According to a recent report by Advertising Age, an exciting new deal is in the pipeline between Yahoo! and Microsoft. If it goes ahead, Yahoo! will use Microsoft’s Bing as its search engine instead of its own, effectively joining forces to become a more serious competitor to Google.

The deal could have a huge impact on Search Engine Optimisation. comScore reported that Google commanded an impressive 65% share of the search engine market share in June, while Yahoo! and Bing held 19.6% and 8.4% respectively. If all of the current Yahoo! users were to continue using Yahoo! via Bing, their combined share would reach 28%, which could really begin to challenge Google in the future.

So what does this mean for your SEO? A number of possible things. If your website currently ranks well in Yahoo! but not in Bing or Google you could really be in trouble of not ranking at all. Alternatively, a website at the top of Bing and Google but not for Yahoo! could see a considerable increase in traffic, as Yahoo! users will now see their site via Bing’s engine instead.

Pay Per Click advertising could also see a major change. Either Yahoo! Search Marketing will be replaced by Microsoft adCenter, or the two will merge. This could affect the Cost Per Click and positioning for many of the Sponsored Links found when a search query is made.

In recent years, Google has been criticised for its strict rules and T&Cs as well as its somewhat monopolistic nature towards the World Wide Web. This is fairly understandable, given that two-thirds of all Internet searches are run through them. However the Ying/Bahoo! engine could encourage Google to relax or change some of its policies and prices, especially if the combined alternative becomes popular enough to claw away some of Google’s dominant market share. This could have a radical effect on AdWords, AdSense and other Google services in the way that they’re operated and managed - perhaps a potential sigh of relief to many search engine marketers.

Overall, the important thing to understand is that change could be on the way, with this new partnership being a possible indication of things to come. Anyone who believes that Google will remain the king of the search engines forever will be hugely unprepared if Bing and Yahoo! meet or even overtake its share of the search engine market. Of course this might not happen at all, but it’s best to be ready, just in case.

I recently spoke at an event, teaching small business owners some of the basics of search engine marketing and optimisation. A few times I used basic industry terminology which created a sea of puzzled faces. Hopefully the following list of the more common terms will help clear up any confusion caused by SEO jargon.

Adwords – The name for Google’s Pay Per Click advertising system. Businesses that use Adwords will find their adverts displayed on the Google search results labelled as “sponsored listings”.

Affiliate – A person or business that doesn’t sell products or services, rather existing to send traffic to retail sites and take a commission or fee for any sales generated.

Alt text – A description given to an image on a webpage. Not often shown to users unless their browser cannot show graphics but important to search engine optimisation as search engines use these tags as a factor in determining keywords.

Anchor text – The blue, underlined text displayed for a hyperlink. Placing your keywords in anchor text of links pointing to your site has a positive impact on SEO.

Black hat SEO – Techniques used to trick and manipulate search engines into ranking a webpage. Examples include cloaking, gateway pages and keyword stuffing. Black hat SEO is frowned upon by search engines and can lead to a site being penalised or banned from search results.

Bounce rate – The number of visitors who leave a site without visiting any pages other than the one they land on. Shown in a percentage in website analytics tools, for the majority of sites the lower the bounce rate the better.

Canonization – Strangely, search engines see http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com as separate sites, which can lead to duplicate content penalties. Canonizing one of these URLs tells the search engines to only focus on one, and can lead to improved search engine rankings.

Cloaking – To cloak a website is to show one version to the visitors, and another to the search engines. Cloaking is an example of black-hat SEO and if discovered on your site, could lead to a falling out with the search engines.

Content Management System  (CMS) – The software that many websites come with which allows people to easily add to, and update, content such as text and images. Blogging systems are a good example of simple, user friendly CMS.

Conversion rate – The percentage of visitors who reach a goal. Conversion goals include signing up to a newsletter, making a purchase, filling in an enquiry form, clicking an advert, etc.

Cost Per Click (CPC) – The amount of money each click costs a Pay Per Click advertiser, which can range from a penny to over £10, depending on the competitiveness of the keyword.

Duplicate content – Content on a website that is a copy, or very similar, to content that search engines have found elsewhere. Web-pages containing duplicate content are less likely to outrank the originals in the search engines.

Ecommerce – Selling products online. Many of the most popular sites on the internet are ecommerce based. Some sell a wide range of products, like traditional department stores, while some stick to one or two specialist lines of product.

Free For All (FFA) – The name given to web pages that allow anyone to place links on them. These pages are not very well respected by the search engines as a lot of the links are low quality and point to spammy websites.

A follow-up post for terminology starting with letters G-N will be made soon.

Here are five tricks used by the more unscrupulous internet marketing firms. Swindles such as these have been going on since the dawn of the internet and while some of them are just a cheeky way of getting a few pounds out of your marketing budget, some of them could cost you thousands and potentially cause long-term harm to your website.

Each of these is a scam in use today and is one that businesses we deal with have been caught out on in the past. We are highlighting them here so that you can see the types of tricks that exist and can hopefully spot them before handing over your cash.

Scam #1 - “We’ll put you top of Google for 10 of your keywords for only £200 a month”

This is a pay per click scam that has become pretty popular over the past couple of years, with a number of businesses we know falling for it, to their later regret. On the face of it, the offer seems like a good one: A company calls you saying they will put your website in the sponsored listings on Google and guarantees that your site will appear on the first page for only £200 a month. What they don’t tell you is that the search terms are ones that are rarely used so are cheap to bid on. For example, if you were an IFA that works nationally then bidding on the keyword “pension advice” would be expensive, but bidding on “independent pension advice in South Wales” wouldn’t be. These pay per click companies will bid on keywords like the latter so that not that many clicks happen, and when they do, the cost is minimal. Out of the £200, you may only receive a few pounds worth of clicks, with the company pocketing the other £190 or so as a monthly management fee.

We have also seen one company that doesn’t stop there. They will charge you an additional £50 set-up fee which they say is mandatory as it’s charged by Google. Whilst it is true that Google does charge an Adwords set-up fee, it is actually only £5, and it gets refunded out of your first few clicks anyway.

How can you avoid this scam? If anyone cold calls you offering pay per click advertising then perhaps it’s better not to sign up over the phone. Instead, take their details, stick them into a search engine, and have a look to see if they are associated with this type of con. If it looks genuine then find out whether they let you bid on the more competitive keywords or whether they just let you choose from low level ones.

Scam #2 - “We’ll submit your site to hundreds of search engines for only £10”

One of the oldest online marketing scams and one of the most pointless. The first thing you should be aware of is that there are only three main search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing) and they take up over 95% of all search queries made in the UK. Submitting a website to any others is a worthless exercise.

The next thing you need to know is that submitting a site to a search engine can potentially do more harm than good. For a long time it has been widely accepted within the online marketing world that search engines prefer to find websites via inbound links. It is believed that search engines will sooner show a website they find on their own, via another website, than one they are force fed through a submission.

If you have a new site then to get indexed, all you need is one link from a website that is popular with the search engines and your site will start showing in results pages within a matter of days or weeks.

There is a variation on this scam where companies try to get on-going money out of you by offering to re-submit your site regularly. Even if the above wasn’t true then this additional service is a complete waste of time as once the search engines know your site exists and have crawled it, they place you within their database, something they don’t need to be asked to do over and over again.

Scam #3 - “We guarantee to get you #1 on Google”

No-one can promise you the first position on Google. There are hundreds of factors that search engines use to determine the search results, many of which aren’t known to people outside of Google. If someone is making guarantees then it is highly likely that one of two things are happening. They may be offering to optimise your site for keywords that are of a very low competition level (much as the pay per click scam, above), or, more worryingly, there may be something dodgy going on.

Black hat techniques, such as cloaking and keyword stuffing, are used by some SEO companies to trick search engines into ranking a website. Whilst these often work in the short term, they can actually damage your website in the long-term. When the search engines discover that these techniques have been used they can penalise, and even ban your website from the search results. Don’t think it can’t happen to you either, as BMW once had their website disappear from Google thanks to some black hat work, and if it can happen to a company of that size, then it can happen to anyone.

Scam #4 - “We will give you 1000 links for only £9.99”

Whilst inbound link building is an important part of search engine optimisation, the links do need to come from quality, relevant websites. Buying links in bulk, through companies that have automated link submission systems will never bring in links from good websites in relevant fields.

The links will most likely come from spammy directories that no person and no search engine is ever going to bother with. Not only will the links be completely worthless but they could highlight to the search engines that something dodgy is going on and pose harm to your existing rankings.

Scam #5 - “We will build you a high ranking sales page on our site”

Whilst micro sites and separate sales pages can work for businesses there is one fairly common trick that should be avoided. The company offers to build a one-off page, branded with your logo, optimised for your keywords, and hosted on their business directory site. This sounds good as there are no hosting or web development fees for you, but what it lacks is control. The page is a part of their site, not yours, so your monthly fee is paying them to work on improving the ranking of a website that doesn’t belong to you.

If you ever decide that you no longer want the page then you are left with nothing, and they are left with a valuable asset that they can easily sell to one of your competitors. If you decide that coming up high on the search engines is a goal for your business then it is probably wiser to work on improving your site rather than someone else’s.

Google, the company behind the world’s most popular search engine, has today announced that it will be creating its own operating system to take on Microsoft Windows. The two technology companies have been at war for years, and with the recent release of Bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine, things have really started heating up.
 
Clearly challenging the software giant, Google said that it has been working on a lightweight operating system based on its Chrome web browser that it launched last year. The new system will be aimed at laptop and netbook users.
 
In a post on the company blog Google stated “Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code...and we'll soon be working with the open source community...”
 
“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web”
 
In an apparent dig at Microsoft the announcement also said “It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be…completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”
 
Can Google successfully take on Microsoft in a market that they have dominated for well over a decade, or will they struggle just as the Apple and Linux systems have?
 
Google’s new operating system is due to be released in the second half of next year.

OVER the past decade the battle between the main search engines has remained intense and, even though Google has long been the dominant player, it looks like the real fight is only just beginning.

Since Google launched, just 11 years ago, the company has become synonymous with the internet and how we find information. But rather than scare off competitors, it looks like the meteoric rise of the search giant has inspired many internet entrepreneurs to have a go themselves.

The problem these hopefuls face is differentiation. Without a new or improved way of presenting search results, why would anyone stop Googling and take up their service instead?

Existing engines are being re-inventing to try and grow market share (the new Microsoft Bing and recently re-branded Ask Jeeves are examples), and new entrants are coming up with big ideas they hope will drastically change the way we search.

While many have tried to develop world class search engines – and failed – developers now have the advantage of access to over 10 years’ worth of data on people’s search habits. Technology firms now know how we want information presented to us and are trying to find new ways to satisfy us.

The end goal of all search engines is to present us with the answer to our question as soon we ask it. Even though search engines of today offer results much more accurately than ever before, it is still sometimes a chore to find specific information. Many companies are investing a lot of R&D dollars in Latent Symantic Indexing. LSI focuses on the meaning of words and the relationships between different phrases, rather than just looking at a word as a collection of letters. Google has invested heavily in the technology and believes that it will allow them to present users with the most accurate results of any search engine.

While accurate Latent Symantic Indexing may still be some way off, several of the latest search engines feature new innovations that its creators believe will allow them to stand out from Google.

Bing, a search engine developed by Microsoft, is officially only a week old, although it is based on the company’s previous offering, Live.com. It is being touted as a “decision engine” as it offers more information to searchers, helping them make choices and leading them to their goal. This is clear with the preview button that appears next to searches, which when clicked offers a more in-depth look at the web page. Reviews so far are very positive, concentrating on a much improved quality of results. These changes have helped Bing receive more traffic than Live.com, but will they be enough to keep this growing after the initial buzz, and $100 million advertising campaign, die down?

Wolfram Alpha is the most important search engine you’ve probably never heard of. Its creators prefer not to have it known as a search engine – instead they call it a “computational knowledge engine”. Rather than presenting users with a list of search results to choose from, Wolfram Alpha tries to answer their question by displaying data from a knowledge base. Putting “Cardiff” in as the search term brings up a page showing the location, population and weather of the city, among other things. It’s this creative way of trying to get us straight to what we are looking for that is leading to this site becoming touted as a future competitor to Wikipedia as well as Google.

Recently there has been a whole host of new Google applications and features, almost too many to follow. It is easy to spot the keyword options that drop down below the search box, but less clear is the “Show options” link displayed at the top of the search results page. It offers more in-depth options so that a user can choose where they want to take the search. Choices include narrowing results by time, such as “Past 24 hours” or “Past week”, and having the option to mix image results with web pages. There is also the option to show the relationships between keywords in a graph, called the “Wonderwheel”.

Will these innovations change the way we search? It’s hard to see how they won’t. All search engines, new and old, are trying to get us to the information we seek far more swiftly. If it wants to continue its reign then Google will continue to develop its technology, either in-house or by acquiring smart sites such as Wolfram Alpha.

(This article was originally written last month for Welsh news website, Waleshome.org).