We quite often see infographics surrounding social media & new / emerging trends. But it's rare you see one on natural search. The infographic below was recently shared with me and I feel it does a good job at visualising search, the various components that make up a search strategy & most importantly simplifying it. It's particularly good for summarising key issues in SEO to non-search specialists.
I hope you find it as interesting as I did.
* Image source www.datadial.net…
How popular is Bing and how do its SEO ranking factors differ from Google?
We are only 4 months into 2011, but I don't think Microsoft and specifically the Bing team could have asked for a better start to the year!
Conversations about the search engine only seem to be heading in one direction, the same direction as the number of people using their service - up.
In a previous post this year I discussed how searches on Bing were increasing, well this trend has not changed. In recent posts on Mashable, bloggers are showing how, if current trends continue, Bing could well overtake Google in the US.
Summary of the current Bing trends
Bing accounted for 30% of all searches in the US during March 2011
In September 2010, Bing accounted 24% of searches
If the same trend continues it would mean by…
Over the past few months it has been hard to escape stories about Bing. A recent post on Search Engine Watch which goes into some nice growth figures for Bing really made me sit up and listen.
Some of the numbers quote in this blog from Search Engine Watch should start make you wonder how & when Bing fits into your search strategy, for example:
Searches on Bing last month increased by 21 percent
Bing passed Wikipedia on compete’s list of top 50 websites
Bing saw its share of searches jump from 10.6 percent to 12.81 percent for the same period
Compete reported that Bing closed the year with a 105.36 percent increase in unique visitors -- the largest yearly growth among the top 50 sites.
You can view all the stats & full story from Search Engine…
Importance: [rating=5]
Our commentary: Here we're alerting you to an exciting new information-sharing and learning technology. It's very early days for the service - it's in a closed alpha and launched around November 2010. But it's already getting rave reviews and satisfaction ratings from users and I found it interesting to take a look.
So what is Qwiki? Qwiki describes its technology capability as "to evaluate and enrich any static text "€“ transforming it into a beautiful, interactive experience with zero human effort "€“ it can be applied to virtually any corpus of information.
Here's an example for an individual:
TEDx SF 2010 - Juan Enriquez from Qwiki on Vimeo.
View more examples of Qwiki.
For me, Qwiki looks to be a great visual way of learning - think of it as a combination of Wikipedia or Google Knol with a TV documentary. The voiceover is very futuristic - like from a Sci-fi…
No keyword searches to build a strategy off? No problem! Or an opportunity at least
Value: [rating=5]
Our commentary: A recent blog post from Rand @ SEOMOZ really caught my attention this week. In many markets for natural search there is data & tools that can help you plot a strategy and get rough ideas of potential results (in terms of traffic). See Dan Barker's post on keyphrase gap analysis.
But for the remainder where a service or product is new, so there is low awareness, or the audience is not yet online SEO may appear to not offer an opportunity to generate awareness about your new products.
This case where there is little or no data specifically about it, is more interesting / exciting to me and forces people in the search industry to think a lot more…
A reference of major updates we think marketers involved in SEO, Pay Per Click or Social media need to know about
Each day Google makes many changes and updates to its different tools and it does a great job of announcing them through all its feeds, but it can be difficult to keep on top of what matters and what doesn't.
So on this page we'll be selective and update you on algorithm updates, new tools, policies and changes to Google Analytics we think anyone working in digital marketing or marketing needs to know about, even if they're not a search specialist. Hopefully SEO or Adwords specialists will find it useful too and can let us know what we're missing!
Significant January 2011 updates from Google
Google Keyword Tool now includes mobile volumes (12/10/11)
Importance: [rating=3]
Category: Search behaviour and Adwords targeting
(more…)…
The start of a new year quite often means lots of reflection & sets in place new ideas / learnings for the year to come. 2011 is no different; its always difficult to remember where you were 12 months ago, but digital marketing and search as part of that came a long way in 2010. Search in my opinion has matured, enough people now understand enough for it to become more widely accepted and feared less.
The smoke & mirrors, black hat techniques and complexity that used to make it inaccessible to so many has finally been broken down. Moving into 2011 I believe Natural Search will start to work its way into marketing teams & businesses rather than outsourced to "specialists" or left to specific roles in the business, it will as my first trend talks about become integrated.
Recommended reading on SEO success factors for 2011
I've been checking out the…
Search Queries & Links to your website get updated!
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary: With Christmas fast approaching and rumours of Google updates during Christmas, a distant memory its nice to receive some news that the free webmaster tool kit from Google is still receiving updates & new features. Last Friday (10th December 2010) Google announced two upgrades to its webmaster toolkit.
The post we link to below on Google Webmaster Tools alerts you to an update to the Search Queries report which now has the ability to show which pages are displayed for certain search queries.
The second update relates to the links to your site area of Google Webmaster Tools. This new facility displays the appropriate information when an inbound link is redirected to another page.
Find out more about the updates here >
Marketing implications: The two updates gift marketers with some great new…
Confirmation that social mentions are used by Google to rank sites
Value: [rating=5]
Our commentary: With Danny Sullivan's interview with Google & Bing earlier this month & the follow-up by SEOMOZ it would appear its now almost official that social media & SEO need to be well & truly integrated. The concept of quality content that is shared, tweeted etc is now a big part of Google & Bing search results.
The interview with Danny Sullivan also goes onto talk about the concept of authority users and how being successful in social media (whether thats followers, fans, sharing) will help you in natural search rankings.
Marketing implications: I think this is something a lot of marketers have believed for sometime now, it just seemed so obvious. But now we know for sure what does that mean for digital marketing teams & online businesses? I would be asking myself :
Does my 2011 marketing strategy…
How can you tailor them for your business?
Marketing Importance: [rating=4]
Our commentary
In case your wondering what Site Links are, they are the additional blue links to deeper pages in the site listed under the main domain name, often displayed for a brand search.
See Smart Insights Google Site Links
The Google reason behind Sitelinks
This article has to be mainly based on speculation and reverse engineering the sites that do have SiteLinks since Google don't explicitly explain Sitelinks.
To understand sitelinks you should start with the official Google explanation on Google site Links although all they really say is that they are created automatically!
Note that Google now enables you to selectively switch off some Sitelinks within its Webmaster tools facility
Google engineer Matt Cutts gives a little…
