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According to web analytics firm Statcounter , Bing has registered it’s first decline since its launch, Bing has lost more than one percentage of the search marketing in US in September.
Its market share fell from 8.51% to 9.64% in August. During this time Yahoo also showed a decline in its market share to 9.40 % from 10.50 %. Although Bing’s decline has been just over one percentage point, it sure would be a worrying factor for Microsoft.
With Bing and Yahoo losing market shares in the month of september, it should be no surprise who gained from them. Google gained by almost two percentage points to 80.08% in September from 77.83% the previous month.
As per StatsCounter the Data is based on an analysis of 4.6 billion search engine referring clicks (1.1 billion from the US) which were collected during the period September 2008 to September 2009 from the StatsCounter network of over three million websites.
Steve Ballmer’s is on a battle front in the online search engine market with the launch of Bing, he has made his intention very clear that Bing will be a serious contender to Google and Yahoo’s share in the search market. Microsoft’s share of the US searches is about 8 % , a distant third behind Google and Yahoo.
A look at Microsoft’s different search efforts in the last six months (the bid to buy Yahoo’ search capabilities and the successful launch of Bing ) shows that Steve Ballmer is a persistent guy. And now, Ballmer may be ready to try harder than ever, as he’s voiced a willingness to spend something like $2.25 billion per year on search.
According to Reuters , Ballmer said at a business lunch, “Our shareholders, I told them we were willing to spend 5 to 10 percent of operating income for up to five years in this business, and we feel like we can get an economic return.”
Bing grabbed 12.1 % of the US Internet searches for the june 8 – 12 work week, up from 11.3 % from June 1-5 compared to Google’s 65 % of US searches in May. Ballmer is counting on Bing’s ability to provide more focused search results to lure web users away from Google and Yahoo. Bing was launched this month replacing the company’s previous Live search engine.
Microsoft’s operating income in 2008 equaled $22.49 billion, so that’s a not-quite-commitment of about $1.12 billion to $2.25 billion annually or more, since Microsoft’s likely to pull in greater sums of money in the years ahead.
Ballmer said, “In our industry, the number one mistake that people make is that they quit too early. We should have started earlier, but we’ve got our mojo working now I am willing to be patient to give Microsoft’s Bing search engine time to catch on with web users ”
According to Matt Cutts – Head of Google’s Webspam Team, if you want your blog to rank well on Google’s search engine you must use Wordpress. Matt recently mentioned at WordCamp SF that Wordpress takes care of about 80 – 90 percent of SEO mechanics.
He gave a SEO presentation that spans 50 pages and also gives tips on how to rank high on Google.
The two biggest ones are be relevant and be reputable.
Being Relevant
Google is all about relevancy, high the relevancy better the impact of your blog on search engines. According to Matt If you have a blog you need to answer basis about
Who am I ?
Why am I here ?
What do I love ?
What am I really good at doing ?
What do I have to say?
Once you’ve answered those questions and commit to exploring them via bloggery, there are some technical things for gaining relevance, like keyword relevance. Choose words users are likely to type, and include them naturally in blog posts. For example, a blogger can use name variations referring to the same device: usb drive, thumb drive, flash drive, pen drive. Matt recommends ALT attributes.
Wordpress URL structure is considered as a high ranking factor in Google rank algo. WordPress default URL structure uses question marks and numbers, instead of day and name, month name, etc.. Cutts says these types of URLs improve aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility. For URL paths with keywords in them, Cutts says dashes (hyphens) are preferred over underscores to separate words, but no spaces between words is a bad idea (example.com/my-keywords).
Don’t overdo keywords in the text. Make sure they flow naturally. Otherwise, Google could bust you for keyword stuffing.
Being Reputable
Cutts recommends the following to boost a blogger’s reputation:
- Be interesting
- Update often
- Find your niche
- Provide a useful service
- Do original research or reporting
- Give great information
- Live blog
- Make lists
- Create controversy
- Meet people on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed
Other Useful Information
Google crawls in decreasing order of PageRank, which means if a site has a low PageRank, it will be crawled last, behind sites with higher ranking.
Cutts’ simplified definition of PageRank is “the number and importance of links pointing to a site.”
Cutts also recommends plug-ins he uses for his blog, which include Akismet (a comment spam catcher), Cookies for Comments (another comment spam catcher), Enforce www. Preference (301 redirects to no-www or yes-www preference for link building), Feedburner Feedsmith (for tracking subscribers), and WP Super Cache (for fast caching).
Download the Search Marketing presentation from Matt Cutts blog
