Bing Grows Search Market Share – at Yahoo's Expense, Not Google's

Jessica Lee, July 17, 2013

 Bing's search share was up in June to 17.9 percent, while Yahoo dropped to 11.4 percent, according to comScore. The percentage Bing grew was exactly the amount of market share Yahoo lost.

This is another indicator the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal isn't meeting Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's expectations.

"One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other," Mayer said earlier this year. "We need to see monetization working better because we know that it can and we've seen other competitors in the space illustrate how well it can work."

ComScore's monthly analysis showed Google holding steady market share from the previous month with 66.7 in June, but down slightly from June 2012's 66.8 percent.

Bing's share grew 0.5 percentage points from its 17.4 percent in May. In June 2012, 15.6 percent of searches were conducted on Bing.

Yahoo hit a new low as it lost 0.5 percentage points in June from 11.9 percent in May. Yahoo's market share is down overall from 13 percent in June 2012.

Both Ask and AOL had unchanged market share from May, with Ask at 2.7 percent and AOL at 1.3 percent. However, both are down from this time last year, where Ask had 3 percent of market share and AOL, 1.5 percent.

When it came to Google-powered organic searches in June, the search engine held steady from May with 68.6 percent of searches. Bing experienced a 0.1 percentage-point increase from May with 26.8 percent of searches.

Turning to "explicit core" searches, which exclude "contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results," comScore reported 19.2 billion explicit core searches in June, with Google ranking first at 12.8 billion. Bing came in second at 3.4 billion searches, followed by Yahoo at 2.2 billion. Ask saw 524 million and AOL, 253 million.

How to Deal With Search Marketing Burnout

Andrew Delamarter, July 22, 2013

As a 12-year veteran in the search industry, there have been moments when I wondered what the hell I was doing and how I was going to make it through another day. There's a word for it – burnout – and it's a problem in any industry, not just marketing.

So what is burnout, how do you identify it, and what do you do about it?

In short, burnout comes from being bored, resentful, or just plain exhausted.

The solution to burnout will vary with the specific cause, but I'll share what worked for me.

As I expect many of us have all dealt with burnout, I hope you will share your experiences in the comments. Burnout can kill careers and make you miserable, but it's a sign that something is wrong and that means there may be something you can fix.

How to Tell if You're Burned Out

The first sign to look for is a simple lack of joy in your life and career. Misery at work. You find yourself using the word "hate" a lot – "I hate what I'm doing"; "I hate this project"; "I hate this office".

You've become jaded; cynical. Your worldview is pessimistic and possibly resentful. You go into engagements with low expectations and often those expectations turn out to be justified.

You're dealing with same problems again and again – the "here we go again syndrome." Boredom. Repetition. You start to dread going into the office or opening your email app.

What Causes Burnout?

I've found that burnout seems to stem from a sense of resentment or anger at missing the things that are important to you.

For me, it was missing spending time with my young daughter, fly fishing, surfing, and getting some time in nature. I work in New York City. It's a three-hour drive to anyplace worth being and a three-hour drive back in tough traffic.

For other people, burnout comes from overwork, which is a related issue. Low-margin industries rely on a churn-and-burn approach to employees. They can't afford to hire enough so they overwork employees until they burnout, quit, and get replaced. Burnout is simply part of the business plan for some companies.

So you're burned out. Now what?

Are You in the Right Job?

My view is the first thing to ask yourself is maybe you hated your job from the beginning, in which case you may just be in the wrong job. Or the wrong project.

For me, when I'm in a burned-out state I can no longer think clearly and it can affect the quality of my work. It's also possible that you may just be in the wrong industry, job, or career.

Let's face it, some jobs just really suck. So try to determine if it's the job itself or the industry. My best advice: change organizations/companies to find out (or just take a long vacation).

Productivity Gives Way to 'You Time'

When I first encountered burnout, I started to think hard about what I could do about it. One thing I decided was that I needed to be so productive that I could leave work at 5:30 p.m. and still deliver excellent quality thinking and work.

Try to get to the point where you are productive enough so you don't need to spend 60 hours a week at your job in order to do well.

I also decided I needed to start writing more and getting more engaged with the search community. The industry moves fast, so paying close attention to the bleeding edge and building relationships with the people pushing things forward can help avoid burnout.

Sharpen the Saw

A good friend of mine said that she overcame burnout when she reframed herself as someone who was hired for her brain, not for her deliverables.

Instead of focusing on the output of your work, shift to focusing on your physical resources for doing that work. Neglecting to maintain your physical resources will only result in poor work quality anyway.

I can put in long hours when I have too. But when I don't, I leave work early and take my daughter on a sunset picnic.

Start thinking of your brain as the primary resource, not the output (the deliverables).

Steven Covey's ends his classic "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" with the maxim "Sharpen the Saw". By this he means give yourself time for psychic, physical, and spiritual renewal.

Consider your brain and your body as a single unit. Treat it well. Don't burn the candle at both ends. It's a short-term solution and you want to be in this for the long haul.

The renowned mathematician Henri Poincaré felt the ideal workday for cognitive-intensive work is 4 hours. There are limits to what the human brain can do.

Think about your limits – are you giving yourself time to recover? Four-hour workdays may not be practical for most people, but think about how you can apply this concept to your life.

Talk to People About Burnout

Another thing is to talk to people about being burned out. This is a risky area, but telling your boss you may be getting burned out may be a necessary step to fixing things.

When an employee is burned out, the quality of their work will inevitably suffer, because they frankly "just aren't feeling it".

While I was working for a large-scale software developer, I eventually found myself struggling with burnout. So, I spoke with my supervisor and he worked with me to allow me to spend time working remote in the Catskills for several months where I could fly fish on the weekends without 6 hours of traffic hell.

Again, if you're in a churn-and-burn company, talking to your boss may not help, but talking to other people will. They have ideas.

Stay Versatile and Consider Career Moves

For me, search marketing is a niche area. If you've spent more than a few years dedicated to one discipline you may be looking at issues of boredom and repetition even if you've avoided full-scale burnout.

Full-on career changes are hard, and they get harder as you get older. It might be easier to make a move into a related or adjacent career area.

You many not always need to start at the bottom either, because many skills can transfer, and just be applied in new ways. For example, moving from paid search to SEO, from SEO to social media management, or from social media to content marketing or writing would all be easy transitions that lead to new challenges. I personally moved from paid search to SEO and content strategy and have never looked back.

One of the many benefits for working for big companies like Microsoft or IBM is that they often facilitate and encourage employees to shift roles within the firm. Well-run companies know burnout is a real problem and they want to retain talented people by keeping them interested and challenged.

All you need is to think in a more versatile way about your work. Learn what your non-search colleagues are doing, keep an eye out for growth areas, and be willing to move if you see a chance for a new challenge.

Know What Makes You Happy

This one sounds simple, but it's deceivingly difficult.

A famous exchange between Jeff Bezos and Zappos.com founder Tony Hsieh on the science of happiness dealt with the fact that people are bad judges of predicting what will make them happy.

Personally, I had to try a lot of things before I discovered the activities and hobbies that make me happy.

Meditation became a key component of my free-time. For example, If I don't meditate at least a few times I week I start seeing burnout symptoms. In fact, unless you spend time exploring what makes you happy, you may not even consciously know what it is you resent missing by being at work all the time.

What Do You Think?

Let's stay happy, do great work, and live lives that have meaning and joy. Burnout is the enemy and we can beat it together.

I've struggled with burnout in different stages of my career, and these are some of the ways I overcame it. Have you struggled with these issues? And what did you do about it? Tell us your story in the comments.

Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft Urge 'Greater Transparency' in PRISM Letter

Several high-profile technology companies have co-signed a letter that asks President Obama for permission to report on PRISM data requests.

Firms including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and Reddit have put their names to the letter, and Yahoo has provided a copy of the letter (PDF). Yahoo general counsel Ron Bell called it a "call to action."

"Democracy demands accountability, and accountability requires transparency," he said. "Today, we are proud to join dozens of our partners across the tech industry, civil society organizations, and trade associations to urge greater transparency by the U.S. government regarding national security demands for our users' information."

The letter was also addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder and Senate majority leader Harry Reid, among others.

It asked that the government release its own transparency reports that show the number of individuals targeted and the number of accounts and devices covered. Supporting this would be more detailed transparency reports from the companies involved.

"Basic information about how the government uses its various law enforcement related investigative authorities has been published for years without any apparent disruption to criminal investigations. We seek permission for the same information to be made available regarding the government's national security related authorities," added the letter.

"This information about how and how often the government is using these legal authorities is important to the American people, who are entitled to have an informed public debate about the appropriateness of those authorities and their use, and to international users of U.S. based service providers who are concerned about the privacy and security of their communications."

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

What is SEO? [Search Engine Optimization]

Posted on Jul 31 2012 - 6:15am by maddyacca

Introduction To SEO

When you type something in the search engine you get a results page that lists webpages possibly containing what you searched for. You and most users tend to look up the pages that appear on the top of these results as they are thought to be more accurate. The real reason however lies in the ingenuity of a marketing technique we call Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is the key that assists your webpage up the ladder of rankings better than other sites. In short it directs a lot of traffic to your website when anything related to your content is searched for.

This article specifically dedicated to SEO technique will definitely answer your queries regarding its function and how it works for search engines used extensively.

How it works?  

The obvious distinction here needs to be made more obvious that being: the one searching is human whereas the one doing the search is not near a human. Both have their own ways of looking for content. Search engines are purely text-dependent which translates into the fact of not judging a webpage by its better looks or soothing sounds. No hard feelings, in fact no feelings at all. As their ability allows, search engines scan through the web and look at websites through some of their text mainly. When they have an idea of the content, they either pick the page or leave it if not suited. This is not the only feat they perform to produce results but a list of activities likecrawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving are performed to get the final result listing.

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Crawling is the act of looking at the web content or seeing the entire content on the search made. Different engines have different names for the software that performs this task like Crawler, Spider or for Google a Googlebot. These bots go from page to page and index all the data they have gone through. Since the numbers of pages on Web are in an enormous amount of more than 20 billion, these bots might not be able to search a webpage everyday to see if the site has been updated with more content. This may leave a site unsearched for even a month or so.

To avoid such situations you first need to find out what these bots (Spiders) can view on your website. As they are not humans so they won’t see flashy stuff like images, movies, JavaScript etc. But if you have loaded your webpage with such things then they might be entirely invisible to these spiders and not be indexed or processed further. To check you might as well run theSpider Simulator.

The next step after crawling is indexing in which the page is stored in a huge database after it is assigned to keywords that best indicate the subject of the content as per the search engine. From this record the particular page can be picked later against the keywords it is assigned. Imagine the time and energy a human will have to spend to scan all that amount of data – A matter of minutes for a search engine. Being merely software it might not hit the right page but optimizing by you can help both the engine to be accurate and you:  You can achieve higher ranking.

When a user types in for a search, the search engine immediately initiates the processing. A comparison of the search text with the indexed data is done. Resultantly, millions of pages contain that search string but it is further shortlisted as the engine then calculates the relevancy of every page it processes with the search made.

You might need to change your track if you think all search engines use the same algorithm to compute the relevancy of the content. In fact, there are many with different weighting for features like links, metatags, keywords etc. That is the reason why you get different results on different engines for same search words. Major engines like Yahoo!, Google, Bing also have a tradition of regularly changing these algorithms and in the race of getting higher rankings you must keep up to them by keeping up to your SEO campaign.

Retrieving comes at the end. As the name suggests, it is merely a listing of the results in the browser you are using. The sequence from top to bottom is usually from higher to lower relevancy.

Different Engines do differ!

The underlying phenomenon is the same. There are just little differences in the principles that end up as major variations in the relevancy of a webpage. The level of importance given to each factor varies. Buzz from the SEO community has it that Bing algorithms were made as exact opposites of Google. You can imagine the dissimilarity in results.  If your target is more than one search engine then you are in for a very cautious optimization.

Varying importance to factors means something like for Bing on-page keywords are the most important whereas Google

has its eyes for links. Another example is the age of the domain, for Google the older the better concept works but Yahoo! has no such tradition. This also means your site might take more time to be finally suitable for Google than Yahoo!  Keep a look out for these little details and you will be on your way up the rankings.

10 Best SEO Techniques For 2013

Posted on Dec 25 2012 - 12:22pm by maddy acca

For every search we make, there are a number of results that are listed on the results page. Some websites are listed above others but what determines the sequence? Search Engines have a complex system called ‘algorithms’ that evaluate each site and its contents on basis of a number of different variables. Google has more than 250 of these variables. Search Engine Optimisersmake use of these variables to put their sites higher on SERP’s.

Nobody has been able to determine what exactly Google Algorithm follows to rank pages since it is the one piece of information that keeps the content original and the only information that spammers would love to get their hands on.

Then what is it that SEO workers use to make their page rank higher and succeed in doing so? Honestly, it all comes down to a lot of experience and being aware of the working trends through these years that aid these Optimisers to aim higher for the rank. Combined with these practices comes the very useful advices from more experienced SEO specialists.

The question remains, how would a new website owner or anyone for that matter find out which out of the 250 variables work for Google to rank good on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Top 10 SEO Tips 2013

1. Analyze your website

When you are struggling to get up on a list, you always have competitors working for the same goal. The most important thing to do first is keep reviewing your website. Make sure it is better than others in all aspects within your niche:

• If your website caters to a certain type of search then you need to ask yourself if your website has complete information regarding that search query.
• Also, what is it that your website offers regarding that search term than your competitors don’t have?
• Is your website trusted enough to be termed as the most reliable website for that particular area of information. Does your website have a better content quality than others? For instance, it could have more than mere text leaden pages. Probably, some supporting videos, PDF documents, images etc.
• Analyze user friendly content on your website i.e. which parts or pages from your websites are more visited than others and why?
• If you are going deep into the user analysis then you might as well check if users areattracting more traffic and is that traffic hitting back or they don’t seem to stay around for some time. If you are aiming for customers then it is important that they are interested enough to browse around.
• All the above questions are necessary for a benefitting audit for your site. If you can’t do it on your own then no need to worry. There are sites that provide SEO Audit service.

2. Keep Your Content Clean

Ensure clarity and ease of navigation through your website. Keep cleaning your site and remove the irrelevant content:

• You must follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to ensure that Google can locate, crawl through bots and put your website on a high rank accordingly. These guidelines are the most trusted source to get near Google’s analyzing variables. These will aid in improvements though technical and quality assuring guidelines.
• To make sure your website is easily accessible; get it authorized by W3C for a clear code. Since Google is always more interested in the websites that are more conveniently usable by readers who have some sort of imparity like visual limitations or dependence upon software to read websites.
• Use HTML tags using Title Tag, Meta Description, images etc. to make sure these tags have the search keywords that you are aiming to get a higher rank on the result’s page for. BE careful of over-optimizing your page by avoiding forceful addition of keywords through hidden and stuffed links. Keep it natural and needed.

3. Write a good Title & Description

SERP shows a list of results for a search query. Each result is displayed as a Title, a summarized description and the URL it can be accessed from. One of the variables Google uses for ranking is determined by how many times a particular page is clicked. This variable is called the Click-through rate (CTR).This means even if your page is displayed on the first page and it is not clicked by the searchers, Google will end up downgrading your page to a lower rank.

Users will click your page if your Title and Description are good enough:

• For the search your page is targeting, the Title and Description should be accordingly.
• Make use of Google’s helping guides like Google’s Keyword Tool to see which keywords are being actively used.
• Consider your short description and title to be the only picture of your page that reader can see as first impression.
• Inform the users about the advantages of visiting your website.
• In short whether users will click on your website depends upon the title and description of your page displayed on results page.

4. Create a natural link profile

Google is smarter than many bloggers thought it was. The recent updates in its algorithms have identified a lot of websites that had been engaged in illegal means of link building like buyingthem or being involved in link farming. If your site is also doing one of these practices then it runs the risk of being located by Google and banned to be displayed on the results page at all.

• Ensure only those links are added to your website that are actually needed for your niche.
• Keep yourself away from buying links thinking Google can be tricked to rank your page higher.
• Make sure the links that you are getting to your page are from a variety of sources and not just one place. Get some from directories, blogs and other relevant websites.
• It is always better to get links from sites that are located in the same country as yours and the place where most of your readers are located.
• The backlinks in your content should have anchor text that goes with your content. BE careful not to keep all the anchor text the same because it seems unnatural to Google. Make some of the text slightly less matching to your niche.
• Build links to only authorized and relevant websites.
• Don’t go for an overnight link building strategy. Let the process be gradual and relevant. Otherwise, Google bots will get the impression that bulk links have been purchased.

In case you are finding it difficult to analyze your link building criteria, you can always take help from tolls available online or acquire the aid of SEO professionals who are there to do the job for you. There are many experienced professionals that understand the complexities of link analyzing and building but stay aware of the sites that offer bulk links.

5.  Content plan

Previously, it wasn’t as important to have new content or be concerned with the amount users get engaged with. However, changes in algorithms have made it increasingly important to keep adding content to the site and keep tabs on the activities of users on your website since Google now takes that into consideration. In short, users should not only be visiting your site but also be interested enough to share the content.

Here are some questions you need to ask yourself:

• Do the users continue to stay on your page after clicking it?
• Do they get interested enough to share it with others?
• What is the average amount of time spent on your page by various users?
• Do they go through the entire content on your page?
• How many times is your page printed?

Google will analyze the content quality of your website on some of the above mentioned criteria. The better option is to plan ahead when it comes to content update: have a 12-months long plan to update your content according to the popular trends of the time in your niche. Add a variety of relevant stuff like blogs, articles, information updates, latest news etc.

Google Analytics gives you the service that will aid you in understanding what type of content you should have. If you are unable to get a grip of the data Google Analytics displayed, you can always ask the SEO companies to assist you with it.

6. Integrate Social Sharing

Social networking has taken over the world of internet surfing, you should make sure you are taking full advantage of this trend. Make your content easily sharable on these sites:

• The first step to link to these social networking sites is to add buttons to your blogs or services that allow the user to share the content easily.
• If majority of your readers use a selective social network then you must alos be there on that network through an interestingly engaging presence.
• The content that best describes your content or is most used by the visitors must be shared on these networks through your website’s page on that network such as Facebook, Google+ etc.
• To ad social sharing buttons to your blog you can get a lot of plugins available online such as AddThis or others.
• Professionals encourage bloggers to update or post more content every day. If your routine does not allow doing this regularly the you can use tools like Hootsuite to schedule your updates.
• Having a social media integration plan added to your content plan makes a good marketing plan to attract a target audience.

7. Marketing the content

Google bots detect the updates you make to your content but how would your readers know about the latest posts you have made? Here come your marketing strategies in. You need to inform your readers about these changes so they can read and share it on social networks. The more traffic you attract, the more natural backlinks you will receive.

• You authority on the search query you are targeting depends directly on the number of times you update the content.
• Come up with content that your readers would like to share. This will affect your ranking positively.
• Adding a resource library containing instructions, videos, images, case studies etc. would be a smart move on your part. Let your readers know about it.
• Engage in guest blogging i.e. share your content on other blogs as well.
• Add a link directing back to your blog on social networking sites. Don’t overdo it.
• The readers should be updated with the latest changes to your blog. Make an RSS for this purpose so readers can subscribe.

8. Promote the authority

Google has come up with a new variable that it gives a lot of attention to while ranking a page.AuthorRank  is the new factor that takes into consideration the individual contributors to a blog or website.

• Make an author profile of your content contributors by using author tags and attributing the specific content to specific persons depending upon their importance to your blog.
• Create a profile for the author on Google+ and link all the content posted by the author to that profile.
• Put in his Google+ profile number to the posts by the author to your page.
• Use author tags on all the other blogs as well such as guest blogging and social network sharing.
• The authority of an author consolidates with the number of posts he makes. The more, the better.
• If you can make your readers to share the author’s content more, the author Rank of that particular author will increase.

9. Create a mobi-friendly website

Reports suggest in certain areas of the world like South Africa 60% search queries are punched in through mobile devices and through social media networks on these mobile devices. With the advancements of mobile technology more users are moving towards mobile friendly websites than desktop sites and hence, their growth rate is very high comparative to desktop websites.

As per Digital Media Marketing Association of South Africa (DMMA), users had a total of 79 million page views in July 2012 through ten largest mobisites.

You must also put a thought in building a mobisite for your website:

• Avoid replicating your desktop website for creating your mobisite since users browse differently when using a mobile device. Build a mobile friendly version instead.
• Keep the information minimal and to the point. Users browse fast through mobiles and only seek the relevant piece of information.
• As much as you can, keep the page smaller and the most important content on the top so the users do not have to scroll much further down to find what they are looking for.
• For tasks that need some information from users must be kept as short and simple as possible. Users do not like to fill lengthy forms or pages to carry out the tasks they visited your website for.

10. Localize your content

Reports indicate that around 40% of the users intend to perform a locality based search query.  After typing in the search query users usually add in a postal code or geographic location to seek a local information.

For a location based business, you need to ensure that the locals of that area are the targeted traffic for your website since these people will be looking for specifics on your business for that area. Hence, you need to have a website that contains content specifically intended for that location:

• Check your location with Google Places since the first location based research is usuallyGoogle Maps results.
• To direct the results towards your website, embed Google Map for your location to your contacts page.
• Mention your full address and location information including famous buildings and street names on your contacts page.
• Add the location information in the HTML tags.
• Go for a < strong > tag for your location if you can otherwise make it bold for easy identification by Google bots and readers alike.
• Add your business in local business directories that users refer to.

Apart from these factors, there are a lot of other variables that can help your business rank high and stay on that higher rank for long. However, these are the best steps that you can utilize as you take your business to 2013, another year of successful blogging.