Bing is giving a though competition to Google these days. The statistics of its search volumes is a clear indication. The search volume of Bing has seen a considerable increase in the duration of September to October 2010. The increase has been about 12.3% from about 3.9 million to about 4.3 million. This increase is attributed to the increase in the monthly query volume. This increase has certainly affected the search volumes of Google. The month to month search volumes of Google thus have seen a considerable decrease.

In the duration of last one month that is between September and October its market share has grown by 8.5% from 25.8% to 28%. The market share of Google however has slipped by 3.4%, from 70% to 67.6%. Thus Google is still dominant. The search share of Google has also dropped considerably. Bing had a huge increase in monthly search share and also had a good improvement in the yearly search share. It went up from 10.9% to 38.2%.

The unique visitors result for Bing is however not available. Microsoft however has been the only search engine with a significant month over month or year over year change in unique visitors. The total increase in the number of unique visitors has been about 23.3%. Between the same duration, the increase of the market share of Bing total visitor for Microsoft has increased from 65 million to 74 million. The total increase thus being 13.8%.

There was about a 4% increase in the US explicit core searches in October 2010. The searches grew from 16 billion in September 2010 to 16.6 billion in October. Google sites ranked first with 11 billion searches, Yahoo ranked second with 2.7 billion and Microsoft was third with 1.9 billion. Though Microsoft ranked third and its increase was about 7%.

According to the share of queries which 2 search engines are at the top in countries like United States, United Kingdom, Russia and China.

The ranking of the search engines in the above four countries matters a lot. In both the United States and United Kingdom it’s either Google and Bing or Google and You tube. Though there is often an argument whether Youtube and Google should be given consideration or not as Youtube is technically owned by Google. In China Baidu ranks 1st and Google ranks 2nd while in Russia Yandex and Google ranks 1st and 2nd respectively.

What is better? Having 10 links from 1 website or 1 link from 10 different websites?

Having 1 link form 10 different sites will have a far more positive impact on a page’s search engine ranking rather than having 10 links from 1 website. The more diversity a page has the more popularity it gains and thus it helps the page to get a higher ranking.

The response given by the search engine to 301 response code, 302 response code, canonical URL tag and meta refresh.

In case when a page is permanently redirected to a new URL the 301 response code may be used. The 301 redirect tells browsers and and search engines that a page has been permanently redirected to a new URL whereas in case when a page is temporarily redirected a 302 response code may be used. In case of 301 redirect search engines like Google and Bing pass the link equity and ranking metrics from 301’s URL to the target page. This happens with the 302 redirect in very exceptional case.

When multiple pages contain the same content a canonical URL tag is used to tell the search engines which page should be indexed. A <link rel> should be placed in the header of the document that is used to indicate to the search engines which is the “original” or “canonical” version.

The meta refresh placed in the header of the document indicates that the browser should be redirected to a new location after a specific amount of time has passed. Usually longer meta refreshes are indexed as normal by the search engines whereas short refreshes are treated as permanent redirects.

The concepts of “fat head”, “long tail” and search query demand distribution.

When it comes to performing searches the concept of “fat head” and “long tail” comes into picture. There are billions of searches performed every month by billions of people. About 70% of the total searches are such that they are searched for less than 10 times per month. Such distribution is represented in the demand distribution as a “long tail”. The other words or phrases which are searched for millions of times constitute the “fat head” of the distribution.

How can a search engine be influenced to increase the ratio of pages that it will crawl and index on a website.

There are many possible ways to do so. However doing it smartly is very important. Some of the ways would include keeping the navigation and architecture as simple as possible. Also reducing the click depth of the target pages will be beneficial. Trying to keep the quantity of low quality and low value links as low as possible. Also pages with less unique content should be less. Getting more links to pages that are being passed over for crawling or indexing. Having RSS feeds of pages that are frequently updated will be beneficial.

Which parts on the page where target keyword is employed influences the search engine rankings in a positive way.

Having the keyword in the title element, domain name, sub domain, URL string, body element, alt attribute bold/strong tag/italic tag and heading tags are some of the main areas which will certainly help influence the rankings in a positive way.

What impact does the meta robots tag have?

There are certain pages which are exclusive to certain organizations and not intended for display. In such cases a meta robot tag can be used to specify whether a page should be included in the public display of search engine or not. Also the tag can be used to prevent the usage of snippet from open directories.

Rectify Canonical URL Issues

When one usually wants to visit a site there are two possible ways by which it can be done. Firstly a person may type “www.site.com” or might just type “site.com”. Google will see this as two different sites with the same content which is highly undesirable.

Thus to avoid such a thing following can be done:

Create a file called .htaccess with the below mentioned lines and put it in the root folder of your site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.site\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$ 1 [R301, L]

However all servers are configured differently so if one does not have enough knowledge about it then it is advisable to get it done from someone who has knowledge regarding the same.

Double Listing Is Highly Desirable

A double listing can highly increase the click-through-rate(CTR). A double listing is nothing but to have two pages of a site on the same page of Google results.

Suppose let’s say you have a page A and page B. Page A ranks #2 on Google for “vedic math” and page B ranks #13 for the same keyword. You need to get page B from position 15 which is on the second page of Google to position 10 which is on the first page so that both pages A and B are on the first page of Google.

Find 2 pages Google finds most relevant for a given keyword by typing site:yoursite.com[keyword]. Once the 2 pages are found the SEO Rank Checker Tool can be used to find the Google rankings for that page.

Optimize the pages for your keywords by linking the first page from the second and vice-versa. The keywords one wishes to rank for should be used in the anchor text of the links. Some keyword-rich links from external sites can be brought to the pages.

Quality of Links is more important than Quantity

Link quality is always much more important thank link quantity. Links from authority sites should always be considered over links from other average sites. Care should be taken that related links are placed rather than unrelated ones. Also having keywords in the anchor text is more desirable rather than just having a “click me” or “read more”.

Smart use of competitor’s keywords

The keywords used by the competitor’s in their title tag and their main pages can be smartly used. To know which keywords the main pages are ranking for keywordspy.com, spyfu.com etc can be used.

However sometimes the main keywords are used in the meta keywords tag. Taking a look at such keywords is fine but it should be kept in mind that doing such a thing is not at all a good practice. Smart SEO people will never do such a thing. But to mislead wannabe  SEO’s they might actually put bad keywords in the meta keywords tag.

Google can be used for keyword suggestions

Once the main keywords are typed in the Google search box a list of suggestions is provided by Google. These suggestions can be used. The Google Keyword Tool can be used for a more detailed keyword research.

Also Google Instant which has been launched on 9th September 2010 increases the importance of Google Keyword Suggestions as results are viewed when you type and this can easily distract a user, plus helps in increasing traffic for keywords which are listed in Google Suggestion.

Google Webmaster Tools are certainly very useful

The Google Webmaster Tools are simply very amazing. They can be used to get lots of vital information. Using the tool one can detect Crawlability issues. A list of links pointing to a site can be found. The most common keywords people use to see a site can be seen. The 404 error can also be found using the tool. Thus the tool has amazing functionality.

Create a Google site map

The tool GSiteCrawler software can be used to create a sitemap which is required by Google Webmaster tools. The software if free of cost and we normally recommend it to everyone who is looking for a simple sitemap creation software.

The 3 major US search providers persisted their long-term dominance of the online search market in May 2010, as per the data from The Nielsen Company.

In total, Americans carried out 9.25 billion online queries in May 2010.

3 Companies Take 90% of Market

Only 3 companies, Google Search, Yahoo Search, and MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search, accounted for a little more than 90% of all US queries for the period of May 2010. Google held a 65.1% share of the search industry with 6 billion searches, its share flat from the preceding month, whilst Yahoo came in 2nd with 13.8% market share and 1.27 billion searches, sufficient to increase its share by 0.3 percentage points.

MSN/Windows Live/Bing closely trailed Yahoo with about 2 billion queries and 13% market share (up 0.1 percentage points from April 2010). The fourth-ranked provider, AOL Search, accounted for simply about 191.2 million searches and 2.1% market share (down 0.4 percentage points).

Market Stays the Same

In general, the US search market exhibited minimal fluctuation between April and May 2010. AOL lost the most percentage points from its April market share figure and Yahoo gained the most. 4 of the top 10 providers, including Google, retained flat market share compared to the prior month.

comScore Demonstrates Very Much The Same Results

comScore generated similar results in its tracking of the May 2010 US search market, using different metrics. comScore’s core search results from May 2010 show that Google Sites led the US core search market in May with 63.7% of the searches conducted, down 0.7 percentage points from 64.4% in April.

Meanwhile, Yahoo Sites managed the number two spot with 18.3% of all core searches, up 0.6 percentage points from 17.7% from the previous month. Microsoft sites continued to be in third place with 12.1% of all core searches, a 0.3 percentage point boost from 11.8% in April. comScore tracked 15.93 billion core searches in May 2010.