Posts Tagged ‘search engine’

Link Building with Bing

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

bing-launch-light-showAs the smoke clears and the newness wears off, Microsoft’s revamped search engine Bing is starting to rub off on me…..I know, I know, I’m eating my words from Friday’s post. I have to admit, the simplified search function helps in my personal life, but what implications does that have with regards to link building?

Bing, the ‘decision engine’, is designed to create an easier experience for searchers by providing you with more detailed and precise search results. A one word search, such as "truck", yields basically three results each for: what "it" is, who produces "it", variations of "it", prices for "it", reviews for "it", images of "it", videos of "it", and locations to find "it".
 
What does this simplification mean for link builders? The end of eccomerce and first page listings for small businesses? I wouldn’t go that far, but in time I imagine we will be seeing less and less small businesses in the top listings, and more of an emphasis on large brands dominating search results. All of this is assuming that Microsoft’s $100 million advertising plan works, and we all start using Bing more than Google. Without that, Bing is simply just another Live – unpopular and unused.
 
So what is a small or large site to do in preparation, besides looking at the usual webmaster tools? Well for starters, take a look at your meta titles, keywords, and descriptions. Are you trying to ‘crowd’ your homepage with too many keywords? It may be time to revamp your site and reorganize the keywords associated with each of your landing pages. If you are trying to target too many keywords to one page, then presumably search engines with detailed search, like Bing, will have a harder time determining what your page is really about.
 
This concept is nothing new, but one has to draw the conclusion that when search engines get more detailed about results it means they’re looking for even more details than before. With the previous example search term "truck" the site owner could possibly include a page that hits each and every one of the categorical results that show up for the term "truck". Dedicate a page to answering: what "it" is, who produces "it", variations of "it", prices for "it", reviews for "it", images of "it", videos of "it", and locations to find "it".
 
Bing still has a ways to go to compete with Google’s market share, but with events like Hulu’s Bing-a-thon and creative commercials it may be sooner than we all thought!
 

Wave and Bing: The Highlights

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Two search giants, Google and MSN, recently announced some pretty big developments that are sure to change the face of search as we know it.

Google leaked information on Wave, a new communication and collaboration tool via video recently. I had a chance to watch some of it….forgive me, I didn’t watch all one hour and twenty minutes of the thing. I have to admit, I was pretty impressed with what I did see. This will be an open source communication device that, to me, looks like a mash up of Twitter, Facebook, G-mail, and Google search. Mashable wrote a complete guide to Wave, that has some pretty good information.
 
google-waveA Few Highlights:
 
Real-time Chat- Alright, so it might not sound so cool to some, but in most areas of Wave you can see what the other person is typing during chat sessions…..letter by letter while they are typing it. Not so great for those of you that edit your messages before you hit enter, but cool nonetheless.
Embed- Wave’s are embeddable on blogs and pretty much any website. From Wave you are able to embed and post on your blog, and respond from Wave to any comments, postings, etc directly from Wave.
Open Sourced- Developers will be able to adapt Wave for their own uses. They will be able to develop apps, which increases the number of sites integrated into the program.
E-mail Enhanced- One of the key features with Wave is that when sending e-mail, or any other note/Wave, you are able to respond to one particular section of that document, without having to reply to all of it.
 
I was completely geeked when I first learned about Wave. I’ve been wanting something like this for quite some time now. It’s so hard trying to manage multiple social media accounts and with Wave I see the ability to interact and connect with ALL my friends at once with one user interface, instead of upwards of twenty that I am active on right now. Also, I love the e-mail features and the fact that it is open sourced. Just reminds me that I really need to start learning how to make apps!
 
Microsoft unveiled Bing recently, their new and improved search engine to online users this week. Have you checked it out? A few of their pitches in a recent commercial: Search overload is officially over…a decision engine…..It’s time to bing and decide.
 
Some of the key highlights to note: bing-2
 
Task and Decision Sessions- Bing was developed to assist users in the most basic of searches, such as checking your flight information, or something as simple as the date and time. Your search results will come back relative to your particular location, the information taken from your IP address of course.
Simplified Results- SERPs are grouped categorically in a way that allows for quick navigation of the results. More listings are on the first page of the SERPs, which can be very good for some.
Enhanced Video- Bing claims to have better search capabilities when it comes to video, but most don’t see it. Many of the search results are repeated, and some are very irrelative.
 
While Bing is a great site, they do have a few bugs to work out. In the end, it’s just a tricked out Live. For link builders, the biggest benefit of Bing is their task and decision session mentality. If you conform your techniques and start focusing your efforts to conform to their new guidelines, it’s likely you’ll have results on the first page of Bing quickly…..well faster than Google at least. I haven’t started using it, but probably will when they get everything worked out. Wait…but by then Google’s Wave will have come out.. :) Tell us your thoughts!

Various Link Building Techniques

Friday, October 26th, 2007

Link Building is considered to be one of the most effective SEO techniques. If you haven’t done any link building yet, you should consider doing some right now or contact a SEO company that offer Link building services.

Just a quick note about how search engines work first. For a search query entered into the search engine, the algorithm uses rules to identify the most relevant pages, based on the page’s text content and its context (which can be indicated by links from other pages and sites). So essentially inbound links act as a vote to your website.

There are different ways of doing link building but not all are good so you have to be very careful. Below are the link building practices that are considered to be among the best.

Link Directories.
Although link directories are not as effective as they used to be, many can still be considered quality links such as DMOZ and Jayde and are very cost effective.  But not all directories are created equal. There are very few directories left on the web that are still worth submitting to, so don’t put much time or money into it.

Link Exchange
Link exchange with the wrong sort of site can be bad for your website and get you banned from Google so be careful with this strategy. If you use link exchanges, you have to be very selective.

Article and News Submission
The good thing about good article sites or news sites is that their article pages often rank highly and send highly qualified traffic, so as well as getting inbound links from them you will often have qualified traffic click through to your site. So writing an article and submitting it to this kind of website is recommended.

Link Baiting
Link baiting is where the quality of your content is useful or entertaining enough that people will want to link to it, thus improving your number of inbound links and your position in the search engine results pages. It can be done through your website’s content as well as through your blog.

Forums and Blogs
Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and visit your site, link to your site, and/or buy your products. You can also post comments in blogs with a link back to your website.  Some forums us "no follow" so your link may only provide the benefit of traffic to your site.

To conclude remember that Inbound links (one-way text links) using good anchor text are your goal from an SEO perspective. It is much better to have 10 inbound links from related topic sites with a PR of zero, than 100 inbound links from unrelated, PR6 sites. And think long-term when building links, as it takes time to achieve real benefits.

[tags] link building, inbound links, SEO, link exchange, forums, blogs, search engine, link building services [/tags]

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