Marketing Autopsy Blog » search engines

Bing Is Not Showing All Results in a Bing Search

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:09:25 +0000

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

Bing – Helps You Make Decisions or Just Another Search Engine

Cuong Huynh — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:57:04 +0000

Okay I guess the buzz on Bing has died down a little. When it first came out, everyone is eating up their marketing spiel about Bing’s capability to “help you make decisions.” My initial reaction was: “What!? Somehow they have gathered enough information on me, and know how my mind works, to help me make my decisions now?” I had reasons to worry.

But a few quick searches on Bing helped put my worries at ease. Bing gives search results. Bing doesn’t help you make decisions, it’s just a search engine. I said “just” because Microsoft had search engines before (MSN and Live) and it’s not meant to belittle Bing. But to me Bing looks like a search engine with some pre-programmed searches, if you will, plus other new features.

Some people can argue that if Bing gives you search results then it’s helping you make decisions. They must have been living under a rock, because all search engines do this! What matters most to me is being able to find relevant information to make my own decisions.

According to Bing on itself (meaning I typed “what is Bing” into Bing,) this is what I got

Bing is a search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.

The question becomes, how does Bing find and organize the information I need to make my own decisions, that live.com or msn.com didn’t? Microsoft (MS) has been consistently third in the search engine war and is trying to improve traffic. With a reported marketing campaign upwards of $80-100 million, I think MS would be better off revamping their search (which they did,) and running $100 lottos every hour with the winners selected from Bing searchers. That would get their usage up against Google and Yahoo.

But do you know what’s real interesting? I still can’t get Bing to help me make my decision to use it regularly, or at all.

For SEOs who want to take a closer look at Bing SEO, Benj Arriola has some good views in his article “MSN, then Live, now Bing – What do SEOs need to know?” at BusinessOnLine.com.

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

Bing – Helps You Make Decisions or Just Another Search Engine

Give Customers What They Want: Easy Site Navigation

Cuong Huynh — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 02:44:45 +0000

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

How to Ensure Google and SEO Friendly Page Title

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 03:06:21 +0000

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.

Who Doesn’t Want Inbound Marketing?

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:10:44 +0000

So HubSpot gave us another very easy to understand and easy to explain term: Inbound Marketing. It wraps everything about Web 2.0 into a neat little package. According to the article “Inbound Marketing & the Next Phase of Marketing on the Web“, the current recession is pushing the next wave of marketing on the Internet. And it’s a good thing. Evolution is good.

Marketers are seeing the value of Inbound Marketing. While we can’t totally do away with traditional marketing, or Outbound Marketing, marketers can certainly step up their Inbound Marketing with little to no additional costs. Considering these 3 key components that make a successful Inbound Marketing, one can see why it’s so powerful.

Content – Content is the substance of any Inbound Marketing campaign. It is the information or tool that attracts potential customers to your site or your business. Content is king.
Search Engine Optimization – SEO makes it easier for potential customers to find your content. It is the practice of building your site and inbound links to your site to maximize your ranking in search engines, where most of your customers begin their buying process.
Social Media – Social media amplifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.

The beauty of it is anyone can successfully put them to use at very low costs. You don’t have a budget for this? Or your budget has just been scaled down? No worry, you can still run an effective marketing campaign. Here’s a graphic comparing Outbound and Inbound Marketing, courtesy of HubSpot. If you work up a marketing budget for each side of the table, it’s not hard to see the budget needed to do the left side is going to overwhelm the one on the right.

Print ads, TV ads, cold calling, trade shows, email blasts will continue to cost a bundle to do. On the other hand, blogs, eboks, viral videos, SEO, webinars and RSS are all very affordable to start or even expand in activities. To be fair, Inbound Marketing does require specialized knowledge and skills, and this is a good thing. It forces marketers to move with the time. It will weed out strong marketers from the weak ones. It’s the natural law of survival in the business jungle.

Pounding your message out to the customers? Not too effective anymore and too costly. Attracting customers coming to find you? Now everybody wins.

So consider these. Inbound Marketing costs much less than traditional marketing. It has better targeting with self-qualifying customers. And it is an investment with word-of-mouth and viral effectiveness.

If it’s not already in your marketing game plan, then you may as well make Inbound Marketing your new year’s business resolution. But don’t wait. Start today. Remember, you don’t need a budget to do this.

Marketing Autopsy Blog » search engines

Bing Is Not Showing All Results in a Bing Search

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Bing – Helps You Make Decisions or Just Another Search Engine

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Give Customers What They Want: Easy Site Navigation

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How to Ensure Google and SEO Friendly Page Title

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Who Doesn’t Want Inbound Marketing?

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