Proving its advertisement campaign worth $100 million to be utterly successful, Bing has become the latest buzz in the search engine optimization universe. Known as the new ‘Decision Engine’ of Microsoft, Bing is all set to impact the search volume. Latest surveys have revealed that there has been a huge jump in the search volume of Bing. There has been a 12% jump in the search volume within June 8 to 12. The increase in jump has been calculated up to 33% as compared to its pre-launch work week in May 25-29.
With so much happening on the ‘Bing’ front, quite naturally, a lot of curiosity has piled up about Bing. Reviews are being published about how this new ‘decision engine’ works, its interface, and also how it can be compared to Google in terms of organic search and search engine rankings. With such a huge amount of investment, Microsoft is certainly looking forward to yield some results out of it.
According to statistics, the initial three weeks have worked quite well for advertisers as well as Microsoft. Microsoft has been selective enough to display the ads on the search engine results page, in spite of the increased search volume. There have been positive impacts even on the pay per click model in various aspects such as conversion rates, click through rates, cost per acquisition, etc.
The growth of Bing is going to be monitored and tracked to determine its stability and improved performance rates to feed the curiosity factor. If it works, it can work really work well for SEO in India as well as in other parts of the world.

Domain popularity is one of the highly valued factors that help search engines to assess the importance of your website in comparison with the other websites in a particular field. Greater the number of domains that link to your website, greater the domain popularity. Domain popularity will help you increase your website’s ranking in search results and also increase your website’s PageRank in Google.

Whenever a search is made through the search engines, all the relevant results are listed on the search results page. These results are presented to the user in an organized fashion based on the importance of the website as per the assessment of the search engine. The role of the search engines is to provide the most relevant information to the users from the most authoritative sources. Search engines decide the authoritativeness of a website from its domain popularity. Very often, it is the domain popularity that makes or breaks your search engine ranking.

Google uses domain popularity as one of the most important factor to assign PageRank to your website. As you can clearly see, domain popularity is highly important for your website’s online success. At times, domain popularity would be the only differentiating factor that will set you apart from your competitor.

Here are some of the best features of Google Analytics which you could utilize to optimize your website.

1) Setting Goals – If you don’t set goals, Google Analytics is not going to take you very far. If you have an e-commerce site your goal would probably be a sale or if your business is newsletters your goal would be a registration. After your business goals are setup in Analytics, you can analyze a large amount of data about what’s working and what’s not in your marketing efforts.

2) Historical Data Comparison – In old Analytics there was no facility to compare how your site is doing relative to a different point in time. However, now we have new capabilities that allow you to compare two different time periods and chart them immediately. This feature helps tremendously in analyzing the performance of your website.

3) Geographic Data - You can also see how your website is performing for a variety of metrics like traffic, revenue etc. in different countries / cities etc. So you know where exactly is your traffic coming from.

4)Funnel Visualization - This is an awesome feature which helps you to figure out what exactly is scaring your users away as it gives you a proper analysis of the path taken by your users and where exactly your users drop and leave the process.

So go ahead and make the best use of the above features of Google Analytics for improving the search engine rankings of your website!

2009 is rapidly approaching and the vital question in front of search engine marketers, SEO consultants, and Internet marketing companies alike are “what’s new” with Google’s algorithms. As SEO is a highly dynamic game but the need for the use of best practices and adaptability are never truer than when trying to stay at the top of Google for desired keywords.  So what‘s next in 2009?

Here is some information about Ballgame of Google SEO 2009 and several tips on how to cope up with ever changing world of Google SEO 2009.

The first thing that needs to be understood is that the way that search engines, such as Google, behave is going to be changing drastically in 2009.The upcoming strategy is that Google is making the search process more geared towards the individual user.  Basic idea for new algorithm is to personalize search results more to each user based on location and past search history. This makes sense for the user but makes it increasingly tricky for SEO consultants to maintain rankings for their clients.

All of the basic best practices will still be important with the new algorithm and should not be overlooked.

Google will also be looking at the IP address and cookies to determine where in the world you are, to geo target you, as well as what country’s websites you frequent most often. This will likely cause more advanced Internet browsers to constantly delete their cookies so that they may obtain a broader search base.

The best thing to do is always focus on the user experience and value of the content.  The only sure ways to keep your website as king is to regularly add new content. It’s still very important to have unique and fresh content on site to keep your website ranking stiff on Google. However, there is a lot of speculation that video and even audio content may be the next big thing for Google. So keep adding good content and consider the use of video and audio where appropriate.

Some webmasters recently experienced a delisting from the search engines without any good reason. The webmasters had not done anything wrong and their web sites were optimized for search engines. Nevertheless, the web sites had been removed from search engines.

Poorly configured firewalls can block search engine spiders

It turned out that the delisted web sites were all hosted by the same hosting company. More precisely, the web sites were all hosted by a hosting company that used a special firewall software by SonicWALL Inc.

That firewall stopped the search engine spiders from accessing their web sites. Google, Yahoo, MSN and all other search engines that request the robots.txt file couldn’t index the web site anymore because the firewall didn’t allow that:

“An attacker could retrieve robots.txt from the server, then use the contents of this file to discover the path of an unprotected administration interface for the server. The attacker may gain control of the webserver using this interface.

The information gathered from robots.txt could be used for system compromise and control of the web server.” (source)

This is the standard security settings of the SonicWALL firewall and it basically means that your web site won’t be spidered by search engines if you use this firewall without customizing it.

A firewall with these settings will drop the connection to anyone requesting the robots.txt file so that it looks as if the web site is offline. From an SEO point of view, this is very bad for your web site because all good search engine spiders request the robots.txt file before indexing your web site.

What does this mean to you?

If your web site is not listed on search engines although it has many good incoming links and optimized web page content, you should ask your web host if their firewall blocks search engines that request the robots.txt file. Your web host might not be aware of the problem.

I often get asked about web site submission to Google. Most people believe that submitting your site your Google ensures search engine rankings on arguably the best search engine today.

Well, the Google spider crawls through the internet and finds majority of sites via links from other sites. So optimizing your site and getting some great incoming links from directories and other related sites would ensure that your site is indexed by Google. If you still want to do a web site submission to Google, you can do that using their online form at http://www.google.com/addurl/.

One does not need to submit each individual page to Google. Submission of your web site’s front page will do that job. However, you need to make sure that your inner pages are linked well from the front page.

Another method to submit your web site to Google is through Google Sitemaps (now a part of Google’s webmaster tools). Web site submission to Google using sitemaps requires an XML file to be generated. This XML sitemap file contains all the URLs that you want crawled. It can also contain other data like the last modified date for each page, change frequency of each page and the priority of the page. Priority is the relative importance of that page as compared to the other pages of the site.

I’ll discuss the Google webmaster tools in details in another post. Hope this post has helped clear some myths of web site submissions to Google and helped understand the basics of indexing by Google.

Today, search engines play a very important role in getting traffic for a website. Even big sites like Amazon and ebay are trying to improve their search engine placement by working on their internal site structure and pages.

A case in point that shows how important search engine rankings are for bigger sites is ebay. WayBackmachine shows that the title of Ebay’s front page in Jan 2001 was “eBay – Your Personal Trading Community”. Compare this with today’s title that incorporates their primary keywords – “eBay – New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices”.

Further, the ebay product pages are now all without querystrings (i.e. – all the pages have their URL rewritten thus enhancing spideribility).

There are a few very simple things that can be done to improve your search engine placement -

1 – Make sure you have unique titles on every page. The title should be crisp but should contain your keyword.

2 – Have a short meta description in place. Again this concise description should contain your keyword.

3 – Its best to use text links to link all your pages. If you have a flash or JavaScript navigation panel, try to link those pages using text links that can be placed at the bottom of your page.

4 – Write unique content. Spiders like to see unique content that offers information about your products and services.

5 – Upload pages close to the root directory. A simple site structure with pages close to the root (www.domain.com/directory/, www.domain.com/directory2/) enhances chances of getting spidered quickly.

6 – Get links from similar sites and link to sites that will offer value to your users

7 – Submit to DMoz and other major directories

Though just doing the above will not help you get search engine placements for really competitive keywords, they are steps essential for every site and would give you a good advantage over other sites right from the day your site is launched.