If you’re a Tweetin, technie nerd like (some of) us, you’ll probaby already know the latest big search engine news from the current Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco:

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.

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by Suncoast Internet TeamNo Comments »

For us Internet Marketing people Down Unda, it can get a little frustrating trying to do the research necessary in this role with tools and information that are so dominated by the US market.

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.
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by Suncoast Internet TeamNo Comments »

Question: If you had turned down millions of dollars for the purchase of your company by another firm which, 18 months later, was able to strike a deal anyway with your company to use your services at no extra cost, would you feel silly?

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. (more…)

by Suncoast Internet Team3 Comments »

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.

by Suncoast Internet Team2 Comments »