Welcome to SEM SEO Expert. This site is owned by Toronto based SEM Expert, Nima Asrar Haghighi, and covers topics such as Search Engine Marketing , Search Engine Optimization , Social Media Optimization (SMO), Web Analytics and Affiliate Marketing. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and refers to marketing through search engines. SEM experts/specialists market products, services or websites either through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or through PPC Advertising.
As I mentioned in my previous post (Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance), the alliance is well on its way. Some Bing results have already started to show up on Yahoo particularly in US. As a result of the testing, some sites have seen fluctuations on their rankings.
The search alliance also impacts organic search (web, image and video). Microsoft will be responsible for the platform serving organic search used by both companies (Yahoo & Microsoft).
It is possible that the current ranking of your site on Yahoo changes when Yahoo’s organic search results are powered by Bing. Once the transition occurs, your ranking will be largely based on how Bing indexes and ranks your website for a particular search query. Though there might be some adjustments on the way, the current Bing search results are a good indicator of how your site may rank on Yahoo! after the transition.
Comparing your organic keyword rankings on Yahoo and Bing will help you gauge the possibility of rise or drop in your organic traffic after the transition is fully in place. If rankings are doing better in Bing than in Yahoo, then there should be a rise in traffic and lower if your ranking is currently doing better in Yahoo.
Bing’s crawler is scheduled to come out of beta in October and will be re-branded as bingbot replacing msnbot. Bingbot will still honor directives the same way msnbot does. Nevertheless, the main objective of this move is to improve crawling efficiency and increase the number of documents being crawled by Bing.
Given the fact that moving forward the combined traffic of Yahoo and Bing will account for almost 30% of the search market share, SEO consultants cannot ignore Bing as a rounding error anymore. SEO specialists need to pay more attention to how their sites rank on Bing and take the necessary actions to ensure they improve their visibility. Some of the actions that can be taken are:
Create XML sitemaps for your web properties and submit through your Bing Webmaster Tools account.
Expand your link building campaigns for your important pages in your web properties. Make sure you create link baits to get more deep links.
SEO for Bing, in most part, works with Google SEO best practices. Nevertheless, in the next few months, Bing Webmaster Tools will be web marketers best friend. They need to create their webmaster account with Microsoft if not already in place, submit XML sitemaps, run diagnostics and examine performance indicators.
You might need to adjust your pay per click campaigns so that you deal with the traffic shift. In another post I will cover the impact of the merger of Microsoft and Yahoo search results on PPC campaigns.
It seems that the Yahoo and Microsoft Search Alliance is going to happen as planned in October and we are not going to wait until the end of holiday season. As announced back in February, Yahoo and Microsoft forged an alliance to provide their users with a new search experience by providing relevant results faster and offering more value for advertisers and in the process challenge Google’s supremacy.
Once the search alliance is in place, the organic search results pages will be served by Bing and paid search listings will be served by Microsoft adCenter instead of Yahoo Search Marketing platform. Nevertheless, Yahoo will continue to enhance the search results by providing relevant content from Yahoo content properties, vertical search and search tools and filters. So, both companies will continue to have differentiated consumer search experiences.
Yahoo and Microsoft search alliance does not cover companies’ display advertising and other web properties such as email and instant messaging.
In the upcoming posts I will talk about the impacts of Yahoo and Microsoft search alliance on PPC campaigns on Yahoo and Bing (MSN) as well as what needs to be done as far as SEO is concerned.
Depending on the size and brand sensitivity of organizations, they have traditionally had Public Relations departments, spokesperson or spin doctors to deal with crisis management, customer relations, employee relations, government affair and media relations.
Even though Public Relations (PR) has been a center of attention for years as the process of maintaining public image for high-profile people, organizations, corporations, programs and governments, in the recent years, its importance has grown more than ever. With the ever growing creation of user generated content (UGC) through blogging and video sharing platforms and other forms of social media, more people have access to the media and can potentially negatively impact the image of a person or an organization.
Negative blog postings, undesirable feedback in blog comments, damaging testimonials in popular forums, unrealistic allegations, and product reviews from false users just under or above your company name can destroy profits without the proper corporate reputation management. Reputation Management is the practice of responding to the reputation damaging information.
Robert Greene says: “so much depends on reputation – guard it with your life. Make your reputation unassailable. Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen.” To do so, you need to monitor your brand or name on an ongoing basis to see what is being said about it. You can do so using various brand monitoring tools such as Google Alert. Once you find possible negative online comments or blog posts, you have various options to deal with the situation.
Reputation Management will assure that potential customers will have a positive and realistic impression of your company. As in most cases removing the damaging information from the result pages of search engines is not possible, online reputation management explores other solutions such as improving the first page of search engines results pages more favourable to the corporate site.
The first goal of online reputation management is to get negative results off of the first page. This is done by adapting various SEO strategies to outrank those negative results and send them far down the search results. Some of these strategies are:
• Developing micro sites
• Utilizing social media sites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn)
• Developing and optimizing videos and other digital assets
• Writing and distributing press releases
• Blogging to create fresh content
• Building wiki-sites
Search engine optimization agencies were among the first companies who started offering search reputation management services. PR companies seem to be a little behind the online world. They either need to start developing the skills or team up with search marketing firms to help their corporate clients in the Web 2.0 world.
Since the introduction of Universal Search (aka Blended Search), search engine marketers have been considering optimizing videos to rank high on search engine results pages as part of their SEO efforts.
Some of the techniques SEO specialist use to optimize a video are:
Using a keyword rich title for the video
Tag video with relevant phrases
Add a keyword-smart caption to the video
Surround the video with relevant content
Provide a transcript of the video content
Generate links back to videos
Add descriptive meta data to videos
Allow comments on videos
In order to maximize viewership, Internet marketers use third party video hosting sites such as YouTube, Metacafe and Vimeo to publicise their videos. However, the challenge with the video files has traditionally been the difficulty search engines have had with understanding and ranking the content.
The introduction of Youtube Auto-Captions can change the way video production and video SEO are done. Google software engineers have developed a solution that uses speech recognition technology to automatically transcribe what is said in a video and add it to the video as a closed caption.
YouTube Video Captions and Subtitles
The goal of Youtbe captions is to make the videos more accessible not only to deaf people and viewers around the world who would like to translate the video in English to other languages, but also to search engines. Google can use the same speech recognition technology used in captioning and adding subtitles to videos, together with their ranking algorithm, to analyze video content, index and rank them accordingly.
Of course machine generated caption texts are still far from accurate. Currently, like any other speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise cannot properly be auto-captioned.
The challenges caption generators face are issues such as various languages, a massive vocabulary, people’s accents, poor audio recordings and background noises.
Video captions are generated for a limited number of Youtube videos automatically. However, video owners can are able to manually request their videos to be transcribed. Nevertheless, they need to check to make sure the captioned transcript is accurate. This can be done to all past video files uploaded to Youtube.
Currently, website speed does not have a huge impact on the ranking and still site relevance and backlinks are more important factors in SEO; however, this is another factor that search engine optimization experts need to take into consideration.
You can use tools such as Firebug Firefox add-on, Yahoo’s YSlow tool or Google Webmaster tools to monitor and improve your site’s speed.
Google Webmaster Tools - Site Load Time
Some techniques that you can take to improve your website’s speed are:
• Optimize web graphics
• Reduce the file sizes
• Compress JavaScript
• Reduce CSS size
• Utilize HTTP caching
• Minimize browser reflow
• Reduce HTML document size by eliminating optional elements
• Use fewer redirects
By speeding up your site, not only you may help your SEO efforts and search ranking but also you can potentially improve user experience, average time on your site as well as conversion rate.
