How are your referral stats looking? Noticed more traffic from Bing lately?

According to a Nielsen report last month, Bing is growing faster than any other search engine. It was reported Bing had 10.7% of the total search market, up 2% from the month before. Yesterdays report from Hitwise suggests Bing has since dropped to around 8.96 percent.

So, somewhere around 8-10% perhaps.

The new statistics, from internet research firm Hitwise, will make disappointing reading for Mr Ballmer, who has said he is willing to spend as much as $11bn on search. Earlier this week he told The Daily Telegraph: “We’re trying to give Google a little competition in the search business

Microsoft have struggled for along time to make a dent in Google’s share of the search market, so it looks like they are beginning to make inroads, albeit slowly. Microsoft have done a ton of marketing to promote Bing. They’ve introduced cutting edge features like visual search and voice support.

This is not a battle Microsoft can afford to lose, and for search marketers, competition between engines can only be a good thing.

Is Your Site Optimized For Bing?

The thought of adopting different optimization strategies for different engines feels so antiquated now.

Years ago, there used to be a lot of talk about how to optimize for the different engines. Some webmasters would go so far as to serve differently optimized pages to each major engine.

In the past few years, SEO has been about all-Google, all the time, so the rule of thumb is to optimize for Google, and the rest pretty much takes care of itself.

This advice still stands.

Keeping Up With Bing

Google has Google Guy (Matt Cutts). Likewise, the Bing search team regularly reaches out to the SEO community. SEOs should bookmark the Bing Webmaster Centre announcements.

In particular:

• Search Engine Optimization For Bing
• Making Links Work For You SEM 101
• Are You Content With Your Content

NB: You need a Live Id to see those links.

Microsoft released a comprehensive document for Webmasters. Check out page 23 where they address SEO specifically.

Like Google Guy advice, it tends towards the general and is ultimately self serving, but interesting to be aware of, nontheless.

The Bing Difference: Why Bother?

In terms of search engine results pages, the two engines do produce different results. Here’s a nifty tool for side-by-side comparisons.

Why should you be interested in Bing at all?

Even though usage is lower, the user demographic for Bing is different to that of Google. Ask search marketers and you’ll get anecdotal evidence that Bing/Yahoo users don’t tend to be as web savvy as Google users, use the web less often, are more likely to click on ads, and are more likely to be involved in online shopping, whilst Google appeals more to researchers, webheads and geeks. If you’re engaged in web commerce, you need to be thinking about Bing.

Bing Ranking Tips

From the Bing Features For Webmasters document:

Because of this new way of thinking about search, some webmasters might initially be concerned that the shortened primary organic listing in the new Bing SERP might render their SEO efforts as less effective. Instead, Bing makes it easier to compete for broad terms because it surfaces more categories automatically, increasing the number of results on the page and generating more relevant content.

In reality, the same SEO strategies you use for Google apply to Bing.

1. Get Your On-Page SEO Right

Nail the basics.

Make sure your content is unique, use H tags for titles, use alt tags for images, use unique page titles and description meta tags, one topic per page and ensure your copy is free from spelling and gramatical errors. Like Google, you can sign up for MS Webmaster Center which will help you spot and troubleshoot problems.

2. Quality Inbound Linking

Bing appears to favour linking from pages that share a similar topic area.

Is Bing a theme-based engine? Think of a theme as a topic pyramind. A themed site would have the topic “cars at the top. The level beneath that would be makes of cars i.e. Ford, Ferrari, Lotus, then below then models, then components, etc. The theory goes that a site should be all on the same topic to rank well, and links should come from sites on the same topic. Themes used to get discussed a lot, but fell out of fashion when people realised Google didn’t use themes.

Is Bing using themes? I don’t think so. Like Google, the algorithms appear to be largely page based, as opposed to site based. Bing looks at the topic of the page linking to you. If the linking page is on a similar topic, the target page receives a boost. Have a play around with the title tag on the linking page. Try to ensure the title tag keyword on the linking page is the same as the keyword you’re targetting on your optimized page.

3. Domain Age

Domain age seems to be an important factor in Bing – the older, the better. Like Google, Bing tries to establish authority, and domain age is one way it does this.

Got any tips for optimizing for Bing? Any patterns you’ve noticed, particularly in respect to how Bing differs from Google?

Twitter is not the first online entity to be plagued by porn spammers, as it is an unfortunate and unavoidable part of the internet. As soon as a social site becomes somewhat popular, adult outlets will try to exploit it.

I’m sure many of you had some questionable followers as soon as you joined twitter. The problem has been well reported all over the internet.  At least in this case you can block the followers and/or report them (even though it is a pain that Twitter should still address themselves).

However, what you cannot seem to do at this time is to avoid these porn spammers when searching Twitter for completely non-porn related words, or setting up a feed using the Twitter search on your website.

We at 10e20 have the Twitter Feed right on the sidebar ->. All it does is pull the recent tweets from a search for 10e20, which lets you, the reader, quickly see what people are saying about us.

Well, a few days ago, unfortunately that sidebar has been filled with tweets from 4 or 5 porn accounts in a row, because they tweeted about 10e20.

After checking some of those accounts, you can see that they intertwine their tweets between links to their porn sites and tweeting legitimate news and trendy topics. This way their accounts will show up for legitimate searches, and as we found out, in your Twitter feed as well.

Currently, there is no pro-active way for us to battle this. All we can do is write a script to black list those accounts from showing up in our feed after the fact. But I was definitely surprised to find out that Twitter does not have anything in place on their end.

It’s time for Twitter to get on board and introduce an adult filter that’s turned on by default, but can be turned off if a user wishes so (much so like Google applies onto their search).

It would then be up to community to report questionable accounts as ‘adult’ or ’spam’ (various labels can be introduced) and up to admins to label them as such – so that they don’t show up in the legitimate searches.

A good example of this in action is when you search for Obama on Google. You can be sure that there probably won’t be any porn, even if Google did not have an adult filter, simply because there are many more legit websites about Obama out there. Twitter, however, doesn’t work that way. If you tweet about Obama, you will show up on the search no matter what your account says. So an adult filter seems to be a must in such a scenario.

Furthermore, labeling accounts as adult can open an additional option for users to choose if they want to be followed by an ‘adult’ account or not. So essentially all Twitter activity can be filtered if the individual user wants. Of course, if you don’t mind receiving adult content then you should have an option to turn the filter off.

What do you think?  Is it time for an adult filter and why do you think nothing currently exists?

BusinessInsider.com has a chart stating that Digg received 17.4 million unique visitors in August 2009, easily eclipsing other social news sites. Its dominance in the social news sphere brings to mind another company…

Top Search Engines According to a July 2009 comScore Search Report:

1. Google (65% market share)
2. Yahoo! (19.6%)
3. Microsoft/Bing (8.4%)
4. Ask (3.9%)
5. AOL (3.1%)

Top Social News Sites Based on Unique Visitors in August 2009:

1. Digg (17.4 million)
2. Yahoo! Buzz (7 million)
3. Propeller (800,000)
4. Reddit (670,000)
5. Mixx (660,000)

Digg’s dominance in the social news sphere is not unlike Google’s dominance in the search sphere. Digg’s strong community and constant roll outs like Facebook Connect, the DiggBar, and constant Digg Dialogues appear to be having a positive impact on the site’s popularity.

Amusingly enough, Yahoo! Buzz is like the Yahoo! Search of social news. Poor Yahoo! — always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Most surprising to me is how disappointingly Reddit appears to be performing — are they the Ask of social news sites? I remember a few years ago when it was all about Digg vs. Reddit, and now this chart depicts Propeller is beating Reddit in unique visitors and Mixx nipping at their heels (though I suspect the unique visitors for Reddit are incorrect–the number seems a bit low for them, don’t you think?). In any case, Digg fans must love seeing their favorite site spanking Reddit while Reddit fanboys are probably scoffing and saying they prefer the site’s “intimate” community.

Love them or loathe them, but clearly Digg is doing something right since they’ve managed to outshine their competition and seem to be establishing themselves as the predominant social news site on the web today. What do you think the other social news sites need to do in order to better compete with Digg and attract more users to their sites, or do you think that, much like with Google, Digg’s only going to get stronger?

I read an interesting article that discussed the importance of targeting and bounce rates and it got me to thinking about the clients that I have had, past and present and the buckets of money I have seen thrown away. So, I decided to put a list together of 10 ways you or your client may be wasting money they could be paying you:

1. Stop sending paid traffic to your home!
   1. Your homepage is rarely the page your potential customers are looking for. If I am searching for �buy sony flatscreen 1080p� PLEASE send me to a page with sony flat screen tv�s on it!
   2. Check your homepage�s bounce rate. It is 60% than you should only be sending people searching for �sitename.com� to that page otherwise, you are throwing at least 60% of your money away. Why do I say at least? Because if you are sending all your paid traffic to your homepage than you probably haven�t optimized your paid search ads and are just looking for a high click through rate.
2. Stop duplicating terms in your paid search accounts
   1. It never ceases to amaze me when clients are using the same keyword in multiple ad groups with the same geo-targeting and timing. Don�t do this
3. Have goals for your website
   1. Set goals for your website. �I want to make money.� Isn�t a sufficient goal. Come up with trackable metrics to get you there so you can optimize your website to eventually make you some more money.
   2. Publishing sites – # of page views, repeat visitors, high CPM.
   3. Ecommerce � lifetime value
   4. Lead-gen sites are a monster in and of themselves. If you generate leads so that they become sales then focusing on the lead only is going to inhibit you from making money. Remember, unless you are selling leads, they don� t make you any money until they become a sale.
4. Don�t cut the long-tail
   1. If you aren�t tracking performance over-time, you are probably missing all of your long-tail terms. Don�t cut terms that are attracting people in the educational phase of the sales-cycle. If you market to them differently you can increase your conversion rate over time. Don�t cut them just because these phrases take a little longer to convert - MARKET TO THEM DIFFERENTLY. These are long sales cycle leads
5. Use negative keywords in your paid search campaigns
   1. This may sound basic, but if you aren�t using negative keywords than you are paying for traffic that will NEVER make you a dollar, pound or euro. If you have paid-search clients or use paid search and using mostly broad match than you really need to spend some time investigating exactly what terms are being clicked on.
6. Learn what terms lead to conversion and optimize your site accordingly
   1. Welcome to the beauty of the internet and web analytics. You can actually tell how people get to your site, what they do there and if they are making you money. It�s brilliant. So why are you optimizing your site based on what you think will work well?
7. Stop making creative decisions based on what your boss thinks is a good idea.
   1. See point 6. We have the ability to test and optimize, which means we can run multiple ad creatives (banner and search) and see what drives the greatest revenue rather than based on the CxO�s affinity to the color blue. Back your decisions with data
8. Test, test, test and SPLIT TEST!
   1. See point 7. Products like Google website optimizer and Omniture�s Test and Target (formerly Offermatica) can optimize your landing pages based on conversions. There is no excuse for not testing your landing pages and assuming that your designers first try is always correct. In all likelihood it is not optimal and assuming it is will make an ass out you but not me because I�m split testing
9. Track how changes to your website affect your bottom line
   1. If designers, programmers, your kids or whomever are making website changes that affect your business� especially your homepage � you should be recording that this is being done and how this is affecting organic placement and conversions. If there is no tracking there is no accountability.
10. Know what your users are clicking on
    1. Heatmaps and click analysis tools, like Crazy Egg are great at letting you know what your users are clicking on and responding to. Using this information to optimize page layout should help you to make the most of the traffic that you have

Originally published on SEO Chicks

I know SEO works. You know SEO works (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog). But there are some folks who’ve just had an horrendous experience with SEO. Whether it be on the receiving end and you’ve paid thousands for updated META keywords and submissions to all the major search engines, or you’ve had a really bad experience with performing SEO services for a client – SEO Horror Story wants to know!

You’ll need to reveal all the grizzly details to have a chance of winning a contest which includes several prizes. Some of the prizes include:

• 1 Year Free Raven Tools Membership (worth $948)
• A Pass to a Search Engine Strategies’ Conference of your choice for you and a friend
• 6 months Pro Account at SEMRush (worth $249.95)
• 3 month subscription to AdGooroo SEM Insight (also includes tools, worth $1197)
• Many more prizes!

To get a chance at winning you’ll need to have your entry in by 12 Midnight, PST, on October 31st.

• Practical Guide to Finding Link Bait Inspiration – Using Search, Sites, and Images
• 7 Steps to Improving Conversion Rates – The Only Metric That Matters?
• Google Integrates Hot Trends to Web Search – Currently Only Works in U.S. or Japan
• Why Google’s Behavioral Targeting Should Creep You Out – A Blueprint for a Truly Social Search Engine
• Google Introduces Search Snippets – Adds Anchor Based ‘Jump to’ Links

There is a misnomer in search marketing and SEO that things change all the time. I think I stopped consuming SEO blogs and news sites on a daily basis about 2 or 3 years ago when I decided enter full time consultancy with no one else’s safety net. There was no extra time for anything accept a low information consumption diet. I had to develop unflinching confidence in the work I was doing to execute on various strategies based on my understanding of how search engines have historically worked, and the assumption that they will continue to function in basically the same manner for some time to come.

This is from a conclusion that there have only been a handful of changes that affected how I conducted my business. I learned from both blackhats and search engineers both to come up with a strategy that fit my ethical code while indulging my competitive nature and hunger for success. I am convinced that the cat/mouse dynamic between blackhats and engineers has helped to form the current state of information retrieval based on strong needs to stay relevant in certain areas that were exploited solely for capitalistic monetary gain.

I’ve found some great posts and articles about search history and how search engines have evolved over time, but not many mentions of how search optimizers have changed their strategies over time. There are a few good resources listed below, but none quite summed up the changes that affected what I like to refer to as the “SEO mentality”. I’m hoping to create a fairly comprehensive document for Market Motive Internet Marketing Training (where I’ll be discussing this shortly with legendary SEO’s Greg Boser and Marshall Simmonds, to help add to the increasingly comprehensive body of SEO training we’ve developed over the past two years (Over 40 Videos now!).

I learned what SEO was in about 2002 – shortly after offpage factors started to strongly determine relevance. I spent several years and thousands of hours on forums reading, learning, an interacting and teaching to figure out how search engines worked. When I made the choice to work for myself at home after another great year of learning and consulting at We Build Pages (with Jim Boykin – one of the sharpest SEO’s I’ve ever known), I decided it was time to start doing. I built sites, and strategies for myself, using consulting money to fund development of website projects, and parlaying to thinks like being able to even afford the insane cost of living in the SF Bay area. It was based on the unwritten understanding of the changes that are mentioned below, and not listening to a lot of the SEO garbage that is spewed all over on the interwebs.

When I started doing – I realized that not much changes with SEO in terms of strategic execution. It is a pretty logical art and science of determining risk to reward ratios, and implementing strategies in a sequential fashion following certain established rules based on intended outcome. I’ve developed a playbook and these SEO rulesets by understanding the HISTORICAL GAMECHANGERS in SEO. Feel free to add some on twitter with #seogamechangers

I’ve been taking a mental inventory of these game changes for a few months, and here is what I have them broke down to:

1. Onpage factors (1995 – 1999)
2. Offpage factors (2000)
3. Florida update (2003)
4. Fresh Crawl/ Everflux (2004)
5. Sandbox effect (2005)
6. Duplicate content filtering (2006)
7. Human editorial (2006)
8. Onebox/ Universal Search (2007)
9. Paid linking handling (2007)
10. No follow (2008)
11. User data validation and segmentation (2009)
12. Brand Mentions (update Vince – 2009)

Some of my dates may be a bit off, but for the most part these are the major factors that affect my actionable SEO Strategies. These are the major changes that contribute to the hurdles, filters, and challenges of ranking a site on a search engine.

I’d love to hear from other folks on the things that you think should be included in the list. There are MANY minor things that full under these categories, but after revisiting most and asking twitter, I think this is pretty comprehensive, as things like local search 10 pack, personalization, geotargetting all fall under one of these other areas (even if the dates aren’t exact). Please let me know if you can think of anything I missed. I’ll try to watch the comments on the post closely for once:) Please post any great resources, or suggestions for adding/updating to the list.

Resources

• Brett Tabke
• Danny Sullivan
• Aaron Wall’s extensive writing on SE history
• Jim Boykin
• James Svoboda
• Rand Fishkin
• Mark Knowles
• Funny from Pat

I’ve been meaning to revise some old posts for quite some time, and am starting to finally get around to it. I’ll likely go down the list of some of my favorite posts, and do edits to what I feel has changed in the past 2 or 3 years with regards to search and social. I thought I’d start with my general theory marketing manifesto originally posted in November of 2006. These are principles that I’ve based my personal efforts in marketing and business in on for the past few years (to varying degrees of success).

It’s been almost 2.5 years since v. 1.0 of the stuntrain seo manifesto, so I figured it was time for an update. I’ve always seen SEO as my philosophy on marketing and success, so the manifesto was ready for a dab of 2.0 polish. The new thought process and goals are in black, and the old ones are in red.

Stunt Train Search and Social Marketing Manifesto 2.0

1 SEO is executing on content and link development strategy for higher ranking, traffic, and ROI. (SEO is not software packages for reciprocal linking and blogspam).

1. SEO is a marketing school of thought…not a process.

2. Plan websites, don’t retrofit them (and don’t break sites that already work in search engines)

2. It’s much easier to plan a website than to retrofit it.

3. Every form of media increasingly impacts search.

3. Search increasingly impacts every form of media.

4. Link building and traffic acquisition through social media is the new brand building. Generic keywords are the new brands.

4. It’s all about the links (but also about the exposure, rankings, conversation, and conversion)

5. Any change WILL affect your search rankings (you only get better or worse, you never stay the same)

5. Any marketing decision impacts search engine rankings – and vice versa

6. Markets are conversations. Hyperlinks still subvert heirarchy. Refrain from maintaining mainstream marketing. Create conversations and inspire links.

6. Creating a “purple” idea is much easier than begging for links

7. Social media is being optimized while you read this. If you’re not participating in the conversation, someone else is controlling it.

7. Social media can be optimized

8. Be defensible and sustainable – You can’t sell 15 mb of fame or vaporware.

8. Top rankings won’t fix a shitty product

9. There are no hats. Only goals. Talking keeps you from doing.

9. Blackhat is lying to clients, customers, partners, or vendors.

10. Lose to win. Conversion rate is a metric for failure that only tells us about our unrealized victories.

10. It’s all about the results

I also thought I’d reorganize them a bit.

Feel free to repost:

• 1. Markets are still conversations. Hyperlinks still subvert heirarchy. Refrain from maintaining mainstream marketing. Create conversations, and inspire links.
  
• 2. Plan websites, don’t retrofit them (and don’t break sites that already rank and sell.)
  
• 3. SEO is executing on content and link development strategy for higher ranking, traffic, and ROI. (SEO is not software packages for reciprocal linking and blogspam).
  
• 4. Link building and traffic acquisition through social media is the new brand building. Generic keywords are the new brands.
  
• 5. Every form of media increasingly impacts search.
  
• 6. Any change WILL affect your search rankings (you only get better or worse, you never stay the same)
  
• 7. Be defensible and sustainable – You can’t sell 15 mb of fame or vaporware.
  
• 8. Social media is being optimized while you read this. If you’re not creating and participating your conversation, someone else is.
  
• 9. There are no hats. Only goals. Talking keeps you from doing.
  
• 10. Lose to win. Conversion rate is a metric for failure that only tells us about our unrealized victories.

Hmmm…I think I have a pretty solid next 2 year strategy for my corkboard.

I know SEO works. You know SEO works (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog). But there are some folks who’ve just had an horrendous experience with SEO. Whether it be on the receiving end and you’ve paid thousands for updated META keywords and submissions to all the major search engines, or you’ve had a really bad experience with performing SEO services for a client – SEO Horror Story wants to know!

You’ll need to reveal all the grizzly details to have a chance of winning a contest which includes several prizes. Some of the prizes include:

• 1 Year Free Raven Tools Membership (worth $948)
• A Pass to a Search Engine Strategies’ Conference of your choice for you and a friend
• 6 months Pro Account at SEMRush (worth $249.95)
• 3 month subscription to AdGooroo SEM Insight (also includes tools, worth $1197)
• Many more prizes!

To get a chance at winning you’ll need to have your entry in by 12 Midnight, PST, on October 31st.

• Practical Guide to Finding Link Bait Inspiration – Using Search, Sites, and Images
• 7 Steps to Improving Conversion Rates – The Only Metric That Matters?
• Google Integrates Hot Trends to Web Search – Currently Only Works in U.S. or Japan
• Why Google’s Behavioral Targeting Should Creep You Out – A Blueprint for a Truly Social Search Engine
• Google Introduces Search Snippets – Adds Anchor Based ‘Jump to’ Links