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.

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.
 

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.