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Using a Bing Search Box Rather than a Google One

December 15, 2010 By

Many top websites today include additional features on the site’s pages. One of those is a Google search box, which is integrated with the site-specific search box. You can easily type in a keyword phrase and choose whether to search the site or Google for that information.

A new WebMasterWorld thread though has some webmasters considering a switch to Bing’s search box.

Each has their reasons with one of the big ones being the ease at which the change can be made. One contributor says he’s interested in changing because Google’s “AdSense for Search” already has a plethora of information about his visitors. While he understands Microsoft will get this information too, he feels it will slow the amount of information Google collects in a day.

Another webmaster gives his initial impressions:

  • Easy to setup
  • Results are excellent
  • Results look good
  • Search box books better than Google
  • Likes the pop-up results window
  • Loads in all browsers except Opera, which only displays it periodically

All of our sites currently contain the Google search box. Would we consider changing?

Perhaps – from the sounds of these comments, Bing’s site search functions work pretty well.

But Google remains the top search engine and actually gained market share in September. Bing is listed #3 by comScore and while they have an ongoing partnership with Yahoo, both of them put together still take less than half of the market share Google does.

See the chart below:

Explicit Core Share* of U.S. Searches Among Leading Providers, September 2010 vs August 2010
  Share of Searches (%)
Domain August 2010 September 2010

Month-over-Month Point
Change (%)
Google Sites 65.4 66.1 0.7
Yahoo Sites 17.4 16.7 -0.7
Microsoft Sites 11.1 11.2 0.1
Ask Network 3.8 3.7 -0.1
AOL Network 2.3 2.3 0.0

Note: Data is based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

*Excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with search results.
Source: comScore 2010

Filed Under: Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Site Architecture Tagged With: , , , , ,

8 Ways you can safely sell Links on your Website

November 23, 2010 By

If you’ve had a blog for awhile, you may be getting inquiries from potential advertisers and others about paid links. It’s one benefit of building a blog for the long term – others will pay you for advertising links.

As you can imagine, this can become quite lucrative over time.

In many respects though, Google frowns upon this practice and penalizes sites it sees as unnaturally manipulating search results. What they do (as well as Bing) is use link-based analysis to determine the quality of a site and its relevance to the keyword in question. Google believes buying and selling links circumvents this process and makes results less relevant and helpful to its searchers.

However, if you read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you will find that not all paid links violate their rules. In fact, if links are bought/sold for advertising purposes and not to pass on PageRank and manipulate search results, then it’s totally okay.

If you’re getting inquiries about advertising links, there are 8 ways you can safely sell links on your site without being penalized Google.

1. Add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link

Adding this code into the link adds the link to your site but prevents your site from passing any “link juice” to the other site – basically it ensures the other site only receives traffic from the link and not a PageRank boost. This suggestion comes directly from Google so you can be 100% sure that it’s okay.

2. Only link to intermediate pages that include a robots.txt file

Robots.txt blocks search engine spiders from crawling a page. Most websites want their pages to be crawled. Therefore, you can redirect links to an intermediate page that includes this characteristic. Using an intermediate page strips the link of any PageRank benefits and ensures the link is for traffic only…this is another one of Google’s recommendations.

3. Avoid “link farm” schemes

Link farms are websites whose only purpose is to pass PageRank and link to other sites. While you probably would not use one, you need to be careful that your site doesn’t appear as one. Understandably, Google does not like link farm sites at all. In order to avoid looking like you’re a link farm site, embed links within relevant content and avoid having them all in one place.

4. Negotiate link sales for the long term

Consistent rotation of links is another red flag for the search engines as they make your site look like a link farm. Therefore, to fly under the radar, you should select paid links carefully and keep them consistent for as long as possible.

5. Don’t advertise that you’re selling links

This is advice that usually isn’t heeded online. If you advertise you’re selling links, you will get a lot of requests from spammers and banned sites. While the money may be tempting, be patient and wait for quality advertisers to come to you. This will give you better link partners and reduce your frustration.

6. Use HTML links only

Some link buyers may be using JavaScript or some other code in order to update or change the text and URL of the link at a future time. Avoid this by sticking with HTML based links.

7. Only link to relevant sites with quality content

Relevancy between links and keywords is the first thing search engines look for. Therefore, you should be sure that links you’re using point to quality content. Doing so helps search engines achieve their #1 goal, which is delivering the most relevant content to their users. In turn, they’ll reward you for it.

8. Be selective on who you partner with for links

Carefully evaluate sites before linking to them and ask yourself if you want your visitors going there. Do a site:yoursite.com search in Google on the company and see if they’ve had any penalties in the past that may hurt you if you partner with them.

One good rule of thumb when dealing with paid links – only deal with sites you would link to without payment. Doing so ensures you only sell links that are of use to your visitors. Selling links shouldn’t be your main source of income but they can provide a nice bonus.

Remember, Google frowns on selling links for PageRank and other purposes. However, you can do it safely by following the 8 steps mentioned above.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Site Architecture, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Ways You Can Still Use Frames and Have High Rankings

November 10, 2010 By

One of the tenets of good site architecture is avoiding frames. While they may look nice, they’ve only spelled trouble in the past from an SEO perspective. If you have a bunch of great content wrapped up in frames, nobody would be able to find it since search engine spiders could not crawl frames.

That is of course you’re very knowledgeable and know how you can both have frames and an easy-crawlable site.

To clarify, a frame is actually an HTML element that pulls content from another URL and directs it to a URL of your choice…in a non-technical sense, frames essentially copy everything on a page to mirror it on another page. There are some good reasons why you would want to use frames…just be careful on how you use them to ensure your site indeed gets crawled by the search engine spiders.

Use specific tags in your HTML code to ensure framed content gets indexed

It’s not that Google and Bing don’t index content within a <frameset> tag but what usually occurs is the search engines will index framed and non-framed content separately and catalogue them as two separate pages.

Viewing frames as images is a good way to look at them. If you absolutely must use frames, you should provide a keyword-rich description of the image in case it doesn’t load. The <noframe> tag explains to users and search engines what the framed content is if it fails to load.

<noframes>Put your keyword-rich frame describing content here.</noframes>

Two important things to consider when using <noframes>: (1) place them as high up on the page as possible so it’s easily readable by search engine spiders and users whose browsers don’t support frames and (2) be sure the <noframe> tag is outside the <frames> or <iframes> tag. If it isn’t, that content may not get picked up by the search engine spiders.

Another “frames” tag for that’s gaining a lot of popularity is the <iframe> tag. It’s used to embed dynamic information and a wide variety of widgets on a site…Facebook’s “Like” button/widget is one common use for an <iframe> tag.

Many who use <iframe> though don’t realize that it doesn’t generate a link back to their site – which is one of the main reasons to use the tag in the first place.

Fortunately, there is a way to get that link by setting up the code as indexable content with the <iframe> tag. Setting up the code in the following way will get the content and any links indexed.

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php”
scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ style=”border:none; overflow:hidden;
width:150px; height:50px;” allowTransparency=”true”>

Content, and links will get indexed here by most engines as it is visible text on the page. Anything that is pulled in using the iframe tag, will not get indexed with the page. So if you want your iframe powered widgets to generate a link back to your site, make sure and include that code in this area.

</iframe>

Generally speaking, we avoid frames on sites we work with if at all possible since it’s very difficult to ensure the content is indexed by the search engines and readable by our users. <Iframe> tags on the other hand can be a good method of building links when they’re used properly.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Site Architecture, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How Facebook Users Interact with Various Brands and Why

October 21, 2010 By

Understanding how social media users interact with a utility like Facebook takes some trial and error…much of this depends on your industry and the kinds of people on Facebook you’re trying to target.

A new study from ExactTarget, an email marketing firm, gives us some ideas on how Facebook members use the site and specifically, how they interact with various brands.

First off, the firm’s study found that 38% of Facebook users “Like” (…or “fan” in the old days) a brand on the social networking site. These users on average “like” 9 different brands (or businesses)…this fact alone presents a tremendous opportunity to get your brand on millions upon millions of users’ news feeds.

Other findings from the study present some challenges to marketers as well. Of the people who click “like” for a particular brand, 70% of them don’t think liking or becoming a fan means they’re necessarily opting in for marketing purposes.

Beyond that, ExactTarget examined what motivates someone to click “like” and found some interesting results, which can help you better engage your fans and help ensure they don’t click the “hide” button from their news feeds.

Here are just a few of the results:

  • 40% of those who click “like” do it to receive discounts and promotions
  • 39% to show their friends they support a particular company
  • 30% to receive updates on current sales
  • 25% to get exclusive access to special content
  • ….and more

An initial look at these numbers may seem to contradict the numbers showing resistance to marketing messages…but what they’re really showing is how Facebook users “like” a company for a variety of reasons.

With that in mind, you should have a good mix of content to appeal to all of these different types of social media users.

Other data from ExactTarget small businesses may find useful:

  • 65% of Facebook users only access the site in the early morning or evening. If you’re only online during the day, you may be missing out on a wealth of potential customers.
  • In regard to gender: A solid majority of women (63%) use Facebook to maintain relationships primarily, indicating that many women may have less time to engage with businesses.

Looking forward though, perhaps data like this combined with our own analytics can help us create more engaging Facebook profiles that drive customers and revenues. With over a ½ billion users and Facebook’s new arrangement with Bing, expect it to become a bigger part of your marketing strategy going forward.

Filed Under: Online Marketing, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , ,

A Quick Link Building How-To for Small Businesses – Part I

July 26, 2010 By

Pages within a website and across the Internet are connected through links. You have links on your website to navigate from one page to the next. You also have links to other sites you think your readers will find interesting. And finally, other sites will link to yours, providing Internet users one more way to find you.

While all three of these are important and impact search engine rankings in some way, the last type has the largest by far…which coincidentally, is the hardest links to control.

Basically speaking, the search engines’ concept is as follows: if high-quality sites are linking to yours, then your site must be pretty important and therefore, will be more inclined to show it higher in their results…you in effect receive “link juice” from other sites that link to you.

But it’s not enough to just get a couple of links and then sit still. Search engines like Google look at link patterns to your site as they build over time, not just a one-time snapshot.

So, building the right links in a consistent fashion can payoff tremendously – that much is clear. But how do I go about building strong inbound links without getting myself in trouble? Getting on Google’s blacklist isn’t much fun and hard to recover from.

Continue reading for one of the ways you can build high-quality links to your site naturally and check back again in a week for part II of our quick little link building how-to.

Variety is the spice of life – and links too!

There are all sorts of link farming schemes out there you can buy into – which is probably the first reason you should run away. This practice is known as reciprocal linking – you exchange links with other sites who will turn around and link to you on a mass scale…Google and others are on to this!

The key to successful link building is to cultivate a good mix of links over time.

Having 100 links with the same anchor-text doesn’t look natural to anyone, including search engines. When links come naturally, some may use your business name while others may use some kind of descriptive phrase for the anchor-text…they vary.

If anchor-text is the same for all links pointing to your site, it will be signal to the search engines that your links are being generated artificially, not naturally.

And consider the pages people are linking to and try to mix that up too…don’t have them all going to your homepage. Try to drive links to specific product pages, your blog, your press room, your articles and more. This will help get them ranking as well.

Also, you will want to try and influence the title tag for incoming links if any have one. If you can, you will want variety in the link text and title for links pointing to your site…again, it’s about growing your links in a natural way, not simply slapping a bunch of homogenous links up there and walking away.

Variety in your links is perhaps the most critical component of successful link building. Don’t have them all coming from the same place to the same place and so on.

Check back with us next Monday for part II of our quick little link building guide and even learn how you can easily find out which sites are linking to you.

In the mean time, take the above steps to ensure what links you do acquire don’t get you in any trouble and give you the most bang for your buck.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
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