Search Marketing Sage

Image via Wikipedia

Since Google has the lion’s share of the search market, it is often tempting to focus solely on SEO for Google. But then MSN became Bing, announced a partnership with Yahoo, and started growing its own share of the search market.  Bing is now a bigger player than it used to.  Furthermore, there have always been certain demographic differences between the users of Google and Bing.  Depending on your company’s target audience, Bing may be an even more attractive channel than Google.

For all these reasons, it is now even more important to know how to optimize your site to perform well on both Google and Bing.  To do that, you have to know how the two engines differ.  The panelists at this SMX Advanced 2010 session break those differences down.

In my last post, I covered the importance of using Google XML Sitemaps for SEO indexing purposes. So how do you create a Google Sitemap?

What a Google Sitemap Looks Like

As I mentioned in my last post, a Google Sitemap is simply an XML file that contains pertinent data about your website. Each page of the website has its own entry in the Sitemap file. Google Sitemaps also follow the Sitemaps protocol established at Sitemaps.org.

This morning I read Frank Reed’s post, “Bing! is That Apple Calling?” The topic of his post was about how with the recent news of Apple shopping for a new default search engine there’s a “growing  battle between Google and Apple” stemming from the mobile market.  He concluded his post by posing some great questions for discussion:

• What could be lost / gained by Apple in a deal like this?
• What could be lost / gained by Google?
• Does Microsoft care what is lost or gained just as long as someone is talking about Bing?”

When addressing these questions, it is important to keep i mind the following:

• Overlapping Markets – Not only has Google recently pushed its way into the mobile market by acquiring Android, Inc. and teaming up with Open handset Alliance back in Nov. 2007(comprised of all the software, hardware, and telecom companies feeling the squeeze of Apple and AT&T’s exclusive partnership); But also, Google announced on July 7th, 2009 that it would be launching its own web-based operating system (Chrome OS) sometime in 2010.  The new operating system will offer users many of the same overall benefits as that that have propelled Apple to where it is today, security and design. This is mostly likely one of the primary reasons that on August 3, 2009 it was announced that Eric Schmidt would resign his board member position at Apple due to conflict of interests and the growing competition between Google and Apple.

• The user makeup of these markets – As Cowen & Co. concluded from a survey they conducted on U.S. Intertnet users, Google users as demographics are mobile Internet users, younger, and high-income households.  To me this sounds a lot like Apple’s mobile and computer hardware/software demographics.

I can’t say I’d really blame Apple if they do end up teaming up with Bing. I don’t think they are pursuing the idea of  swapping their default search engine out of spite, but more so out of necessity for the future. As for who’s to gain or lose? Being how the two have previously reigned kings in different markets with different business models, it’s a tough call. As Google and Apple’s business strategies continue to evolve, with more head-to-head competition, it will be interesting to see who has the bigger brand in the eyes of the consumer. Apple or Google?

One day late last week, my day started like any other day with checking E-mail and my Tweets.  Barry Schwartz aka @Rustybrick tweeted a Search Engine Round Table article about a situation that I was already aware of, but the idea of it finally hit home.  Yahoo is essentially going away this year for search engine marketers and the count down to its irrelevance has begun.

It’s far from a done deal, and there are more than a few potential obstacles in the deal actually getting approved, but sometime this year Yahoo as we know it will likely be gone (I’m betting much later in the year).

So the question has to be asked is all this work I’m doing to make Yahoo PPC accounts perform all for nothing?

At the end of this July, a death certificate was signed for a company.  That company was Yahoo.  It wasn’t heralded by Yahoo as being a death certificate, in fact the powers that be in charge of Yahoo proclaimed that it was a great deal.  The deal in which Bing.com essentially takes over natural and paid search for Yahoo, gives Yahoo 88% of the revenue of the PPC clicks derived from Yahoo.com.  It allows Yahoo to essentially shed hundreds of millions in technology and development costs (along with employee salaries and benefits).

Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz had already made in known in the press that Yahoo wasn’t really a “search company” and never had been a search company (Huh?):

Yahoo, according to Ms. Bartz, simply feeds search results for people who have grown curious while reading one of its news stories or watching a video. It doesn’t generally pop into peoples’ minds as the first place to go look for answers during the course of their day-to-day activities.

As such, Ms. Bartz said she could continue to live with the 20 percent or so share of the search market Yahoo has today, calling it “a very viable number.” “It is very profitable,” she said, “and we would be happy all day long.”

The biggest thing for Yahoo is increasing the number of pages people consume and slapping as many display ads as possible across those pages. “My fortunes are tied to my pages,” Ms. Bartz said.

It’s very well documented that Yahoo obviously is and was a search engine, and Bartz was rightfully raked over the coals for trying to spin Yahoo’s declines.  Either way, the damage was done and Danny Sullivan wrote a marvelous eulogy proclaiming: