It is that both Bing and Google announced yesterday that they will soon be including Tweets in their search results. And, what’s more, Bing will soon be including Facebook updates.

More normal earthlings may be wondering what the big deal is about all this. The answer is that Twitter and Facebook provide real time data – information that changes by the minute – whereas the search engines currently take a while to index web pages and show them in their search results.

Should you need to, you can access information about current hot topics straight away. However, it may be worth remembering that, just like other sources on the internet, the information being bandied about may not always be the most reliable as it can come from a wide spectrum of commentators.

From the other side of the internet marketing coin, any Tweets you make will be accessible by a much larger audience than before. And, since Twitter pages can be viewed by anybody without having to be logged in, this provides another potential route to your website.

As yet, it’s unclear as to what format these search tools will take; whether they’ll be included in the main search results or whether there’ll be a seperate Twitter search page to access – much like the separate News and Blogs searches that Google currently has. In addition, it remains to be seen how successful Bing’s inclusion of Facebook status updates will be given that most Facebook updates are not public. It could have implications for the way that users behave on Facebook in the future.

And how did we find all this out? Yes – you guessed it – from our fellow Twitterers.

For example, with keyword research, so far only Google gives us Australia specific information on popular keywords that are used in internet searches. And, in trying to assess which search engines are the most popular among Australian users, there is very little research around that isn’t based solely on US statistics.

So the recent information released by comScore that Google has increased its share of the US search market to almost 65%, Bing (the new Microsoft search engine) has increased its share to almost 10% and Yahoo is maintaining approximately 19% of the market share is interesting but is it relevant to Australia?

Apparently not, if the figures from StatCounter Global Stats are anything to go by. This is one of the few sites that attempts to provide visitor stats from around the world. It suggests that in Australia, Google is maintaining a steady 95% share of the search engine market with Yahoo and Bing at 1.78% and 3.18% respectively. However, these figures do appear suspiciously well rounded when you consider that there are other search engines such as Search and Altavista in use. And, on closer investigation, it appears that this data is collected from only 3 million websites worldwide – a drop in the ocean considering that there are estimated to be at least 231.5 million websites worldwide as of April 2009, according to Netcraft.

So it remains for us to keep one eye on the US statistics and another on our clients’ Google analytics to stay up to date with the latest search engine trends – a sort of Internet Marketing squint, so to speak.

And the latest news from our SEO clients’ analytics is that Bing has overtaken Yahoo as the second highest source of search engine referrals but it still has a very long way to go to beat Google. More interestingly, for the first time ever, the number of Firefox web browser users visiting the Suncoast Internet website has exceeded the number of visitors using Internet Explorer (IE) – a timely reminder to make sure your website is compatible with web browsers other than IE.

As an Internet Marketing tool, Facebook is less flexible than Twitter. It’s not as customisable as Twitter and it’s harder to get followers or, in this case, fans.  A Facebook page is for the sole purpose of marketing your business; a Facebook profile is for your own personal use, ie. a way of getting in back in touch with old friends, sending silly messages and ‘poking’ each other! It’s a good idea to separate your personal stuff from your business stuff on Facebook. That way your business connections don’t have to see how childish you can be and your personal connections won’t feel as though you’re constantly trying to sell them things. However, the search engines won’t rank the business page unless you have a personal profile set up first.

The good thing about having a Facebook business page is that it is viewable by anyone – they don’t have to have a Facebook account in order to view your page – and it can be ranked by the search engines. In which case, just like Twitter, it is again important to include keywords in your page title and any description that you may add. The page title needs very careful thought however as this cannot be changed. You can set up another page with a different or better title but then of course you would have to build up your fan base and information all over again.

The next thing to do is to get some fans. Without fans, the search engines will not rank your page very highly and neither will Facebook in its business page directory. The more fans you have, the more interactions the page is likely to get with fans and this is also valued by the search engines and Facebook. The problem is, you can only invite people to be a fan if they’re already on Facebook and then only if they are already amongst your Facebook friends.

In order to gain more fans of your Facebook page, you need to think of other ways to promote it. A useful Facebook tool is the ability to create a badge for your page which you can include on your website or in your emails. With the ‘become a fan’ wording on it, it can encourage people to do exactly that – see our example (and please feel free to become a fan!).

 Our next blog post will give you some tips on managing Twitter and Facebook pages as well as some information on handy time saving tools to use.

Well this might be how Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang is feeling about this week’s main technology news. The techno savvy among you will already have heard of the deal that Microsoft and Yahoo have struck with each other. At the beginning of 2008, Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for US$47.5 billion but abandoned the move when Yahoo wanted more money. Now that Jerry Yang has left the building as company CEO, Yahoo has done the unthinkable and agreed to share services with Microsoft’s Bing search engine in a reciprocal arrangement.

Effectively, this means that Microsoft’s new Bing search engine will power Yahoo searches when the agreement comes into operation, and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft’s online offering.

So what? You may ask.

So what indeed. Even if the combined forces of Bing and Yahoo are enough to form a super duper new internet entity, at the end of the day, over 70% of search engine users use Google. Having reviewing the many comments on the internet at the moment, Yahoo plus Bing will need to be very special to persuade internet users to change their habits.

Funky looking Bing is being referred to as a ‘decision engine’ because it helps you decide what content you want to look at. We cannot ignore the fact that in just two months since the launch of Bing, it has become the 2nd highest referring search engine for our clients’ websites – after Google.  And, after these two have sealed the deal, whatever rating your website manages to get on Bing will be mirrored on Yahoo. The only trouble is that Bing currently accounts for around 2 to 4% of all our clients’ traffic sources, whereas Google accounts for between 50 and 60%.

Whilst we at Suncoast Internet are working on our Bing SEO strategy for getting our clients to show up on its search results, it seems that Bing has still got a long way to go to catch up and compete with Google.
 

The truth of the matter is that a good reputation can take years to build up and days to shatter. It’s unfair but true that what people remember most are things that go wrong. If you run a website that has a good reputation, remember that it is very important for you to look after it. Some users are inherently suspicious of using the internet and they will be drawn to a trustworthy and reliable website. So if something goes wrong with your website, even something small and relatively innocuous, if it affects the reliability or security of the website, you will need to carry out damage control on your website credibility. Consider some of the important factors about website credibility:

First, have you considered all the ways that your reputation might be destroyed? If you work with people’s money, a security breach that grants access and data to unauthorized persons can certainly shake your clients’ faith in you. Similarly, you will also find that if your website is unreliable when it comes to processing purchases, it only takes a handful of complaints before the online community gets wary about purchasing from you. You may also find that your reputation is in dire straits if you create blog entries without regard for who might be reading them or if you are unnecessarily cruel towards a target that people have sympathy for.

As you can see, a loss of reputation can come from nearly any quarter, and you need to think about what preventative measures can be taken. Remember that, for a secure website, you should always have good security testing of your site and ensure that data is kept secure. You should also regularly Google your company’s name and your own name to make sure that you know what is being said. To further your website credibility, make sure your SEO measures include good back links from quality, well ranked sites. Use article services to put good information out there and to establish yourself as a quality source of information.

A good reputation is something that takes years to build up, but when things start going wrong, it can feel surprisingly fragile. Take some time to ensure that yours is a reliable website; consider what your reputation means and how you can preserve it. At this point, it is a good bet that the PM wishes he had!

Have you started Bing-ing yet?

You may have noticed Microsoft’s new search engine which has replaced Live Search and is curiously named Bing. Available in Australia only in beta form at the moment, apparently, the choice of name is down to the desire to ‘verb up’ the word ‘bing’ much as we do already  with Google. The idea being that instead of searching for a website, we will Bing it!

Bing and Google have different algorithms for crawling websites which is why you can get different search results. But since Microsoft have confirmed that there have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler, SEO professionals don’t have to go and work out what it likes. The bottom line for SEO is still all about quality content and good, relevant links.

The biggest difference between Google and Bing, is the presentation. Users will be impressed by the widlife photography currently on offer when they first view the site, plus some results are categorised in the full blown non-beta version. The categories facility is leading some SEO commentators to sugggest that maximising the appropriate categories on your site would be good SEO practice for Bing in order to show up in the relevant categories in search results.

The jury’s still out on how long it will take for Australia to get the full blown version of Bing but meanwhile, try it yourself and let us know what you think.

Read more about what makes good SEO.