Say Hello To Bing – The New Search Engine From Microsoft

June 3rd 2009 will see a brand new search engine launched by one of the longest existing technology based companies in the world. Microsoft announced the launch of a brand new way to search and they tell us that the new search will be faster and allow us to make more informed decisions.

Microsoft introduces Bing:

“No longer satisfied with the status quo of search, Microsoft designed Bing as a Decision Engine to provide you with intelligent search tools to help you simplify tasks and make more informed choices, from mapping out the fastest route to get home to researching a product purchase or planning a trip.”

Key Features Of Bing

Almost any search engine can provide basic results, but with Bing, Microsoft have tried to improve many aspects of the search experience for normal web users.

Home page – The first thing you will notice is how the home page differs from all of its rival search engines. The Bing home page includes a new image daily, information hotspots embedded in that image, and clear links for starting your searches for video, news, shopping, travel, images or maps.

Autosuggest - Bing examines what you are typing in the search box and will automatically suggest similar terms or common refinements related to the term you are typing.

Best Match – The Bing Best Match feature is designed to make finding relevant information easier by cutting down the number of clicks and getting you to your final destination faster. Best Match results include customer service numbers for retail sites, the ability to track a package right from the search page, deep links to common pages within the site and much more.

Document Preview – Document Preview lets you hover over a search result to see a preview of the site’s content, which helps you determine whether the site is likely to contain the information you’re looking for — before you click.

Instant Answers – Bing provides Instant Answers that immediately return highly relevant direct answers in response to a specific search. For example, entering a flight number will return the most recent flight information and display it prominently in the results, saving the hassle of going to a separate page. Other Instant Answers on Bing include stock prices, local weather, sports scores and more.

Add to all of these specific shopping, travel and health and local search options, results and sections and Bing does tend to look like it is trying to do something different and to make searching more enjoyable, rewardable and successful. It looks clean and quite modern and does display good results, even from the early results we have seen so far.

So, the question that everyone is and will be asking, can Bing take on Google and more so, overtake the worlds number one search engine. Google is and probably will always be the most used search engine, as Google has successfully developed into a brand we all trust and love.

Microsoft have made a fantastic attempt with Bing, but it will always be playing catch-up with Google, but I do feel it could attract a lot of initial interest, but the key will be its retention of the search users.

Google Business Maps – Why You Should Get Listed

Everyone knows about Google maps, especially with the introduction of the somewhat controversial Street View facility, which has caused a stir in a few countries regarding privacy issues. When Google maps was first launched, it soon became a very handy and well used tool to find driving directions, business locations and even you nearest McDonalds.

Google business maps is in fact a very good way to drive traffic to your business or website, as long as you are offering a product or services in a particular area.

From Google –

“Use the Local Business Center to create your free listing. When potential customers search Maps for local information, they’ll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even photos of your storefront or products. It’s easy, free, and you don’t need a website of your own.”

The screen shot above shows how the Google business maps actually works. When you search for something in a particular area, you can see you usually get a map with ten companies listed beside it at the top of the results, with the normal search results below it. Effectively, this is offering 20 results on the search page, with ten basic listings accompanying the map.

The example on the screen shot is the result for our web search, which was “web design Lydney”. Because this is where we are based and in fact have our offices there, Google has considered us to be a relevant result to display had has placed us in the map results and also the natural results as well.

This doesn’t happen just by magic, you have to add your own listing or we can do this for you, but we are seeing a dramatic increase in the amount of traffic coming through this method of searching and returning results. It can take a couple of weeks to be included in the updates, and there does not seem to be any firm ruling about where you will appear, especially if you cover multiple locations, but do make sure you add your business immediately.

The brilliant thing about Google maps is how relevant the search results seem to be, arguably more so that natural results. This is because the results are actually based on service and location, so as long as you have a service and a location, Google business maps is a vital necessity for your SEO campaign and online marketing. Any feature that helps to deliver more relevant traffic to a company, business or website gets our vote, with Yahoo and MSN Live also now offer business map listings.

The Importance Of A Good URL Structure

One of the things that still concern me and my colleagues when we get requests to help with a website in distress or offer advice to a client planning a new website is how often the URL structure gets over looked, especially when in relation to database driven sites, which often need the most guidance.

The URL structure can play a very important part of any SEO campaign and is something that you should always take great care and consideration when planning a new website, again, especially more so if the site is going to be driven by a database with thousands of possible data outputs.

What Is The URL Structure?

It is very easy to go into unnecessary complex details when explaining what the URL structure of a website is, and indeed there are a few elements, but the basic answer is the URL structure is how your URL looks to search engines and of course your clients.

Take for example two different websites, WebsiteA and WebsiteB. Both sites deliver thousands of products for sale to the general public, everything from washing machines to fridge freezers. They are both database driven sites, they are both offering the same kind of products and are both hosted in the UK, so in theory, should be similar in ranking.

We are going to look at the example of a Samsung Plasma TV. SiteA doesn’t really understand the importance of URL structure and therefore all of its links are similar to:

WebsiteA/10004553455000455 429493466319?cm34_re344

SiteB is really switched on and therefore understands the importance of the URL structure to the search engines, so its URL is similar to:

WebsiteB/televisions/plasma_tvs/SAMSUNG_PS50B450B1WXXU

Straight away you can begin to see the difference of how the search engines will take to the links. WebsiteA tells the search engine nothing about the product, whereas WebsiteB not only tells the search engine the product detail, but also that it is a television and in fact a plasma TV.

So when the customer searches for a Samsung Plasma TV, WebsiteB has a far greater chance of ranking well, where as it will take WebsiteA a lot more time and hard work to rank for this product.

When designing your website, make sure you place as much importance on your URLs as anything you are considering in your planning stages. Getting this right from the start will make sure your site is indexed correctly as you really do not want to go changing your structure half way through the indexing process, or even worse, a year down the line.

Top Tips For Directory Submission And Directory Links

Directory submission has seen a big increase in the importance of any SEO campaign over the past few years. Luckily, Google has closed many of the loop holes that many people were exploiting by setting up mass link farm directories and paid links, but there is still some juice in a good, relevant and a well thought out directory submission and directory linking campaign.

A Few Tips For Directory Submission Campaigns

One Way Links – Try to submit to those directories that do not require a link back, with one way linking seeming to offer a better return in the eyes of the search engines than reciprocal linking. If you can, try for as many one way links as possible, with a one way link simply meaning Site X links to you, but you do not link back to Site X.

Relevant / Niche Directories – If you type in to Google “free directory submission” you will see millions of results. But, if you try to only submit to relevant directories, you will find that the rewards are far greater, as a relevant one way link back to your site will be worth more than just a standard one way link. For example, if you run a property website, try to find related directories by looking for property, financial services and investments, as these are related links back to your site.

Relevant Category – If you are going for a general directory, make sure you navigate down to the most relevant category. This will not only improve your chances of being successfully accepted, but will also be much more of a powerful link, because once again, it’s more related to what you’re doing.

No Spam – Try to have a quick look through the directory before you submit your site. If the directory appears full of spam and seems not well managed, think about how the search engines will view your link being there. Although you probably will not get penalised, you will not really gain much by having your link in a spammy and unmanaged directory.

Age Of Directory – Google and the other engines tend to favour sites that have been around for many years. Finding these directories that have been around for years and are still free to submit can be a harder challenge, but the rewards will be far greater.

Page Rank – Again, this will be harder, but try to find those directories that have been assigned page rank, the higher the better. I think it is true that Page Rank does not bear the same importance as it once did, but it still does hold some link juice, so try to aim for directories with good page rank, especially in the category of your choice.

Alternate You’re Title Text – Although some directories will only accept your company or website name as the title, there are some that you can enter what you like, within reason. For example, instead of My Property Company, have four or five you alternate, things like Property In Nottingham, Investment Property In Nottinghamshire etc. Make sure you get some good and powerful keywords into your title tags, but do not try to take things to far, keep them short but effective.

Little But Often – Don’t spend a week adding thousands of links, this will seem unnatural to Google. Try to spend a few hours a day to spread the links over a period of time, which will not only make your life less mundane, but will also appear to Google and other engines that you have entered into a natural link building campaign, and are not up to black hat techniques.

All About Attracting The Long Tail Keywords

The story is the same for millions, if not hundreds of millions of businesses around the world battling to get onto the first page of Google for a certain keyword. Everyone wants to be top for the most searched keyword, its natural human instinct to want to be top of the industry you sell or provide in, and therefore coming top for your most wanted keyword terms is also a very natural want.

The issue is and always has been that the top keywords are hard to rank for in the early and short term days of your website going live, and it can take years of hard work to really start ranking for those sought after keywords. For example, if you are trying to sell property investments in Nottingham, trying to get top of Google for Property Investment will be a very hard and long process, where as looking to rank for property investments in Nottingham will be a slightly easier achievement to gain in the early days of your website.

Some SEO companies will make claims to guarantee you first place in Google. Personally, any company that does this I would walk away from and find someone else, as with Google, there are no guarantees. But, if you wanted to come top of Google for your business name, this is very easily achievable, and to be honest, you can achieve this in the first couple of weeks. As more and more businesses launch online, the most sought after keywords are getting harder and harder to rank in the top few pages for, so many people have started to turn their attention to Long Tail Keywords.

What Are Long Tail Keywords?

Long Tail Keywords are a collection of four words, based around your sought after keyword. Going back to the Property Investment example, Property Investment would be my short tail keyword, the one I really want to get top of Google for. I know this is going to be nigh on impossible for the first couple of years, so I need to turn my attention to Long Tail Keywords.

Therefore, working with the client, I would start looking at areas and come up with:

• Property Investment In Nottingham
• Property Investment In Hull
• Investment Property In Nottinghamshire
• Cheap Nottinghamshire Property Investment

As you can see, I have made sure to keep my main keyword Property Investment in all four, but have added a few words either side, related to the company which will make ranking for these terms much easier.

The nice thing about long tail, is that someone typing in Property Investment In Nottingham, is going to be a much more defined customer than someone just typing in Property Investment, as the client has already indicated what they want and where they would like to consider it. Someone typing in Property Investment might be looking for a property anywhere in the world, but someone who has entered a location, and we can capture this via our Long Tail keywords, is going to be a much better customer for us.

Highly specific multi-word phrases quite often will tend to be a lot easier to rank well for than the more generic single keyword or double keyword phrases, which are going to be much more competitive. So, by thinking outside of the box and not worrying too much about having to get ranked for some very hard terms, you can start concentrating on taking a lot of the search traffic most other companies miss out on, mainly because they are preoccupied with getting top for the single or double phrase keyword.

Understanding The New Google Search Options

If you have used the Google search engine within the past couple of weeks, you will have no doubt of noticed the new feature that has been added. Saying that, many users have failed to notice the change due to the positioning and how small it is. Either way, if you do not know about the changes and what they mean for your search, this blog should help to understand things a little better.

We are going to do a search for the HOTPOINT WML520P washing machine, for no other reasons than we need a good example and my washing machine decided to die last month, so I need a new one!

So, as normal, we enter HOTPOINT WML520P in the search box in Google, and from that point you may think everything looks pretty normal. But, take a closer look and if you still can not see the new addition, check the screen shot to the right.

As you can see, the new option is hidden away at the top of the search results, but once clicked opens up the menu that you can see to the bottom of this text.

So, what exactly do these new options allow us to do as searchers?

› All results

Videos – If there are any videos for the product, item or search term, this option will show you all of the results for t

hat search, in relation to the YouTube and other videos available for it.

Forums – Want

to know what people are saying about the product? The forum option only shows the results of the product from forums, a great way to see what the customers are saying.

Reviews – If you just want to read reviews, opinions and comments about the product, then this is the search option for you. It  only shows the results of the product from review sites and blog posts, a great way to see what the customers are saying.

› Any time

Recent results – This option is pretty much self explanatorily, but if left on this option, it will only show the most recent results.

Past 24 hours – This option is pretty much self explanatorily, but if left on this option, it will only show the results from the past 24 hours.

Past week – This option is pretty much self explanatorily, but if left on this option, it will only show the results from the past 7 days.

Past year – This option is pretty much self explanatorily, but if left on this option, it will only show the results from the past year to date.

› Standard results

Images from the page – If you click on this you get the images for that product from all of the different websites that sell, advertise or promote that product. This is really useful for when you just want a quick look at what the product or item looks like.

More text – As you might assume, this option allows you to see much more related text about the search term.

› Standard view

Related searches – This option allows you to find information about the related products, so if we do this for our search term, its brings up a full list of alternative but related search terms and the actual results.

Wonder wheel – This took us some time to full understand but this option gives the users related search queries or terms on a visual wheel so that they can click around and discover new topics. Your search query will appear inside a light blue circle, with related terms around it.

Timeline – And finally, this new option allows you to view historical information about your search time, ideal for finding more about companies, services and historic information over many, many years.

Has Google Got A New Rival In Wolfram|Alpha?

Today has seen the launch of a revolutionary new system to find information, answers to questions and even what time the sun set on your birthday 27 years ago. Wolfram|Alpha is something a little bit different, a new way of searching for information that instead of taking you to a website to answer your question or query, actually tries to answer it on the site itself, via a massive database of knowledge.

In its own words:

“Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.”

So, how does it work?

A good question and one of which we took sometime to fully understand. Traditionally, if you wanted to know the answer to a question, you would normally type that into Google and then browse through the sites that Google returns to you, in hope of finding the answer to your question.

It is important to know what the system can handle and sadly, at this moment in time, can not. We tried to find the answer to who won the FA cup in 1991. Wolfram|Alpha didn’t seem to know much about this subject. So, we decided to ask it a complicated question, what is the population of Germany. This time, we got the answer we wanted and on top of that, loads of other information, graphs and statistics. We also typed in the place where we live, and once again we managed to find everything we needed to know, including population, location details and a handy map. It even gave us the current weather, which was actually amazing accurate.

A really cool feature that we found was the ability to download your results as a PDF. This will be very useful when presenting reports or just looking to revisit the information at a later date. The mathematical ability of this new engine should not be under estimated either. Type in a formula or equation you need solving and this system appears to be able to handle it, and more importantly, answer correctly. And if you want to find out the owner of an IP Address, this site can also handle this for you.

It really is amazing the amount of things this site can do. Whether it’s a site, search engine, system or just a comprehensive database will be up for debate, but you really do look at this system and just feel a sense of “wow”. It has so many tools, features and hundreds of millions of answers and pieces of information that I doubt you could use all of them in a lifetime, but it does seem to be a cutting edge piece of technology.

Any site that can tell us what the weather was like on our birthdays 20 + years ago and then allow us to find the differences between two books published 50 years ago is quite something. This site seems to appeal to man audiences. It does take some getting used to and it is now doubt still adding to its answers, but whether you area student preparing a presentation or someone with a bit of free time, this site could keep you occupied for hours.

This really is one to keep an eye on, it will be interesting to see how far it can go and how much traffic it can take from Google.

Do I Need A Sitemap For My Site?

With the invention of the Google Webmaster Tools and the Yahoo Site Explorer, webmasters were given the opportunity to submit XML sitemaps to the two major engines. Many years later, Clear Web Services are still amazed at how many webmasters, site owners and business with websites are still failing to make use of this amazing tool, which helps Google and Yahoo to spider, index and portray your site more effectively.

What Is A Sitemap?

To give a very basic example, a sitemap is simply a list of pages on your website.

Creating and submitting a sitemap helps make sure that Google and other major search engines knows about all of the pages on your website, including URLs that may not be discoverable by the search engines normal crawling process.

Click here to view Clear Web Services sitemap to help you better understand.

Sitemaps are a great way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling and indexing. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for any site along with additional meta information about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more incisively crawl the site.

Why Should I Use One?

Once you have your created sitemap, you can then upload this to your website and then tell Google and the other engines you have a new sitemap. Every time your site is updated, you can then recommend that the engines download your new sitemap to make sure your new pages are quickly brought to the attention of the spiders.

Although opinion often differs on the subject, there is no firm proof that an engine will index your site any quicker if you use a sitemap, but one thing is for sure, you will never be penalised for submitting a sitemap, so it really is a no lose solution to trying to make sure all of your pages are known about by Google and others.

How Do I Make A Sitemap?

Clear Web Services can do this for you on a regular basis, so please do contact us if you require pricing information and further details regarding this service.

You can of course make them yourself, either by hand or using one the programs or free sites on the internet, but do bear in mind the free sites normally only allow you to make limited site maps, with the full service needing to be paid for. If you are going to do them by hand, make sure you get a good example of one before editing it to make sure its in a valid format, else the engines will struggle to handle the data.

Sitemaps are a useful way of making sure the various search engines know about your site, its urls and the information you are publishing on your site and / or blog. You can then track how many urls have been indexed, find and sort any problems that your site may have and of course help to tell the world, via the engine, that your site has brand new content for them to read !

Article Submission – How To Write A Good Article

As we have talked about often on the site, there are many parts, procedures, elements and “things to do” when it comes to Search engine optimisation and getting higher in the rankings.

Article Submission is a very good way of getting traffic and natural visitors, becoming known in the industry for your expertise on the subject you are writing about and often getting some decent links back to your site.

When writing articles, you have to make sure that the article you are writing is:

Informative – Would you want to read something that was boring and that you wouldn’t learn anything from? Most people would probably say no, so always make sure you write an article that you are knowledgeable about.

For example, if you fixed washing machines, writing an article on how to mend a broker spin dryer would be a good idea, rather than writing something about the history of search engines, you need to write about things you have experience with, as this will come across in the article.

Well Written – Make sure what you are publishing is well written and reads and flows well. If the user can not get to grips with your writing style, they will not read further, they will not learn more about you and your services and they certainly will not use your company.

Grammatically Correct – You are selling your knowledge and services, having lots of spelling errors and grammar errors will not do you any favours. Although it’s good to have a familiar feel in your writing, try to make it professional and well written. You wouldn’t buy from someone who had spelt his advert in the local paper with lots of errors, so make sure your article follows the same route. Check, check again and then get someone else to check!

Not Like An Advert – Many of the article submission sites do not want you blatantly promoting your products. There is no harm in mentioning what you do or sell, but do not make this the focus of the article.

If you are selling LCD TVs’, you could write about how to maintain the life of your television, and at the same time you can insert information about your company and what you sell. As long as your main focus is to inform, this is ok, but the whole point of writing an article is really for that important link back to your site and exposure, so try to strike a balance.

Concise – Don’t go on for ever and ever. Try to keep your article to one page of Word or maximum two. Most people on the interest like to read concise and easy to read articles, they do not want to read endless pages of information. Also try to think about how long the article looks on your monitor and how much information you would like to read on an average sitting.

All About Linking

Many years ago, linking was probably the most important thing you could do when it comes to SEO. These days, less emphasis and importance is placed on links when it comes to the Google factor, but it is still very important, albeit possibly in a different kind of way.

Linking is very important, as we mentioned, probably not as important is used to be, but it still needs to play a big part of your overall seo strategy. Google still rates links pointing to your site depending on relevance, content and page rank, so it is very important that you choose where you ask for your link to be placed, even down the page on which the link is placed.

There are a few types of links, but the ones below are probably some of the most important types when it comes to link building campaigns for your site.

One Way – One way links are pretty much what they say on the tin. It is where Site A links to you, but you offer no link back to them. This is often found with directories and articles or press released.

Reciprocal – This is often called a link exchange or link swap. It is basically where you link to Site A and they link back to you. If you are doing reciprocal linking, try to make sure the sites you are swapping links with are relevant and have some kind of existence.

On-Site – On Site links are links on your site pointing or leading to other pages on your site. These are basically the links you use on your site for navigation.

When embarking on a linking campaign, we sit down with you and work out what you are looking to achieve. We then plan a strategy and begin the work needed to achieve your aims.

It is is also important that your links are relevant. For example, if you ran a golf website, your links will be of a much higher use if you have links back from other golf sites and golf related sites. These might include golf directories, golf property sites and golf clubs. If the link pointing to your site is of relevance, i.e. it is related to your theme, the link will be considered of higher value by Google and other search engines.

Link building also has to be done naturally and over a period of time. If you suddenly embark on a quick campaign and end up with a thousand link in Google within a couple of weeks, Google will think this is very unnatural and you may well be penalised for this. All of our campaigns are spread of a period of time, we only try to add to so many links in one go and we feel this makes the campaign look as natural as possible to Google. It is very important to see link building as a long term project and make sure you are trying to get links back in small goes, as trying to cheat the system by buying or adding thousands of links will only back fire.

A great way of getting one way links is to embark on a linking campaign using directories. It is important to try and get links from established and respected directories, but even new directories are usually worth having a link in. Link swaps are nowhere near as effective as they used to be, but swapping links with established and relevant sites is still worth doing, just in small quantities.

Paid links have caused a little bit of stir over the past few years. When Page Rank was at its most important, people were buying thousands of links to try and exploit the algorithm, and as such Google has now tried to close this loophole, and quite rightly slow in our opinion. Paid links can still be used effectively, and there are a list we recommend you do purchase a paid listing for, and again, we can organise all of this for you.