve greatly expanded your potential client/customer pool.
Reason 7: With a Few Keystrokes You Can Announce New Updates of Your Activities
Your updates on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn take seconds - and you’ve announced to your followers, friends and connections what you’re doing or what you’re offering or what you’re speaking on. And there are even online applications that allow you to update your status across several of your social media accounts simultaneously. So it is as easy as 1-2-3 to keep in front of your potential clients/customers.
In conclusion, once you become active yourself on social media platforms, you’ll find many more reasons to promote your brand, book or business on social media in order to attract targeted potential clients/customers. And you’ll look back at your pre-social media days and wonder how you ever did marketing without using online social media.
About The Author
Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant whose company website www.MillerMosaicLLC.com has lots more useful advice like this. Grab her free report on “The Top 3 Internet Marketing Elements” to maximize your Internet marketing experience. Claim your report now from www.TeachMeBranding.com.
SEO determined by your Business Goals
SEO is predictable. You might disagree. Predicting where you land for a single keyword might be a bit of a pot shot but good SEO campaigns involve many terms and that makes the overall campaign much more predictable. No other advertising format is more trackable and predictable.
From a business viewpoint, every SEO campaign should be run with the idea that there is a significant return on investment. Very often in advertising, it is somewhat of a guess relative to what you can expect. Marketing on the internet is a much more predictable process.
Setting up your Search Engine Optimization requirements begins with a simple question. “How much revenue do you want your website to generate in the coming year?” Bear in mind that the more unreasonable the answer to this question is, the more difficult it will be to reach your target. Set achievable goals!
Once you’ve established your revenue target, you’re done. That’s it. That’s your goal! OK, so not exactly. The point is, your revenue targets are your goals. Goals should not be expressed in terms of traffic, hits, or even how much the site shows up in the search engines (but it sure helps : ). But let’s say that our sights are set on meeting our revenue targets via search engine results. That’s the purpose of an SEO campaign.
HOW MANY CLIENTS DO YOU NEED? You should be able to state clearly your revenue targets and the average annual value a client brings to your business. If you know that, then simple division will tell you how many new clients you need. You should also have a “gut feel” for how many of a hundred people on your website turn into clients. So with that, you should be able to determine how many visitors you need to generate to your site to develop those clients.
The number of visitors required is equal to the number of clicks that are required. The purpose of a good SEO campaign is to increase the number of visitors who are searching for your products and services. Successful SEO creates enough impressions on the search engine results pages (SERPS) to deliver enough visitors to meet the revenue targets.
Getting on the first page of the SERPS generates an impression, or a chance that the visitor will click on your site. Since very few people advance beyond the first page of results, a conservative SEO specialist considers the first page of the SERPS the ONLY place to be and of course number one is best if you can get it.
AOL published information showing that first place in the search results gets almost half of the organic clicks. Second gets 10-15%. Third gets 5-10%. The remaining scrounge around 3-6% but at least they made it to the party. Conservatively, you can estimate that with a well executed SEO campaign, that you will get 5-10% (we’ll use 7%) of the search volume. Predictably, you’ll be somewhere on the first page of the SERPS. So, if you need 100 visitors, then you need impression in 100/.07 (1,428) total searches.
Once you’ve established your total search volume to optimize for, you then move into keyword selection. The best approach is to select a variety of keywords rather than the most popular terms. Remember this: Most of the time its easier to rank for many low volume keywords than a single high volume one that equals the same number of searches. Further, lower volume keywords are usually more relevant and more specific to the needs of the visitor. Ultimately, they convert better. You’ll also discover that once you know your total search volume requirements, your keywords collectively will meet the search volume requirements without extending into a range that’s impossible to optimize for. You can develop a much more practical approach to your SEO campaign.
Greg Newell owns a WSI franchise serving Cincinnati, Columbus, and Dayton. Want to calculate your SEO requirements? Check out the SEO Requirements Calculator on:
http://wsinetreturns.com/InternetMarketing/Search_Engine_Optimization_Dayton.aspx
Paying for links? Good or bad..
Online Marketing is Complex - One thing I believe about online marketing (and SEO in particular) is that the more rigid the advice the lower its value, particularly when it is cast out to a general audience. Why? Online marketing incorporates psychology, sociology, game theory, etc. The human mind is complex. Understanding how many of them work together (or against each other) is even more complex.
There are hundreds or thousands of ways to win a market. Each idea is a tool that has potential risks and potential rewards on a per market and per project basis.
Link Building in 2003
With link buying people get emotional and just consider it out of the question. Back when I got started as an SEO, many SEOs were considered spammers simply because they even did any link building at all. Why?
• It was amazingly effective.
• It was time consuming and expensive work that many established SEOs did not want to do for their clients.
Since then the web graph has got amazingly polluted and paid links are treated similarly to how link building efforts were treated back then.
Few SEO Tips Are Universal
Rand recently stated that he no longer recommends paid links. If you philosophically didn’t believe in buying links then why would you spend $1,000,000+ building a web graph of link data? What good is researching all the link data if you take link buying off the table as one of the options? Most of the competing links that you can replicate will require some level of payment.
Sure link buying does not make sense for everyone, but it makes a lot of sense for some businesses. And if you don’t buy links then there is little purpose to link research tools, IMHO.
The potential risks & ROI in link buying are not the same for everyone. Saying link buying is off the table is like saying keyword research is off the table. Sure if you are TechCrunch you don’t need to do keyword research to succeed, but it still wouldn’t hurt to consider it.
Waiting in Obscurity is a Real Cost
Let’s say that you are starting a brand new project and have 0 market momentum - a position almost every successful webmaster starts from at some point in time. I don’t think there is risk in buying a few links because you have to start from somewhere. Most of the people who launched new websites in the past year will be out of it by the end of next year. The biggest online risk for new webmasters is perpetual obscurity.
While being obscure you are not…
* building brand and momentum
* building cashflow
* building customer loyalty
* optimizing conversion flows
* catching up with established competitors who are re-investing into growing their businesses
One way or another you have to start doing some push marketing to build momentum. Eventually pull marketing can drag you along, but you don’t benefit from it until AFTER you have built some awareness and market momentum.
At Pubcon 2 years ago Stephan Spencer mentioned you might get penalized 5 years from now for links you bought today. I said that I got started in SEO less than 5 years ago and if I didn’t buy any links back then I wouldn’t be speaking into the microphone right now. I also said that if you get penalized 5 years later for what you did back then well then you didn’t build much of a business.
Brands
But for established brands doing limited link buying can still make a lot of sense. Since “brands are how you sort out the cesspool” there is much less risk in a brand buying a few links.
Some SEO consultants who are trying to appear like the safe option (to pull in corporate consulting clients) think that saying they don’t recommend link buying makes them look wholesome, but any SEO who has worked for fortune 500s knows that once you get in the board room all that matters is efficacy.
Having wrote that, I can think of numerous instances where we advised clients to approach their overall strategy in a way that was less spammy and less risky than what they were already doing and what they were proposing.
Deep Links
If you don’t buy links it is hard to influence the anchor text, particularly if you are doing SEO at the enterprise level AND want to get deep links into commercially oriented pages. Companies spend billions of dollars a year on organic SEO because ranking a few spots higher in Google can be worth a lot of money. If you know a #5 ranking is worth x, then there is a good chance that a #1 ranking can be worth something like 8x.
A Tool is a Tool
Am I advocating that everyone go out and buy links? Not at all. I am just saying that it does not make sense to categorically take it off the table. Link buying is a tool which has various value levels depending what market you are in and how your company is positioned.
Paid links can be a stepping stone or part of your strategy, but rarely should they be your entire strategy. On some client projects we have done we have suggested shifting away from doing as much link buying or reciprocal linking because we felt that the strategy needed to be more holistic and well rounded. It worked, and there was no reason to stop doing what already worked, but going forward it would make sense to leverage some of the brand assets and audience to build other types of links.
Where Link Buying Can Lead You Astray
If link buying is your only SEO strategy it is hard to stay competitive long-term because
* if your link profile is nothing but paid links that is risky
* if your link profile is nothing but paid links that is easy for competitors to clone
* if you are in a big money market some competitors will have other assets to leverage against you in addition
Doing a bit of link buying way back when helped get me some exposure, but it didn’t produce the explosive ROI that we got from doing things like going to conferences, networking with people, and launching a bunch of popular SEO tools. Link buying can be considered a support, but the most successful businesses typically have numerous supports.
Creative Link Buying
Did you see that Mint.com was recently bought by Intuit for $170 million? It seems they used a creative way to buy links:
To build demand, we started asking for email addresses for our alpha 9 months in advance of launch. Then when we had too many people sign up, we asked people to put a little badge that said “I want Mint” on their blogs to get priority access. We got free advertising and 600 link backs which raised our SEO juice.
See how they required links as payment for priority access? Well I would say they got a nice return on those link buys. And so would they. And now that they have so much momentum they can’t and won’t be penalized for buying links. 
Where Link Buying Can Make Sense?
* if you are new and have nothing to lose
* if your brand & link profile are so big that buying a few links won’t stick out
* in markets where the competitive barrier set by all the top ranked competitors includes an array of link buying (not saying you should match them link for link, but it might make sense to cherry pick a few of the best opportunities)
* getting a few deep links with targeted anchor text
* in markets where links are valuable and there are few organic links
A Word From Bing
One thing SEOs should love about Bing is that Bing’s search team gives practical advice and does not try to scare you:
The truth is that getting bad links happens to great sites. We know this happens. In fact, we’ve never seen a decently ranking site that doesn’t have a few (or more) bad inbound links. We take the approach that bad inbound links won’t adversely affect your site ranking unless most or all of your inbound links are from bad sites.
Consider this as well: perhaps the reputation of the site linking to you is bad, but the content on the actual linking page is relevant to the page on your site. This could possibly be a decent inbound link-not as good as one from an authority site, but it might give you a little link goodness.
When it comes to inbound links, just remember this: zero inbound links are better than all bad inbound links. But if you have many good, relevant inbound links from respected sites, a few bad links won’t count against you (but they won’t help you, either).
So in general they look at the overall profile of the business when making editorial decisions and are not likely to penalize you for having a couple bad links. They not only won’t penalize you for having a few bad links, but even expect them to be there.
Summary
I don’t buy all that many links for SEO purposes. But I don’t think it is a good perspective for most webmasters to remove the option from their tool set. Had I not bought links back in 2003 and 2004 I am not sure if I would have as big of an audience as I do today.
If you are just starting out and have limited capital you might want to approach link buying creatively (like Mint did), but if SEO is core to your business strategy you shouldn’t be afraid to buy a few links.
Comments
About the Author:
Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, a dynamic website offering marketing tips and coverage of the search space, free SEO videos, and free SEO tools. He is a regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and publishes dozens of independent websites.
New internet Illness spreads around the world!
I’ve had my suspicions that a rather nasty disease has been floating around, under the radar, for many years.
Well, now it has finally been unmasked and its impact on the world, across all continents, has been huge and deadly serious.8-X
It has been logged by Scientists and given an official name of DN-NE1 but the Media have taken hold of this epidemic and tagged it “Domainers Disease”.
Scientists now believe it was actualy created in the 1980s but only had its first outbreak of note in the 1990s. It seems to have then diminished in the late 1990s but then took a stranglehold in and around 2002. It was previously thought of as just being a mutated strain of Capitalismiosis but Scientists now believe it can be classed as a deadly disease in it’s own right.
The exact numbers of infected people is not known but it is now widely believed to have taken a grip on hundreds of thousands of individuals, perhaps millions across the globe. Its growth was most prevalent in the Western World and particular the USA, Germany and UK.
We now understand that in recent years, there have been massive outbreaks in India and China and indeed, some small areas such as Monte Negro, Tuvalu and Western Samoa have been decimated by “Domainers Disease”
Have you got “Domainers Desease”? What to look out for.
Its all starts when you come into contact with a carrier, otherwise known as a Registrar and purchase your first domain name.
Once this has happened you have effectively got the disease for life and it will be almost impossible to shake off.
You will find yourself completely unable to stop registering more domain names no matter how awful they are.
You ignore the advice of colleagues, friends, family and other “Domainers Disease” sufferers by continuing to renew domain names despite being told it is absolutely futile.
You spend all day thinking about domain names and just about everything you see or do makes you unable to stop thoughts of “Umm, I wonder if that is available in .com”
You spend more time on domain name forums than talking with your family.
Your friends dare not mention domain names or websites in case you go off on a 30 minute rant.
How to avoid catching or spreading the Domainers Disease
Do not EVER register a single domain name. Otherwise your life will never be the same again.
Avoid contact with anybody who has a website or worse, actualy bought a domain name with absolutely no intention of developing it.
Should you contract DN-NE1, you should hide yourself in your room or study and never mention to people what do you for a living or as a hobby.
Moving Forward
There are various support groups for people with this disease, commonly known as Domain Forums.
Although, the damage has already been done, the impact around the globe is total and devastating, and it continues to get worse every day, you should not be dismayed. Live every Non-Domainer day as your last and enjoy every second until the dreaded disease gets you, for it will get you, it is just a matter of time.
Below is an image of a person , before and after the Disease has hit them.
Brought to you by www.SEOLatestNews.com
New SEO features in BING
Microsoft recently released a new 24 page document titled Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters. The PDF file detailed not only interface updates on Bing, Microsoft’s own decision search engine, but also provides SEO tips for webmasters and web publishers. In addition, the white paper document contains instructive guidelines on how to create friendly, easy to index websites, as well as ways to make sites look attractive to search engine spiders.
Webmaster’s center
Bing’s primary function is to bridge users with websites and content across the Internet, a target all search engines aim for. So, what is different from other search engines you may ask? Unlike ordinary search engines, Bing offers categorized choices. Users can select options from the side tool bar, picking more to-the-point selections which, in the end, will reduce the amount of irrelevant sites popping up and saving the Bing users a lot of valuable time.
Long tail strategies
Did you know that more than 300 factors are used in determining categorization and that the categories that appear are entity-dependent? For example: if you search for [baby monitor], the search results may offer you options, such as “shopping”, “reviews”, “ratings”, and “videos”, splitting up the search in convenient sections . Microsoft believes that this innovative way of organizing results provides new long tail opportunities for website owners.
Best match
A key objective of Bing is to deliver premium search results and one of the ways the search engine approaches this goal is through a new feature called “Best match.” Watch what happens when you conduct a search for a particular brand, such as Adidas, Toys R Us, Campbell’s, or Chrysler. The result is amazing. Bing will actually separate the official sites of these brands from the rest of the results, featuring a “Best Match”.
Bing Hover Links preview
One of the cool features Bing has to offer is “Bing Hover links”. Just hover your mouse over your search results and a window will pop up on the right of it. It will show a summary of that specific query result, as well as and important links related to that result. Webmasters feel this feature increases qualified traffic and helps searcher to find the information they want without having to leave the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). This time-saving feature is truly appreciated by Bing users.
Data Extraction for previews
Through intelligent data extraction, Bing is able to compile useful information in the hover link section. This includes addresses, phone numbers, and email links the search engine has gathered not only from the content of a specific page, but from anywhere else on the Internet.
Flash recognition
Websites saturated with Flash and Silverlight-based content often lack readable Meta data text. Titles and descriptions in the HTML source code are so poor, web crawlers hardly notice them. In an effort to bring these empty-tagged websites out of obscurity, Bing implemented a new technology capable of extracting limited data.
Instant answers queries
Recently upgraded, Bing’s “Instant answers” feature now offers even more comprehensive and richer results to informal queries than ever. Type in a short question in the query box and wait to be impressed by the result!
Local listing center
Businesses should take advantage of the opportunity to list their company with Bing’s newest addition, the Local Listings Center.
Searchers and Surfers
Searchers who do not know how to start a new or specific search often refine their keywords and phrases halfway through their query. Furthermore, the more information is available, the more people adapt the way they search and surf the Internet. Microsoft has done a number of intense studies to analyze specific search patterns and behaviors. As a result, updates and additions were initiated. Microsoft’s goal is to improve searcher satisfaction by delivering faster, more accurate and complete results. It is a tough objective that, perhaps, is closer in reach than you think.
Visit Shout SEO to find out more.
Shout SEO is a premium SEO Services business based in Melbourne. Shout SEO will help increase your traffic and sales through achieving top rankings on the major search engines. Visit Shout SEO to find out more.
Multiple websites at the click of a button.
Ever wanted your own easy to develop and manage websites?
Achieving a meaningful extra income using the world wide web is now in the mindset of the average person, especially now that times are hard. The web remains a great place for opportunity and with hard work and dedication, earning extra homebased money is still a possibility.
Like me, you have probably been rather envious when hearing about others making a great deal of money via the web and have never really understood how to get involved and start making money for youself. Now, it is time to join them!
There are very many ‘Get Rich Quick’ schemes out there, many with ridiculously long sales pages really spouting off how easy it has been for the site owner to make a mountain of cash in a very short time. It is pretty easy for a noobie to fall into this smooth sales talk, sign up and then have no idea what to do with the information, product or service they have just paid for.
What newcomers really need is a very simple and easy to understand way of being able to develop a website that promotes growth and recognition on the search engines whilst providing a fool proof way to make money using the most obvious channels, such as Google Adsense and Amazon
Yippee as SEOCreation.com has just launched a new service which allows somebody with no previous website or internet experience to create not just one but 25 whole and rich content websites with ease. They can easily add websites and them modify them from their Admin Control Panel and including income stream code such as Google’s Adsense or Amazon’s Store code is easy to set up and understand.
You just need a domain name, then log in to your account at SEOCreation.com and click a button and suddenly you have a great store or video site and even a really cool looking Blog. Futhermore, they can also install a WordPress blog with their choice of great themes at the click of another button. This means that they get a good website to keep customers coming back plus the ability to add their own mark to a site, via the blog system, which really helps in attracting the eye of the search engines
Currently, they are selling the website slots for $24.95 which means you get a fully hosted website with great content for less than $1.00 a time, which makes serious business sense and there is surely no better way to make use of a domain name, short of expensive and time consuming major development.
I would definately suggest visiting SEO Creation.com to check out their offer in more detail. They offer continual support for the lifetime of your account so help is always close to hand although it really is child’s play and your road to internet based wealth has begun.
www.seocreation.com
admin@seocreation.com
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Powerful Ways to Use Google Analytics
First of all - what is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free analysis tool which gives you information on where your website visitors are coming from, which pages they visit, how long they stay, and a lot more. There are plenty of paid stat counters available which present data in different ways, but Google Analytics is one of the best, and it’s free.
One can over-analyze or under-analyze any website. Some people spend too much time checking stats, analyzing, and planning, and don’t spend enough time writing good content and getting new readers to their blogs.
On the other side of the pendulum, you could go on week after week, blindly publishing content and flailing along with offsite promotÃon, without seeing what results your campaigns are getting, which type of content is the most popular for your visitors, and which traffic-generation techniques are getting the best results.
The first is like tuning your car’s engine every day without ever turning on the ignition, the second is like driving in the dark.
In between, we have a happy balance.
I find that the best times to check stats are when I don’t have a lot of time to do a more intense project, or when I am a bit too tired to do anything more “heavy.” Sometimes just before I go to bed at night is a good time to check into what has been happening between my visitors and my websites’ pages. I can browse and poke around in my Analytics account and learn quite a lot - even with minimal energy.
Here are five simple and powerful ways to use Google Analytics:
1. Find out which of your website’s pages are getting the most traffic, and optimize those pages.
If you are running ads on the pages, make sure they are properly placed and updated. If you are linking to affiliate products, make sure your links are up-to-date and that you aren’t missing any links, or new products which should be there. If you are using that page for some other purpose, such as to generate subscriptions or whatever the case may be, make sure that the page is laid out as well as possible. This can be helpful if you have a large website which has a long “to do” list and many things to optimize or tweak. By just starting with the most heavily-trafficked pages, you will get the maximum results from your efforts and also know where to start.
2. Find out which referrers are generating the most traffic, and continue any actions you have been taking to generate traffic from those referrers.
For example, if you see that Twitter is generating a large amount of targeted traffÃc, you can expand your activity on Twitter. If you see that your article submissions are getting new visitors from article directories, you can make a note not to drop those out - or possibly step them up. Conversely, if you see that you have been spending time/money on a traffic-generation method which is not getting very far, you can stop wasting your time on it (presuming you have given it time to take effect).
3. Find out which keywords you are ranking the best for, and see which ones you can “push to the top.”
If you had a website on dogs, for example, and found that you were ranking at #30-#40 on Google for many keywords, but ranking #11 for, lets say, “dog chew toys,” you might want to work on increasing your rankings on dog chew toys and focus more of your SEO efforts on this term (of course there are other factors you would consider as well, such as the searches and competition for this term). Climbing from position #31 to #20 will generally not get you a huge improvement in traffic. But climbing from position #11 to position #3 almost certainly will. Focus first on keywords or key phrases that have the best chance of ranking high in the near future, and then move on to the others.
4. Find out which pages keep your visitors’ attention for the longest.
If the average visitor on Page A stays for 5 seconds, while the average visitor to Page B stays for 150 seconds, the likelihood is that your visitors find Page B’s content more interesting than Page A’s.
5. Look at the graph of your bounce rate.
This tells you how many people left your site without visiting a second page. Depending on the website and the page, this may be a good or bad thing. But if you have a blog or a content site, it is usually a good sign when people stick around to view more of your posts and content before they leave. If your bounce rate increased or decreased after you made a certain change, you can opt to revert that change (if bounce rate increased) or keep it (if bounce rate decreased). For example, if I changed the theme of my Wordpress blog and then noticed a date-co-incident jump in my bounce rate, I might consider changing it back 
This statistic can be used in many ways - it will depend on the nature of your blog.
There are many, many other ways to use Google Analytics. The above are great ways to start, if you aren’t familiar with or used to using this tracking system. Google Analytics can give you a far greater understanding of what’s happening on your site and can guide you to continue on successful actions and drop the unsuccessful.
About The Author
For more information on how to use Google Analytics, including video tutorials, and links to free information including a free eBook download on this subject, visit Anna’s blog, at BuildingFromNothing.com.
Google vs MS Bing
It didn’t look too promising at the launch but Bing has been constantly in the news ever since. Some say the results are better than Google, even going as far as suggesting Google is all but finished. I don’t agree.
On one of the search engine forums I often comment on, one of the moderators had this to say on the subject: “But overall this confirms my sense that Google, having abandoned the business model that got it to the top, viz. fast no frills search, in favour of added features and buying up other companies, is becoming increasingly fat and complacent, and along the way their search results are becoming less relevant.”
Now, I have to say that I had a small run-in with this guy as he supports everything Microsoft does, from its browser to its operating system and now to its new “decision engine”. So when he writes - “I’ve been using Bing lately and I’m finding a lot of advantages over Google. These are early days yet but this is the first emerging search engine that may provide a real threat to Google’s dominance - something I for one welcome,” - I’m a little suspicious.
There’s plenty of supporters out there giving online commentaries on Bing’s progress. TechCrunch.com, for example, analyses its early success by saying: “Microsoft sites’ average daily penetration among US searchers reached 16.7 percent during the work week of June 8-12, up 3 percentage points from the May 25-29 period (which was prior to Bing’s introduction) and up over 1 percentage point from its first week.”
However, on webpronews.com following its launch, Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesman and soothsayer, was reported, rather scathingly I thought, to have tweeted: “Matt Cutts: Congrats to @bing on the launch! Sad to see this not-so-relevant result at #4 for [matt cutts] though.” And then: “The #5 Bing result for [matt cutts] is spammy too.” Interesting that one should search one’s own name to find out if the results were “spammy”, but nevermind.
So, I did a little research on the subject of my own and tested my web turf to find on “web design bangkok” Bing returned very poor results, spammy even, with “Luxor Bangkok the Egyptian Design Hotel” and “Bangkok Metropolitan Administration” being placed in the top ten.
However, there is a site that offers users the opportunÃty for us to choose for ourselves. Just go to bingdevelop.com and type in any search term you are unfamiliar with and see which search engine results you would choose. Select say ten of them. You are presented with randomised results from Bing, Google, and Yahoo placed in a three-column set. You don’t know which one is which at this stage until you make your choice. As a test, take a look and select the one you think delivers the best results.
I tried 10 searches for terms I’m not at all familiar with and Google came out on top in all but one. It did surprise me after my original test on my own search terms that Bing was very close on all of them.
For Matt Cutts to comment as he did in the wake of Bing’s launch, indicates Google is not too comfortable with Microsoft’s re-emergence into the search engine marketplace. For me, though, I am much happier to accept Google’s results as the test bore out. Others may be switching to Bing already, but I am not.
I then looked for commentary - they’re ubiquitous these days - and found money.cnn.com had run the headline: “Bing vs. Google: Consumers Can’t Tell a Difference”. Oh, but I think they can, I thought. While it’s true that on wider, more unfamiliar search terms the two are very close indeed (my own findings were “seo consultant” - Google, but Bing very close; “manchester city t-shirt” - Google because it returned MCFC official site; “polar ice caps melting” - Google again but Bing almost identical; “bank bonuses uk” - Google, as it had reports from BBC, Guardian, etc. but Bing again very close), Bing still has its teething problems.
So as I read the plethora of reports and opinions being spun as to whether Bing is better than Google, I wonder what drove them to that conclusion. Like that of the forum moderator, perhaps? But I’m sure he was being honest with himself about his choices. It’s just a matter of why he would choose a different set of listings to me. It can’t be just because he’s a closet fan of Microsoft; the three engines are hidden until one is selected and I can vouch for his integrity.
However, Bing’s campaign, or spin, however you look at it, seems to me to be communicating that in order to get “relevant” information, you should choose Bing over Google, with its grandiose promise of being a “decision engine”. Which is what, exactly? Another one of Microsoft’s tricks to decide matters for me? As if Word wasn’t frustrating enough at doing that already.
Maybe the differences are far too subtle for me to notice. Or just maybe the Luxor Bangkok the Egyptian Design Hotel is not the place I would go to find a web designer in Bangkok. But the moderator, of course, had the final say: “I was a big Google fan for a long time, but increasingly I find myself going to Bing first and only to Google if Bing doesn’t deliver the goods. There’s no question that Google still has more web pages indexed than anyone else. But if they can’t find better ways of sorting through them they are going to crash. They can’t count on brand loyalty forever. For those of you old enough to remember Alta Vista, I am reminded of their rapid and total fall from grace when Google launched. Nothing is forever on the net.”
My findings are that they are very similar and certainly not enough to make “Google crash” just yet. Personally, I don’t believe this is yet Bing’s time until they tighten up their results. I agree with Mr Cutts that right now Bing is just too, how do you say again, “spammy”.
About The Author
V9 Design and Build produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.
Search engine news and articles of the week
Google passes 74% market share
“Google accounted for 74.04 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending June 27, 2009. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 16.19 percent, 5.25 percent and 3.15 percent, respectively. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.36 percent of U.S. searches.”
Introducing the Google Chrome OS
“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.”
“This is the point when the difference between their internal conception of the company starts to diverge just a bit too far from the public perception of the company, and even starts to diverge from reality. […]
There are some notable trends going on across Google today that could cause the company to compromise its stated values and that will certainly cause people to think Google is being evil, if not corrected.”
June search market share: Bing shines in a rough June for search
“Bing has raised Microsoft?s search market share by 0.3pts to 6.5%. Bing yielded 80% more ‘paid clicks’ last month than MSN/Live did in May. Given this fact, it?s highly likely that Bing will raise Microsoft?s overall search revenue, even though revenue per paid click may go down. […] The overall search market fell by 1.7% and Google lost 0.9% query volume.”
Bing leapfrogs Yahoo Search? again
“According to the new data, Bing took 12.9% of the US market like comScore had earlier measured. With the strong jump, Bing comes out ahead of Yahoo Search (10.15%), while Mountain View remains the undisputed king of the mountain with a US market share of 75%.”
Windows 7 Doomed, Says ScriptLogic Survey
Just a day after analysts predicted a dominant future for Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system (due this October), a new report suggests that up to 60 per cent of all companies might be hesitant to make the upgrade from Windows Vista and XP as reported by Brandon Dimmel
The IDC Win7 forecast discussed yesterday painted a pretty picture indeed for Microsoft, suggesting that 75 per cent of all corporations would ditch XP and Vista for Windows 7 by 2011, just two years after its release. Given that most business users are XP users, that’s good news for Microsoft.
ScriptLogic Paints a Different Picture
However, another group of analysts, ScriptLogic, doesn’t share the same opinion.
In fact, in their survey ScriptLogic found that just 60 per cent of corporations would make the shift within the opening period of Win7’s availability. Another 34 per cent said they’d eventually move over to Windows 7 by the end of next year, but even that number is in doubt. (Source: pcworld.com)
Given that Windows Vista is considered by most businesses to have been Microsoft’s great “Vistake,” it means that the decade-old Windows XP is most likely to be large and in charge even two years after Win 7’s release
Happy Browsing!
