Unique Original Articles » Conquering Natural Search in the Brave New World of Google and Bing in 2010

No doubt you are aware by now of the partnership between Microsoft (BING) and Yahoo! Now there will only be two major players in the search engine world instead of three. What are the implications of Microsoft’s collaboration with Yahoo!?



There are a number of implications in regard to search engine optimization. There is little doubt that algorithms will play an even larger role for these two players to provide the best possible search engine results. Paid search is alos likely to face some new challenges as well as some fresh opportunities so you need to keep your eyes open and get prepared for change.



It will be interesting to see if Bing can really deliver more relevant, personalized content search results on the basis of users’ search intent similar to the Google personalized search that has been evolving.



The real concern for online marketers is trying to anticipate how algorithms and consumer search criteria and behaviors will change the face of SEO and how best to respond to maintain or take advantage of some of the changes to increase rankings.



We are certain to see continued innovation when it comes to natural language, keyword searches and intent. Bing already boasts of making the decision for you and Google has personalized search. Expect these thecnologies to continue to evolve and become even more specific.



The other hot arena for development is real time results and again both Google and Microsft have agreements in place for real time data sourcing. This is certain to create a new set of questions for social media marketing and how to manage content as we move forward.





The piece of advice is to stay calm. It's a pretty safe bet the SEO best strategies wwill continue to work in your favor. Stay on top of best practices and follow the industry-accepted best practices. They are sure to be rewarded by both Google and Microsoft.



What are SEO best practices you should be employing?

· Optimize title & meta tags

· Optimize internal and third-party links

· Provide clean, user friendly URL structures

· Check and remove any technical issues that get in the way of the crawler process

· All HTML coding should be optimized to emphasize structured data and hierarchies throughout your pages

· When using rich media internet applications (RIA), consider using text alternatives to make it readable and friendly for search engine robots and crawlers.

· Optimize the categorization of information for your visitors and for the search engines. Work to improve your site architecture, including domains and directories.





If its not broken, don’t try and fix it. In other words continue to utilize proven SEO practices that are working for you now.



If you don’t currently participate in both Microsoft and Google’s webmaster tool centers you should add that to your list of priorities for 2010. Competition will undoubtedly increase significantly between Bing and Google. Once it does, advancements will follow close behind. By particpating in their tool centers you will have more insight into the methodologies of both engines. The diagnostics from these tools give you greater insight into how the search engines are actively indexing and scoring websites. If anything changes you can jump on it and respond quickly which may give you an advantage in improving your ranking.



Links to the major Webmaster Tool Centers:

· Bing Webmaster Center

· Google Webmaster Central

· Yahoo Site Explorer





Google’s “universal search” and Bing’s “decision engine” do the same thing. In essence all it means it that the search results page displays information from multiple databases—such as video, images, maps and more all on the same page.



Both search engines are striving to guide and direct users during the process of “searching” . They are trying to figure out user intent based on the initial keyword phrase, and then provide paths to more specific results or result types.



Knowing this, you should try to diversify the type of content on your website(s) so you can best capitalize on all the varied subsets of results available to searchers based on a keyword term or phrase. This means you will have to re-evaluate available content and look to fill any gaps in Universal/Decision content and data categories. If you pay attention and build very strategic mutimedia content you will be able to capitalize on the universal search trends.



In the end well-written relevant content still wins. Well-structured, relevant and highly trusted data is vital to SEO success with both search engines. Brands that want to optimize their digital footprint must be ready to diversify their arsenal of content types. This includes web pages, web documents, videos, images, business locations and mash-ups. XML Sitemaps, Search Monkey, Google Base, Rich Snippets and Co-op are a few programs that can help marketers streamline their technical infrastructure to make it easier and more efficient to share their data. Leveraging these technologies will help you gain more visibility, relevance and search results on both engines. You will be able to take advantage of search engine changes in idexing, verticals and algorithmic search displays the more diverse and well structured your data management and delivery systems are.





Web analytics help your understanding of which result types drive searchers to a site. They can help you significantly improve your content and data delivery strategy.

Be careful about which program or programs you invest in because many analytics programs do not properly segment referral information. As engines sort these referrals into buckets, the ability to know whether the searcher clicked on a video, local listing, etc. is critical-especially as we move forward with the changing technologies.

You will be best served when you invest time in understanding the web analytics tools available today and ensure that the tools they use are properly configured to report against critical SEO metrics and appropriately segment information for each referral source.





Announcements about Bing and Google’s real-time data sources has caused uncertainty about the amount of “real-time” results that will be displayed across search engines in 2010. Brands that are not utilizing much social media should re-evaluate the impact of real-time results for their brand, products or services given that these data sources are being unleashed by Google and Bing on the search pages.

These new real time deals increase the impact of social media on SEO since the new streams will supply another layer of data relevance for the Bing and Google algorithms to crunch. You will have to figure out the optimal balance of social media participation that fits within your overall brand strategy so you can capitalize on this new tactic for improving search visibility.





Here comes the caffeine. You are likely to see a full rollout of caffeine. Caffeine is the new infrastructure that sits under the hood of Google’s search engine. Google states that “most users won’t notice a difference in search results.” However, some studies show changes could be significant for certain types of keywords. While Google’s goal of this index is to improve “index size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions”—not the scoring algorithm itself—as a marketer you are likely to see movement in your rankings and more competition occupying shelf space on some of your specific keywords. It’s important that you review your keyword list as soon as possible to get a baseline of current traction and positioning on Google. That will allow you to assess whether a new approach might be required during the coming year. You will have to watch and monitor the new results to see if caffeine gives you a new buzz or a bad hangover. Even Google can’t predict how caffeine will impact any given keyword, so you should plan to do your own keyword monitoring so you can be prepared to make changes if necessary.



2010 is brining many new search-related resolutions to consider. Real-time search relevance will be a developing saga and on ongoing battle between Google and Bing. You are likely to see new social media and SEO tactics emerge resulting in new best practices and new considerations that will help to exploit natural search results. It is possible that each tweet, re-tweet or user-generated comment could be subject to a first page result on the major search engines. Having said that however, you should never forgetor ignore SEO fundamentals—content development, web diagnostics and methods to share your data directly with engines. These best practices and proven tactics will remain key to any SEOs toolbox.


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