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Yesterday, Jimmy Wales tweeted that Google was donating $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation. The question that then popped up in everyone’s minds is, Why Google would support Wikipedia when they came out with their own (almost) direct competitor, Knol.
This is a question I often ask myself. As far as I can see, the answer seems to depend upon two factors – the emergence of real time search and how SEO progresses within the marketing mix.
At present it is impossible to see beyond Google when looking into the future. However, the emergence of a viable competitor does not seem as far off as it did a year ago. The merger of the Bing and Yahoo could make an impact – as long as they stop trying to play catch-up and start looking beyond existing search conventions.
One avenue that looks like it could impact upon Google’s quality-weighted algorithm is real-time search. At the moment, real-time search doesn’t offer much in terms of value for businesses. This is because of its current prominence in the social media sector. The failure of businesses to convert social media into revenue means that the connection between real-time search and revenue has not really been made.
The most difficult thing at the start of an SEO project can be to come up with a landing page strategy.
The difficulty is to try and avoid an overlap in strategy – the terms you’ve been asked to optimise may be associated with more than one page, and it can be very difficult to completely restructure the site once it’s been built, especially if you’ve been given a long list of keywords.
The effect of this can be confusion with search engines as to which page is the main focus for which term. However, a strategy I believe in is to focus the homepage upon the general, most searched for term and focus the deeper page on slightly different or longer tailed terms associated with the general term. The simple reason is: the homepage is more likely to get natural links.
This should be reflected in the page titles, which are the most important onsite optimisation factor – they are not only highly considered by the search engines but they also provide a clear insight into your strategy. Remember the 65 character restriction and your strategy should fall into place.
So for example, a marketing agency may focus the homepage on general terms such as ‘marketing’ ‘marketing company’, ‘design company’, ‘brand design company’, ‘brand design’. Then you can focus the pages that outline these services on longer tailed/less popular terms such as ‘internet marketing services leeds’, ‘logo design leeds’ etc. This would give you the following page titles, with most popular term at the front and word proximity also determined by popularity of term:
Homepage: Marketing Company & Brand Design Company
Marketing service page: Print, Online & Internet Marketing Services Leeds & Yorkshire
Brand design service page: Brand Logo Design Services & Branding Services Leeds & Yorkshire
The content on each page should then reflect these titles. For example homepage content should focus on what a great marketing and brand design company you are. The content on the marketing services pages will expand on the marketing service you provide with headings for online & internet marketing and print marketing, and how you provide these services throughout Leeds and Yorkshire. The brand design service page would follow suit.
Links gained to each page should use the appropriate anchor text.
Ok the example isn’t perfect but hopefully you’ve got the gist of what I mean!
Bing has dropped the whole of one my websites over the weekend. The only change I’ve made to it in the last week is to put more copy on a few of the pages (incidentally Google has liked this, with a positive effect on rankings). So why has Bing dropped the whole site out of the top 500 results for all key terms in the past 3 days?
Maybe it’s some kind of backlash to the accusations of the algorithm being domain-name heavy i.e. domain name has a big effect on rankings in Bing. The domain name for my site was aimed at the main key phrase and was ranking quite well in Bing, possibly as a consequence. But no more.
Whatever it is, they best sort it out. If it’s some kind of strange tactic to shift people’s attention onto focusing their SEO efforts on getting into Bing and deflecting attention from Google then it isn’t going to work. I, for one, will just ignore them until I have any evidence that their merger with Yahoo comes to anything worthwhile in terms of market share.
Anyone else had strange goings-on with Bing and do you actually care?
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