A good number of SEOs must have found this title intriguing. Many would say: “What’s the point? Microsoft Bing might be catching up but Google IS the leader!” True enough. And another thing on that, we “advanced” Internet users are aware that Bing exists and getting hyped by the novelty of it (this doesn’t mean that it is better) but your average user, say your mom or your little brother, is still heads down on Google. This is why things will not or take time to change. I don’t think that we’ll soon be hearing: “I “binged” your name…”

This in no means supposes that Google is so sure about its position that it is just letting Microsoft be. Its my opinion that subtle stand up is being made as usual by Google. This must be the reason that Google is fortifying its position by showing how great it is on the search market. How? By overtly putting its business model forward. Illustration!

In the past Google showed its tools like this:

Strangely enough, since Bing started out, a new element found its way over on the .com site of Google. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it. Its a link showing you that you can discover the web with Google.

The landing page is also quite original as it is an optimised version of the Google products page with videos showing how the goods are so good actually. Not just a bunch of links.

To add up to all that, many of you must surely be aware that Yahoo! will also be launching its own analytics tool which sure looks tasty. This seems to have had a certain influence on the Google Analytics home page.

Put it on the back of the crisis or on that of strong, aggressive competition that is showing up on the search market but the big G is now working hard to counter the coming battles or even stiffle them. Do you have any opinion on that?

Ladies and gents. If you’re in any part of the professional web world and haven’t heard of Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” then you’ve got no excuse, apart if you’ve been living under a rock for the past two weeks. Bing, also known as But Its Not Google has had its launch a bit messed up by the launch of Google Wave the same day. However it looks like the search engine is actually holding on.

IE goes BING!

I was using a shared computer at work yesterday and it only bore IE7 as web browser. I happened to do a web search in the browser’s search box, FF user habit huh! This is where I really got surprised. Instead of being thrown to Google or Live, I found myself staring at Bing results. Well, I used them. So, the default browser is now Bing. This means that all Windows 7 testers will also be staring at Bing!

Stronger than thou!

What is going on now? People are using Bing to test. This is supposed to be Microsoft’s breakthrough in the world of search engines. This also means that the Gates team is trying to prove Seth Godin wrong when he said “the next Google will be Google”. Intrigued as they can be, SEO experts are scouring this engine to see what its got under the hood. Result: it seems to be more reliable than other engines in what Google is leaving the others. The impact is that Bing is now more used than Yahoo! on the web. Will the Y! search engine be the next Altavista?

Going on higher grounds.

Ok, Bing is gaining over Yahoo! in terms of search volumes but bear in mind that it is not getting the users off Yahoo! or other smaller search engines, it is currently dipping in Google’s pool. This is where things are getting messy. I think that we’ll just have to wait and see how all this evolves but we can now admittedly say that Microsoft is trying to get back in this search engine race. If you want to work on optimising your site for Bing, you can just head over here.

A weird idea got into my mind today. Just for the sake of doing it, I tried to see how many pages Google had in its index for Facebook. First question that one would ask: “Why Facebook ?”. The answer: Facebook has a “cloaking” script which according to Google terms of service should have got it banned. Here is a definition:

Cloaking is “used to describe a website that returns altered web pages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, the webserver is programmed to return different content to Google than it returns to regular users, usually in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. This can mislead users about what they’ll find when they click on a search result. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings.”

SOURCE: Google FAQ for Webmasters

So, here we are then with a whooping 385 000 000 pages for Facebook today. This means that the Facebook script works. If you’re asking yourself how, its simple. The info that Google is showing is not the same when you follow the link and Facebook distorts things in the sense that it urges the search engine user to get an account to see other profiles. Now, the remaining dark spot of the whole issue is eventually the fact that Facebook is a huge site, with huge money (though on the decline) and is one of the most search keywords on the web, is doing this overtly. Add to that the fact that online presence is not well by 95% of the persons having a profile you get the idea of what Facebook can mean to Google. Hence, it can get through the terms of services while using black hat SEO.

Do you think that this should be allowed? Is it normal?

Back to SEO basics. How should you do your site/blog’s search engine optimisation? Many elements get into the picture but there are some simple rules to follow to optimise a page. Let’s start with the head part.

The head part of a page is the one that will have the most impact on your visitors via search engines. The head part is what the robots use to build their SERPs (Search Engine results pages). This means that the first thing a visitor will see of your page on a search engine is the head so you’d better polish things up a bit.

Anatomy of a search engine result.

Below is a detailed view of a search engine result off Google’s first SERP.

As you can notice, the title tag is the one that is shown as linked in blue and the meta is used to describe the page’s content. Other thing that you will notice on this specific result is that there are no suspension marks on either the title or the description.

You might consider the result below. The title part has supension marks as well as the description. Though it gives information is triggers the thought: “This looks amateurish”.

Last thing, please, please do not put any HTML tag in the title because it does not do anything but waste character space!

So here is the recipe on how to optimise this part.

The title tag.

The title tag must not exceed 65 characters (spaces included), 65 being the number of characters Google shows on SERPs. This is how you don’t get the suspension marks. Another thing, to bear in mind, especially on blogs, long blog names and what not in the title just eat up space. Get rid of them, shorten the site name in the title to give more space to the real title.

Another thing that has been tested and proved efficient is the place where the site name is shown. On many sites, the site name is shown, then the real title. If the sitename is long, a lot of the characters are eaten up. The practice now is to put the sitename at the end of the title. If the title exceeds the 65 characters, it will just be deleted on the SERP but will still be present in the URL. So no worries on that. Your aim is to bring people to your site not show off your sitename.

So what is the real title? This actually is the title that is related to the content of the post/page. Careful, it is not the title of your post for example. E.g. say you have a page on Chicken Curry on your culinary blog and the introduction title is Cheap Chicken Curry. Your title might be “Chicken curry recipe with aubergines and potatoes under 30 rupees.” There you have your under 65 characters title.

To fully optimise this title, let’s say that your target keyword is “chicken curry recipe”, you have also added the keyword in your title. This therefore works for both attracting visitors through search engines and second for good positions in SERPs on specific keywords.

The meta description tag

The meta description is what will convince the visitor having been attracted by your title to visit the page. The meta description in Google does not exceed 150 characters. Staying in this range will get you to have a full stop end in the SERP description, giving you a cleaner aspect as well as more professional looking result.

Your sitename can be present in there but once again, you’ll find that 150 characters is pretty short and does require some reflexion. So better keep long site names out. The other important thing is to get your keyword(s) in there while giving out a clear and concise description of what the person will find on the page.

E.g. On the same “chicken curry recipe” page and keyword, you can get two occurrances of the keyword in the description while keeping it underthe 150 characters limit. Check it out:
“Need a cheap chicken curry recipe? Find out a cheap chicken curry recipe with aubergines and potatoes for only 30 rupees on My Cheap Recipes Blog.”

Conclusion

Finally, some words in the search results are in bold. These are the keywords I searched for on Google. Google puts them in bold, so use them to stand out of the crowd but do it smartly with a balanced mixture of well though text and important keywords.

Nota for non Mauritian readers: the title of this post starts with a Creole pun “Amene to SEO” translates in “Bring your bucket”.