Archive for July, 2010

How to prepare your website for the Yahoo-Bing era

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Last week, Yahoo announced that the organic search results on Yahoo will be powered by Bing beginning in August/September. Yahoo is already testing Bing results on some result pages.

 

Is the Yahoo-Bing change relevant to your website?

According to the latest comScore data, Yahoo and Microsoft sites had a combined search market share of 31.6% in June 2010.

Yahoo sites had 3.2 billion search queries and Microsoft sites had 2.2 billion search queries in June 2010. That’s a total of 5.4 billion search queries in one month.

If your website is listed for the right keywords in the Bing results, you will get a lot of website visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.

Getting visitors from Bing will also make your website less dependent on Google.

How to optimize your web pages for Bing

Optimizing your web pages for Bing is not much different from optimizing your web pages for Google. Just like Google, Bing requires optimized web pages and good inbound links if you want to see your website on the first search result page.

The difference is the weight that Bing puts in the different ranking factors. Things that work well with Google might not have the same effect on Bing and vice-versa.

Here are some tips that will help you to get the best possible results for your website:

  • Optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your site for Bing. By targeting the exact algorithm of a search engine, you increase your changes of getting listed on the first result page.
  • Do not optimize the same page for more than one keyphrase. It is much better that a web page is highly relevant to one keyphrase than somewhat relevant to many keyphrases.
  • If possible, optimize each page of your website for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination. The more targeted the optimization, the more likely it is that the web page will be listed in the top results.

Check if your web pages are ready for Bing

 

You will lose a lot of traffic if your web page currently has high rankings on Yahoo but not on Bing. Yahoo’s own results will be dropped after the transition to the new Bing results. The sooner you start to optimize some of your web pages for Bing, the better.

Posted in Internet Business, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

How to tell Google that your website is not about toads

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

You know what you sell and you know the topic of your website. Are you sure that Google puts your website in the right category? If your website is about shoes, Google still might think that it is about frogs and toads.

If Google puts your website in the wrong category, it will be very difficult to get high rankings for your keywords.

How to find out what Google thinks about your website

To find out what Google thinks about your website, perform a “similar” search for your domain. Enter the following in Google’s search box:

related:www.domain.com/ ~domain.com

Replace domain.com with your own domain name and make sure that there is no spacer after the colon. On the result page, Google will show you websites that it finds related to your site.

If the websites on the search result page are related to your website then everything is okay. If the websites are about totally different topics, then you have a problem and Google probably won’t display your website in the search results for the right keywords.

Why does Google put your website in the wrong category?

Suppose your website is about selling shoes. If your site is linked by other websites that link to your website and other websites that are about frogs and toads then Google might think that your website is related to frogs and toads.

It’s important that the other links on the web page that links to you are related to your site. If you’re listed in the “Shoes” category of an Internet directory then all web sites in the same category are usually also about shoes.

When search engines look at this page and check the links to other sites they will think that your web site is related to shoes. That means that it will be much easier to get high rankings for search terms that are about shoes.

Is your website in the right co-citation category?

The other websites to which your link partners link influence the ranking of your website on Google.

Here’s an example: web sites 1, 2, 3 and 4 all link to the web sites A, B, C and D. Although A, B, C and D don’t link to each other, Google thinks that A, B, C and D are related to each other because the same web sites link to them:

 

If A, B, C and D are all linked from 1, 2, 3 and 4 they might be related to one another, even though they don’t directly link to each other.

If A, B, C and D are all linked by many other web sites, they have a strong relationship. The more web sites they are linked by, the stronger the relationship.

If you are the owner of website A, you should make sure that web sites B, C and D are related to your site.

What does this mean for your website?

When you build links, make sure that the page that links to your site also contains other links that are related to your website topic. The more pages of the other site are about your topic, the better.

If the link to your website is in a good neighborhood then it will be much easier to get high rankings for your keywords.

Related backlinks and optimized web page content will bring your website on Google’s first result page.

Posted in Google Tidbits, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »