Bing-Yahoo merger, what was a rumor last year in 2009, is now a reality. As per the ‘Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance’ the deal encompasses “search (web, image and video), search advertising and contextual advertising”.  Microsoft Bing will provide web search, video and image results to Yahoo while Yahoo will “continue to enhance the search results page”.  And it is Microsoft Bing’s adCenter that is to be used for PPC advertising.

Bing-Yahoo Merger: More Time for SEO Strategic Thinking?

Search engine optimizers and marketers have long started speculating on the outcome of the merger. Let’s take a look how SEO and SEM will be affected with this merger.

More time for strategic planning…

Well, you don’t have to spend time for the big three – Google, Yahoo and Bing. Rather you’ll have only two major search engines to focus from now on. The time saved can be utilized for studying the Microsoft-Bing platform and interface, installing Bing Webmaster Tool, which was so far a bit neglected, and developing effective strategy for adCenter.

A little bit of adjustment…

Those who are currently running their advertising campaigns on Yahoo Search Marketing platform will have their accounts automatically transferred to adCenter with slight adjustments in functionalities.

Lot of expectations…

As the experts say, SEO professionals have a lot of expectations from Bing. If Microsoft can improve the user interface and adCenter Desktop Tool for Bing the alliance might prove to be a profitable one, both for the companies and for the webmasters.

Location sharing is the latest trend that caught on with the social networking sites with Twitter and Facebook leading the race. But the question is, how much effective is it going to be?

Location Sharing and Social Media Marketing

Recently Twitter has launched location sharing feature, Twitter Places , which enables users share their physical location in their tweets as soon as they activate this feature. As you turn on this feature your geographic coordinates are shown via Google Map.  While Twitter is all set with this new attribute Facebook has kept location sharing (Facebook Places) limited for iPhone users as of now.  As you check-in to different places on Facebook it gets listed on the News Feed and on your friends’ home pages.

But are users ready to accept this exposure? It is learnt that many Twitter users are against going overtly public with personal informaton sharing. Well, it is still an optional feature. Even though people are apprehensive regarding misuse of location information many are glad to share their whareabouts with frinds and acquintances.

Shifting focus from personal view point if we concentrate on the commercial aspect we’ll see that location sharing can add new dimension to social media marketing. Just as search engine marketiners are turning to geo-targeted or Local SEO with the help of Google Places, social media marketers can make use of this new features on Twitter and Facebook  for their campaigns. It can be a great tool to catch up with the potential local customers in their network. The target customers can easily find them out as they search for tweets from their locality. It will be easier for companies to advertise about their local offices, events and meetings and create their brand awareness locally through social media. Thus location sharing online may drive off-line sale as well.

May be Facebook and Twitter’s location sharing feature is primarily designed for personal user accounts but with these two social networking behemoths competing each other we wouldn’t have to wait too long to see what’s more in store for business entreprenuers.

Article Marketing or Video Marketing?

Article marketing and video marketing are two aspects of online business promotion which are very common and very popular as well. The reason is that both are free and both are capable of pulling in visitors if properly targeted with related keywords. However, video marketing is relatively newer to article marketing, which is there from the very beginning of online business and web promotion.

Article marketing – an overused strategy?

Initially article marketing was doing well. Many search engine marketers have made money by creating one article, stuffed with keywords and links back to main site’s landing pages and submitting it to several article directories. But increasing competition, innovation of automated article writing software and spreading of viral articles degraded the quality of content inevitably. Moreover, Google got busy in improving its search algorithms almost everyday. So, the things got tougher and an alternative was required to stay ahead in the competition.

Video Marketing as an effective alternative

With the growing popularity of social media as internet marketing platform video marketing came as an alternative. Multimedia attracts people more than a plain article. A video with sound and moving images can instantly impact viewers mind. There is no denying that video has a larger target market. So, interesting videos were created and distributed across various social networking sites and video sharing platforms for branding and marketing. With time creating, viewing and downloading high resolution videos have become a lot easier. And it has been proved that like human users search engines also love videos provided you upload them with relevant keyword or key phrases.

Which one to choose?

And there arises the question, which one to focus – video marketing or article marketing? Well, from experts’ point of view, both are important. Both are capable of boosting your website’s rank on SERPs if targeted properly. Video may have a wider spectrum but articles are still valued as good resource. Google values contextual links as more authentic and natural way to earn backlinks these days. And in addition to article directories, blogging and guest posting on related blogs have opened up a new horizon for article marketing. However, good quality of the text content is a high priority. So, the best possible way is to combine these two strategies – article marketing and video marketing in your web marketing campaign to get the best result.

There is no denying that social media sites today, have huge impact on common man’s life. More and more people are signing up to an increasing number of social media sites to create a worldwide network of friends. With increasing popularity of social media search engine marketers are investing more time in leveraging the networking power of social media for online business promotion.

Social Media Marketing

If you have not yet switched to social media for marketing your brand here are the reasons why you should opt for it immediately.

Cost-effective

Social media marketing is highly cost-saving compared to traditional marketing strategies. And to be more precise it is much more effective than other online marketing methods such as email marketing which is more of a one-way communication to clients and customers.

Direct and Interactive

Social media lets you interact with your clients and customers in more humanly way. Online conversation and quick exchange of messages work more effectively with users.

Impact of Recommendations

If they like your messages they can instantly spread them in their networks and most of us often rely on the recommendations by our friends. Thus you can get a large number of followers shortly by letting your social media contacts advertising for you.

Quick Turnaround

It may take a long time to build a niche with your website. Making way into the first pages of popular social media, bookmark sites and online video platforms can notably increase organic traffic to your way and in turn move up the sales conversion rate to a great extent.

Improved Ranking

Social media marketing has the potential to boost the search engine ranking of your website. You get more natural back-links to your site and it becomes easier to improve rank on SERPs.

More over, Google have already started indexing real time tweets and posts from some of the prominent social networking sites including Twitter and Facebook. And this real time search result works similar to Google PageRank – that’s what the SEO experts say.

Reduced Risk

You may argue that you can buy links from other website owners in little time instead of ‘wasting’ so much time behind social media marketing. Buying links might be an easier option but it in turn increases the risk of getting your site booked in Google’s black-list and banned forever. But with social media you get natural inbound links which is much more valuable in terms of search engine.

As per “2010 Social Media Marketing Survey Industry Report” about 91 percent of today’s marketers use social media to promote their business online. The number increased from that of last year’s 88 percent. It is also noticed that young marketers of age group 30-39 are more enthusiastic in using social media for branding and marketing purposes. Therefore, it is obvious that social media marketing is going to be one of the most powerful tools for online business promotion in the near future. The sooner the small business owners recognize it the better it is for them.

Though not very new, page segmentation analysis for search engines has come into focus in the recent past. Page segmentation implies how search engine divides a web page into separate blocks to analyze each segment independently. It helps search engines to sort out the main sections of the page and focus on it while weed out the accessories like navigational elements, header, footer, etc. However, introduction of HTML 5 has brought this issue on the surface once again.

Addition of some new tags for in HTML 5 promises improved page segmentation that was not possible with this presentation language so far. Let’s take a look as how HTML 5 is going to benefit SEO page segmentation. As page segmentation leads to more accurate understanding of a particular page’s relevancy the new tag elements in HTML 5 are expected to prove beneficial for optimized web design.

Let’s take a look what’s HTML 5 has to offer.

• <Article> tag: The new <article> tag can be used to mark any sort of online entries including forum post, blogs and articles. In a way it will help the search engine to concentrate on the main content of the page. It gives a relief from using several <div> tags for better display and management of on-page content.
• <Section> tag: The new <section> tag for marking different sections of a page can have its own HTML heading. The tag can be used to exploit the relevancy factor. The search engine will treat the section containing the keyword in greater number as more relevant than any other sections and focus on it.
• <Header> tag: The <header> tag similar to existing <h1> tag in terms of functionality ensures greater flexibility by allowing marking long texts, even an entire paragraph as well as hard-coded links in addition to common header elements such as H1, H2, H3, etc.
• <Footer> tag: Similarly the <footer> tag can contain all the important information at the bottom of a page as well as a section.
• <Nav> tag: Navigational elements are important factors from SEO perspective. The new <nav> tag can be used to point out the set of links to other pages to the search engine.

With these tags it will now be easier for the webmasters to direct the search engine about how to segment the page. The coding will be much cleaner resulting in faster crawl of a page by the search engine robots. It not only adds to flexibility of the presentation language but also makes it easier for the search engine to decide importance and assign relevancy of a particular section with respect to a particular search term.

SEO is nothing but a marketing tool. A super-talented marketing expert cannot promote a product or service if he does not understand how the product works and what are the special features it has. And to market the product creatively, the marketer should have a solid knowledge about the product.

When you do SEO, you have to understand your client’s website. Few basic things you have to do before starting SEO for a client:

• Understand their target audience and country
• Understand their objectives – traffic, conversion or clicks on ads
• Understand the business – special features, how are they different
• Study the market; watch the competitors and their online behavior
• Start keyword research – consider client’s input and use your own knowledge to decide on the keywords
• Think of article topics that can create a buzz for the client
• Think of niche-specific online platforms where you can promote your client
• Find out web spaces where you can place banner ads to have a strong online presence
• Decide which social media channels can be good for the client
• Find target audience on Social Media and reach to them

With no understanding on how your client does business, you can do a lot of article submission and directory submissions, but you cannot think out of the box. To stand above the average you have to go that extra mile, do your own homework and prepare yourself to take up the project. And while preparing the marketing plan, apply your understanding in it. Unless you know the terminologies and industry-specific terms, you cannot write an acceptable Meta tag even!

And when it comes to Social Media Marketing or community building, this domain knowledge becomes more important. Without a fair understanding about the market, the product and the service, you cannot engage the customers in a conversation.

Stand out of the crowd, study your client’s business properly, know about the product, do some basic research and then start working on it.

Search Engine Optimization used to be considered as the process of making a website visible in the organic web search. But can you ignore Image Search, Video Search, Blog Search any more?

SEO 2.0 covers them all. Businesses that are looking for web presence should not miss the other verticals of web search. Image optimization, video optimization, blog post optimization and organic search engine optimization – the combined effect of all can only help to achieve a strong online presence.

There are many plug-ins available for WordPress that allow bloggers to optimize the blog posts – such as adding Meta tags, introducing search engine friendly URL etc. Image optimization and video optimization cover a lot of things also. These topics require dedicated blog posts.

Even a lot of individuals and corporate houses go for optimization for name search – professionally called online reputation management. If someone searches for the name of an individual or a brand name, they should see the official pages related to the individuals and brands only.

Finally, with the increasing popularity of mobile web, companies are going for optimization for mobile search as well. Competition is tougher when it comes to mobile search as on web people may visit the pages appearing in the second page of the SERP. But on mobile, people hardly browse beyond top 5 results.

However, if more people start accessing web from mobile – then companies cannot go without having mobile website and without doing optimization for mobile web search. Get ready for the new verticals; otherwise it might be too late.

What is content optimization? Optimize for whom? Is it different from on-page optimization? How to optimize content? Well, let me answer one by one.

What is content optimization?

Content optimization is the process of presenting the content of a website in such a way so that it becomes useful and attractive for the users and easy to crawl for the search engines. And here comes the next question – optimize for whom?

Why content optimization? Optimize content for whom?

First priority is readers of course. Present the content in a proper way so that your readers find it easy to comprehend. At the same time, make it understandable for the search engine bots too. Especially when you are dealing with non-textual content such as image or video, you have to be very careful on how to make it understandable for the search engines.

Is it different from on-page optimization?

It is a part of on-page optimization; but on-page optimization includes many other things. When we discuss content optimization, we just talk about the part within and .

And then comes the most important point – how to do this. Let’s see:

How to optimize content?

1] Know how people read web pages. Process of reading a web page on computer screen is different from that of a book or newspaper. Short and simple sentences and small paragraphs make web content more readable for human beings.

2] Arrange the entire text under various headings; use H1, H2 and H3 tags for the headings and sub-headings.

3] Use keywords in the content and in H1, H2 and H3 tags. Do not put in keywords in the page content so that it looks like keyword stuffing; maintain a healthy keyword density. You can just think of various words that your readers may use while searching the type of product, service or information you offer and use those words in the text; it should make sense!

4] If you are linking to another page of your website or an external website, use meaningful words as the link text. This will help your readers understand where they will be going.

5] Use link title attribute properly to help your readers know about the destination.

6] While presenting image, make sure the alt attribute and image title attribute are properly used; put meaningful and relevant text in image alt and title attributes. This will not only help the users understand the image, but help search engines to tag the image properly.

7] Use relevant terms as image file names; this may increase the chances of the image to appear in the image search.

8] If you are showing content in video, use proper tags or place a transcript just below the video. This will be helpful for those who are physically challenged; good for search engines too.

Do you want to add more points here? Feel free to comment.

Search Engine Optimization is a process of promoting your website on the web by making it more user-friendly and search engine friendly. To be honest, users are more important than the search engines; however, you cannot ignore the search engines as well. Hence, do not try to fool the search engines OR apply any technique to exploit the search engine algorithm. At the same time do not try to deceive the visitors. Wear the white hat proudly.

It is true that some SEO clients ask for guaranteed and instant result. It is the responsibility of the SEO company to supply proper study materials to the clients so that they can understand how search engine optimization is done. Once the clients understand that SEO is a long process and no company can guarantee top position, they will not make such demands.

It is not right to apply unethical black hat techniques just to satisfy the demands of your clients. White Hat SEO may take some time to deliver the result; but it covers the ground so well that the optimized websites continue to perform well and sustain the performance.

Therefore, while taking up search engine optimization projects, it is important to know how much understanding the client has about SEO. Do they expect something that is not achievable? In that case, talk to the client and let them know that SEO is an array of ethical strategies to assign higher visibility to a website.

Things that fall under white hat SEO are:

• Meta tags optimization
• Content optimization
• Code optimization
• Content creation
• Making websites more crawlable
• Proper navigation for users
• Creating a strong web presence

Do you want to add more points to this list? Please comment.

In 2010 you just cannot ignore the power of internet. Whether you are a business owner in USA, UK or in India – you must have a website to establish your web presence.

If you are still not convinced, just click on the link to check internet usage statistics of the world. Remember the computer savvy generation of India is no more in school. Internet penetration is likely to increase like anything in next couple of years. The TREND of searching information online and doing transaction online is supposed to become TRADITION in the South Asian countries too.

Therefore, not having a website is a no-mercy ignorance. If you have already covered the ground and hosted your own website, jump start and start promoting it online. It can be difficult for you to understand the whole process of web marketing, so take help from a reputed web marketing company.

It may not be possible for a small business owner to hire a web marketing expert; assigning the web marketing jobs to a reputed SEO company is the best thing one can do. This way you can get the expert minds work for you and at the same time you can avoid the hassles of setting up a whole new department.

If you do not have a website yet, do not feel bad – you can actually turn this situation in your favor. Contact SEO web design company and let them develop your website following all the SEO guidelines. See if the SEO web marketing company you have chosen to work with can guide the design team on how to build search engine friendly website.

Once you have a website that offers easy navigation to search engines and to your visitors and satisfies all on-page factors you can expect better visibility and higher ranking.

If you already have a website, professional SEO consultants will conduct SEO audit to find out the areas of the website that needs improvement. This way they help you prepare a search engine friendly website. With a flawless website, it becomes easy to promote your brand, products or service online.

Contact professional SEO company today and know your options; any delay may result in more loss.