Weekly SEO news: 7 December 2010
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

Your revenues are fine? You don't need more traffic? You're not interested in new website visitors? If you ignore the Bing/Yahoo alliance in your search engine optimization campaigns, you might be missing a lot of visitors.

In the news: Google introduces Google Social Sitelinks, a spammer gets arrested, there's an undocumented Google search operator, search advertising budgets increase and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. How to get 33% more visitors for your website

Your revenues are fine? You don't need more traffic? You're not interested in new website visitors? If you ignore the Bing/Yahoo alliance in your search engine optimization campaigns, you might be missing a lot of visitors.

How many visitors will you get from Yahoo and Bing?

According to a Chitika study, 24% of all search traffic in their network comes from a Bing-powered search engine. 72% come from a Google powered search engine.

If your website just gets visitors from Google, it will get 33% more visitors if it is also listed on Bing powered search engines.

Several billion searches are performed each day. Even if Yahoo/Bing gets only 24% of these searches, this is still a very large number of potential customers who could find your site through these search engines.

How can you optimize your website for Bing?

Google and Bing have very similar ranking algorithms. Although the algorithms are similar, the results returned by Google and Bing are often very different.

To optimize your website for Bing, analyze your website with IBP's top 10 optimizer. The analyzer will tell you what exactly you have to change so that your website will get high rankings on Bing for your keywords.

Here are some general tips:

  • If a page of your website already has high rankings for some keywords, do not optimize the same page for another keyword.
  • If a page already has high rankings on Google, do not optimize the same page for Bing.
  • Optimize different pages of your website for different keywords and different search engines.
  • Optimize as many pages of your website as possible to get the best possible rankings.

Yahoo and Bing have created a powerful second player by combining forces. Don't ignore the possibilities that this offers to your business. Search terms that are very difficult on Google might be easier on Yahoo/Bing. Download IBP now and start optimizing your website for Google and Yahoo/Bing.

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week

Google introduces Social Sitelinks

"A social sitelink includes your friend's name and profile photo, and it links to her content on a particular website. Social sitelinks are based on the same technology as Google Social Search; we use your social circle to identify relevant websites and user pages. To see social sitelinks in action, try a search for [twitter] or [youtube]."



StatisticsReport: significant increases in search advertising budgets, transactions and revenue

"Key findings in the report include an increase of 31% in year-over-year search advertising budgets for the holiday season to date as well as 83% more online sales transactions and a 60% lift in total online sales revenue. [...]

To capture share of mind and wallet, advertisers must start the planning process early and build in flexibility to react to market conditions."



Google: being bad to your customers is bad for business

"A recent article by the New York Times related a disturbing story. By treating your customers badly, one merchant told the paper, you can generate complaints and negative reviews that translate to more links to your site; which, in turn, make it more prominent in search engines. The main premise of the article was that being bad on the web can be good for business. [...]

Attempts to game Google's ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That's why we cannot reveal the details of our solution [...] We will continue to work hard towards a better search."

Related: Alleged 'bully' online retailer arrested in New York, Do not try to trick Google. Use ethical search engine optimization methods.



GoogleAn undocumented Google search operator

"A query like 'CNN Obama' will mostly show CNN pages that are related to Obama. However, if we modify the query to look like 'CNN AROUND(2) Obama,' you get results where these two terms are written in close proximity. The higher the number, the less the proximity. [...]

Google's wildcard search operator, represented by Asterisk (Obama * CNN), may achieve similar results but with AROUND, you even get to specify the distance between the two search terms. Do remember to write AROUND in all CAPS else it won't work."



TripAdvisor reviews missing from Google Places – bug or kerfuffle?

"It is unclear whether we are seeing a bug in Places that is preventing reviews from showing up or whether TripAdvisor and Google are having a disagreement about Google's right to show them. Both possibilities have their precedence, with 3rd prty reviews coming and going due to both bugs and battles."



Search engine newslets

  • Google launches new site, tool for global marketing.
  • Amazon adds Wikipedia to book-shopping pages.
  • Facebook director of monetization Tim Kendall steps down.
  • Twitter goes after Twittersearch.com.
  • Why LinkedIn is the social network that will never die.
  • Google launches Google eBooks.
  • Groupon rejects Google's 5 billion offer; will stay independent.

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3. Success stories

"Thanks to IBP our business is growing."

"IBP has helped us get top rankings on all the big search engines. 6 months ago our new oil and gas jobs site was not getting any rankings. We were up against some long established sites that had ranked at the top for many years.

In just 6 months using IBP we have worked our way onto front page for all our main search terms. We are now competing on an international stage and giving big multi million pound companies a run for their money.

We are a small company and really didn't think this would be possible and definitely not in such a short time frame! Thanks to IBP our business is growing and we are now seen as a main player in our industry sector."
Kevin Forbes, www.oilandgaspeople.com



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4. Previous articles

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