Seo Melbourne, Search Engine Optimisation Services

You’ve probably heard about the Yahoo/Microsoft deal. This will have a major impact on the search engine landscape and there definitely will be effects on your website rankings and the number of visitors that your website will get.

The basic facts

Yahoo is going to give up their own search technology and use Microsoft’s search technology instead. Bing.com will power the organic and the paid search results on Yahoo (except for premium ads on Yahoo).

Self-serve advertising (i.e. the AdWords competitor) will be managed by Microsoft’s AdCenter. Microsoft will get access to Yahoo’s search technology and can use it to improve its own search technology.

What does this mean for your website?

1. You should optimize for Bing.com.

Yahoo/Bing will have a search market share of at least 15% (that’s the current market share of MSN and Yahoo combined – some statistics show a much higher market share). If you do not optimize some of your website pages for Bing, you’ll lose a lot of visitors and sales. Fortunately, IBP’s top 10 optimizer already enables you to optimize your website for Bing. The optimizer works with the US version of Bing as well as with many country versions. Recent research has shown that Bing’s traffic is more likely to convert.

2. Yahoo’s inbound link data will probably be lost.

Yahoo is the search engine that currently returns the most inbound link data. When Yahoo drops its index, that data will probably be lost. We recommend using IBP’s link manager if you want to get an overview of the websites that link to your website. The link manager in IBP will retrieve all links that are returned by Yahoo, Bing, Google and other search engines.

3. A big PPC provider will be gone, an even bigger provider will appear.

Microsoft will provide the search ads for Yahoo and Bing. Yahoo will close its own paid search offerings. That means that you will be able to manage your ads for both Yahoo and Bing in one user interface. It probably also means rising bid prices on Yahoo and Bing.

4. Yahoo might close some of their websites.

Yahoo might put its Internet directory into question as well as their alternative search applications SearchMonkey and SearchBOSS. Applications such as Yahoo Maps might also be reconsidered because Bing offers similar services.

5. There will be two independent search result pages.

Yahoo will have full control over the user interface of their search form. The ordering of the results, the layout and the whole search focus can be different from Bing. That means that you still might have to optimize your website for both search engines.

The deal still needs shareholder and legal approval. Yahoo and Microsoft hope that the changes will be in place by early 2010. If you want to participate from the change as soon as possible, you should optimize some of your web pages for Bing now.

Optimize different pages of your website for different search engines and different keywords. What works with one search engine might not work with another. Optimize each web page for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination to get better results.

more at Axandra.com

Utilize a directory structure that organizes your content well and is easy for visitors to know where they’re at on your site. Try using your directory structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.

Avoid such things as having deep nesting of subdirectories like …/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6//page.htm and using directory names that have no relation to the content in them. Many sites with indexing problems and lack of representation in the search engines are usually suffering from an inefficient internal page linking structure.

If a page is not accessible by a link from somewhere, it won’t be ‘seen’ by the search engines.

LONG-running rumours about a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo may finally come true tomorrow. The two companies have apparently agreed to team up against Google with an online search and advertising partnership. The deal is expected to be formally announced within today.

If you want to get high rankings for a special keyword, you must optimize one of your web pages for that keyword. If one of your web pages has been optimized for a keyword, then Google will return it in the search results.  Unfortunately, there are many websites that target the same keywords as your website. If more than one website has been optimized for a keyword then Google will list the web pages with the best inbound links in the top 10 results.

For example, if 20 websites have been optimized for the keyword “green widgets” then the website that has the most inbound links that use the text “green widgets” as the link text will get the best position on Google.  If your website meets all on-page requirements and has the right kind of links (which does not mean that it must have the most links) then Google will list your website on the first result page.

Matt Cutts recently published this great video about how to get backlinks, the whitehat way.

Worth your time to watch it

There’s been an interesting and ongoing saga occurring between two companies: Facebook (Facebook), the world’s largest social network, and Power.com, a social media aggregator that has significant traction overseas and launched its U.S. version late last year. Facebook threw a wrench into Power.com’s gears when it filed a lawsuit claiming that it used Facebook data without authorization.

Here’s Power.com’s full list of demands:

1. That plaintiffs take nothing by the Complaint, and that judgment be entered against Plaintiffs and in favor of Power

2. That Power and Vachani be awarded costs of suit incurred in defending this action, including reasonable attorneys’ fees;

3. That Facebook be permanently enjoined from the unlawful and anticompetitive practices identified herein;

4. That Power and Vachani be awarded monetary damages for the injuries caused by Facebook’s unlawful and anticompetitive practices;

5. That such damages be tripled under 15 U.S.C. § 15(a);

6. That Power and Vachani be awarded reasonable attorneys’ fees, expenses and costs associated with prosecuting their claims; and

7. For such further relief as this Court deems necessary, just or proper

GOOGLE wants Australia’s biggest property listing websites Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au to join its newly launched real estate maps service, despite neither player showing any sign it is willing to partner with the search engine.

Google has been developing the application — which enables people to see houses for sale on Google Maps — for the past 12 months, taking the framework of a system developed for the US market four years ago and re-tooling it for the local market.

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Blog commenting is probably the most popular – and in many cases, most irritating (because of spammers) – technique of getting permanent links.

The Google PageRank algorithm implies that the more outbound links there are on a page, the less authority or power this page can pass to each of those links. That’s because the page’s PR is distributed evenly between the outbound links. If a webmaster wants to add an outbound link, but doesn’t want Google to follow that link or for PR power to be passed on to the linked page, then that webmaster has to add the ‘nofollow’ attribute to the link. Many bloggers do so to prevent their PR from flowing to the pages cited by commenters. However, this practice is no longer encouraged by Google.

A few weeks ago Matt Cutts blogged about a change in the PR algorithm concerning Google’s approach to passing PageRank through the links with the ‘nofollow’ attribute. Although no PageRank and anchor texts are passed through such links, they are also counted when sharing the outgoing ‘link juice’. The only difference is that it’s neither passed to the linked site nor kept on the page. This means Google disapproves of the practice of using the rel=nofollow attribute for the purpose of not sharing PageRank.

If you own a blog, setting up the ‘nofollow’ attribute to all comments means conserving your blog’s ‘link juice’ and getting fewer comments. The ‘do-follow’ principle can lead to more spam, but it’s a good way to attract webmasters to your site. On the other hand, if you are a webmaster trying to obtain more links by commenting on blogs, don’t rely solely on this method of link popularity improvement. Use a combination of methods, including the time-proven ways of press releases, articles and site submissions to relevant lists and directories, and the newer techniques for site promotion in social media.

The company floated its first US television advertisements in recent months for the browser, which has captured just a tiny share of a market dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s new search engine Bing was launched in a bid to hit back at Google’s gains in the search market, but still lags behind its rival. Web analytics firm StatCounter said last week that Bing had carved out an 8.23 per cent share of the US search market in June, up from 7.21 per cent in April and 7.81 per cent in May. By contrast, however, Google continued to dominate the search market with a huge 78.48 per cent share last month.Google already has an operating system called Android.

While the system is only used for mobile phones at the moment, the open-source operating software with Internet capabilities has showcased Google’s obvious interest in expanding beyond its search engine base. In the US, telecom carrier giant T-Mobile said last month the latest version of a touch-screen smartphone featuring Android would be available in August. It is being seen as Google’s answer in the highly competitive smartphone market to the newly released Apple iPhone 3GS, the Palm Pre and the latest Blackberrys.

Webmasters reported a Google PageRank update in many online forums. Google’s John Muller commented on the PageRank update: “As far as I can tell, it looks like the change in Toolbar PageRank for your site is only due to some technical quirk and not something that you need to worry about.”