So I had a problem with Bing claiming to help you make decisions (see Bing – Helps You Make Decisions or Just Another Search Engine.) But a recent post by Benj Arriola from BusinessOnLine really put the nail in the coffin.

Through a tip from an SEO friend, Benj demonstrated in a simple search test that Bing search results are way biased, or inadequate for a major search engine, or both. The test consisted of searching for the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” in each of the Google, Yahoo and Bing search engine. A very reasonable task, I should add.

Guess what the results were? In a nutshell:

• Google search engine: Each of the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” came back with plenty of relevant results. No surprise because that’s what you’d expect for well-known sites.
• Yahoo search engine: Same expected results. Each of the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” came back with plenty of relevant results.
• Bing search engine. The search on “Google” gives a single result on google.com. The search on “Yahoo” gives a single result on yahoo.com. But the search on “Microsoft” yields plenty of results on both the company and its various products and services!

You can test all of this by conducting the searches yourselves. It’s totally duplicable, at least for now. Below are my own tests.

Google search engine results.

Yahoo search engine results.

Bing search engine results.

These are real funny results. Heck, the term “yak” (or substitute your own term) returns more results than “Google” and “Yahoo” combined, according to Bing.

Oh and another thing. If you look at Bing’s search results for “Google” and “Yahoo” you’ll see to the right of the single result in each case is a list of similar search engines. And Bing is at the top of this list. But when you search for “Bing” on Bing, there is no list for alternative search engines to be seen anywhere. It’s like google and Yahoo don’t exist. Pretty odd.

The bottom line: I don’t think users of Bing is getting unbiased search results. You can make your own conclusion.

Read Benj’s post “Should I Trust Bing’s Search Engine Results?“

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Bing Is Not Showing All Results in a Bing Search

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Want to make a customer happy even before s/he becomes your customer? Make your website site navigation easy to navigate. It’s really low-cost marketing and even easier customer service.

A website’s navigation is important for several reasons. It helps visitors find information faster and more efficiently. It can also help search engines understand what you consider important on your site.

First make sure you get the basics down by making available a sitemap (a webpage on your site displaying the structure and a hierarchical listing of all important pages on your site, otherwise known as HTML sitemap) and a Sitemap (a file submitted to and utilized by major search engines to easily discover pages on your site, otherwise known as XML Sitemap.) Here are a few easy ways to ensure your navigation is user friendly:

• Create site navigation that flows naturally from general content to specific content. This means giving the readers an overview of the subject matter before showing detailed information. Do this without forcing readers to make too much effort in finding what they want, including making them click through 4, 5 or more levels down from the top. I would recommend no more than 3 levels deep in your navigation.
• Create site navigation that is not complex where all pages are linking to all other pages. If this is the case, then each page will be laden with navigation links, crowding out your real content. Practice selective linking by using keyword rich text links within your content to relevant pages when appropriate.
• Create site navigation using mostly text instead of images. Search engines especially like text content, and this will aid them in going through your site to find them. You can do your site a real disservice if you only use drop-down menus, images or animation in your navigation.
• Create site navigation with breadcrumbs links to help readers see exactly where they are on your site at any time, and to quickly go back up the navigation structure. A typical breadcrumb navigation (below) starts with a “Your Are Here:” or some other similarly user-friendly phrase, and is normally located just under your site’s navigation/header area, and above all main content.

• Create site navigation that gracefully handles errors, incorrect urls, nonexistent pages, and the ‘page not found’ faux pas. One way is to ensure these problematic pages will be taken care of by a custom 404 page. Your custom 404 page then will kindly guide readers on what to do next, including offering a list of popular links on your site, a search box to find the content, or other suggestions. In any case avoid having just the “Not found” showing, or even worse, no 404 page, leaving your readers stranded. Here’s a link to nowhere on our site which will serve up our custom 404 page.

It’s all about making it easy for visitors to find what they want. It’s no different from providing easy way for customers to find products a brick-and-mortar store. They’ll love you for it. This is low-cost marketing and easy customer service.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Give Customers What They Want: Easy Site Navigation

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A page’s meta description tag is one of the most important elements of your search engine optimization activities from Google’s standpoint.

When you’re marketing your site online and hope that people will find their way to your content or offering, most of the traffic coming to your site will be through organic searches. In a typical Google search engine result, as shown below for the search phrase “hybrid cars compendium”, what you normally see are the page title snippet (from the meta title tag), description snippet (from the meta description tag), url and page size, then the cached version of the page followed by the “Similar pages” link.

It’s clear that Google tends to choose the title and description metas as snippets to show in search results, although there’s a caveat to keep in mind. Obviously Google is not going to tell us what it does or does not do exactly. However Google does indicate that it might use other relevant sections of your page’s visible text if those do a better job matching up with a searcher’s query (in Google’s eye of course). So if you want control then write your own description that is relevant.

According to Google, the description is important because it gives search engines a summary of what your page is about. The description can be a couple of sentences in length and should be relevant to your content as explained above. From my experience it’s probably a good idea to load all your important keywords within the first 170 or so characters of the description. Anything beyond that may get cut off and not shown in the search result snippets.

And here’s a bonus, courtesy of Google itself. You can use the Google Webmaster Tools to analyze your title and meta description against Google’s expectations. This handy tool tells you if your meta tags are too short, too long or even duplicated. Just log in to your Google account, select Webmaster Tools, find your site and go to Diagnotics/Content Analysis area. Then you can fix any problem listed in the analysis.

Writing proper meta description should always be part of your best practices in search engine optimization and search engine marketing efforts. It’s time well spent to ensure visitors find what they’re looking for. In summary here are some simple rules:

• Write relevant, focussed description that accurately summarizes the page’s content to inform and attract searchers.
• Write unique description for each web page on your site.
• Avoid descriptions that are too generic.
• Avoid filling description with only keywords. 

By the way, because good descriptions attract visitors, you’ll get improved click-through rates (CTR) from the search engine results pages (SERPs), but no effect for your search result ranking.

It’s always a good idea to begin working your SEO before a new site goes live. But what if you already have a functioning site with lots of pages? Should you go back to your pages to redo/improve description metas? It’s probably worth it, at least for those pages with the best/most relevant/unique content.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Use Meta Description Tags to Improve Search Engine Marketing Results

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• About Cuong Huynh
• About Marketing Autopsy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important element of getting a website found by the Internet content reader. After all, without a reader to consume your content, there’s no reason for anyone or any organization to have a website, thus no reason for online marketing and SEO.

The reader, or consumer of content, normally uses some kind of search engine such as Google, Yahoo, MSN (or a whole host of others) to find the information s/he needs. But we as marketers must always keep one thing straight: SEO and search engine are only a mean to an end. SEO is not the end goal itself. It is the content that is the end that serves the readers. This is the reason why providing relevant, useful information for visitors to consume is a crucial step in the SEO process.

Think of it this way. Decisions you make and things you do to attract visitors to your site must be based first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors. If this is not the case, even if a visitor somehow finds your site, s/he can and will immediately leave if the content searched for does not exist. Good content attracts high traffic. Conversely, useless content repels visitors.

In summary, if you do nothing else but just concentrate on creating great and captivating content, you already have a winning SEO strategy in place.

So are you spending a good amount of time on developing great content as part of your SEO strategy?

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

One Secret to Successful SEO, If You Don’t Do Anything Else

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Blogging can bring excellent and relatively quick search engine optimization (SEO) benefits to a company’s website. Catfish over at BusinessOnline has some great tips for marketers in the blogging department to help with search engine optimization (SEO). Called “3 Top Ways Blogging Enhances Your SEO Campaign“, the article touches on the 3 easy-for-executive-to-understand reasons why blogging is important for any corporation.

In a nutshell, the 3 benefits blogging can bring your business are:

• Blogging creates new content opportunities. With blogging, a marketer can write marketing content relevant to any desired marketing message or campaign with very little effort, and without messing up the main corporate website. For blogging to be effective, all blog content should be keyword focused.
• Blogging creates new internal link opportunities. Because of new keyword focused content being generated regularly, there are ample of opportunities for internal linking between keywords and other relevant blog posts and articles. And when you automate this process with tools such as the Cross Linker Wordpress Plugin for Wordpress (as suggested by Catfish), the benefits can be multiplied ten-fold, as older content are given new life with every new keyword linking back to them.
• Blogging creates new external link opportunities. Blogging by its nature encourages communication between readers and content creators. If your content is captivating, interesting and useful to others, they will want to link back to your source article, vote for or recommend your content to others on social sites, and subscribe to your content through RSS feeds.

These are all excellent reasons for companies to get into blogging. But there is an additional good side effect from a marketer’s point of view. Blogging provides a critical, yet almost forgotten basic skill a good marketer must possess: the writing skill.

Anyone and everyone can claim to have excellent verbal and written communication skills. But let’s be honest to ourselves and our customers, how much formal marketing communications do you as a marketer actually write? And how often? The fact is we get bogged down in everyday to-do lists and deadlines that we no longer write proper marketing communications. Blogging brings good writing back to marketing communications.

And you know the saying is still true. With practice comes perfection.

So are you and your organization blogging? If not, what are some of the hindering factors? Share your experience with us.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Blogging for SEO Benefits, Plus a Great Side Effect

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Web page titles are an important element of getting traffic to your site for the following reasons:

• Page title is one of the few elements search engines show in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Therefore the words in the page title do carry significant authority in the subject matter of your web page content.
• Because page titles are representative of the content on a page, it’s an effective technique to link to pages using their page title as the link anchor text. This is another SEO technique discussed in another post on link anchor text, and it directly influences click-through rate (CTR).
• On a SERP, more informative page titles are likely to attract clicks from a searcher because it meets his search needs. Good, descriptive titles stimulate an emotional response and promise to the searcher that what he is looking for can be had by clicking on your search result. This is a key differentiator between your site and other sites listed on the same SERP.

It is recommended that your page titles be different from page to page on your site. And when pages have similar content, thus causing similar sounding page titles, try to creatively vary the keywords within the title so it is clear that the 2 titles are different and represent 2 different pages.

In addition, the format, order, and word selection of the words in your page title should be somewhat different than the words in your page meta description and on page headers.

Finally, if you look at a typical Google search result page, you’ll notice that Google does not display the page title beyond 65-70 characters. Therefore your title should fit within 65-70 characters and anything beyond that will be cut off by the search engine. You may still write longer than this character budget to provide great user experience for your web visitors, but be sure to put all important keywords up front before the 70th character.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

How to Ensure Google and SEO Friendly Page Title

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