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.

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).

Microsoft has launched www.bing.com, a new type of search engine that they prefer to call a “decision engine”. The software giant hopes that the replacement for Live Search (which was the third most popular search engine in the UK, behind Google and Yahoo!) will change the way people use search engines. By offering users greater options in the search results and helping them find what they are looking for quicker, Microsoft believes it now offers what internet users have been looking for.

Bing certainly looks different to the other search engines. The large homepage image shows their intention to stand out from Google by avoiding the use of big white spaces. Once you perform a search however, the look and feel is instantly familiar to anyone who has used a search engine before.

When it comes to features, changes include a list of related searches along the top left hand side (Google places them at the bottom of the results) and a nifty little box next to each search result that you can choose to pop-up, with further information from that web page and a list of other pages from that site.

At a first glance, the algorithm seems to be centred much more around local results. Microsoft has shown an interest in local search for some time, and it looks like this could be their bid for that market. Some of the results are a little questionable at the moment, but you can bet that a lot of work will be put into making this Beta release a very strong search engine in the near future.

Will Bing successfully change the way we search? Will it start taking market share from Google and Yahoo!? Time will tell, but with the Bing marketing budget rumoured to be $100 million, you can bet that Microsoft think so.

Google has recently filed for a patent where part of the ranking calculation is made up by the click through rate of web pages that have previously been listed for that search. See here for in-depth details.

This means that if your site appears on the first page for "cheap MP3 players" below Amazon.co.uk but receives a higher rate of clicks for that keyword then there is a chance your site could start showing above theirs.

Search engine optimisation and in-bound link building could now only the first half of the battle when it comes to winning the search engine war. If people aren't clicking your listing then you may start slipping back down the results.

How do you combat this? Strong calls to action.

The search results show three things that you have control over: your page title, your meta description and your URL. Make them really work for you.

Page title - Along with making sure your main keywords are in here try adding a sales message that will help people click through, e.g. "Cheap MP3 Players. Huge selection of low price MP3 players."

Meta Description – This is where you should see a big difference. In the meta description you have up to 160 displayed characters, so can create a couple of really strong sentences that will entice searchers towards your site. Make sure you include the keywords a couple of times too. e.g. "Cheap MP3 players. Full range of MP3 players from iPods to Zens. Cheapest price guarantee plus FREE shipping."

URL - If you have search engine friendly URLs then make sure the keywords show, as this increases click through rates. e.g. www.example.com/cheap-mp3-players

This just goes to show that you never know what's next in the world of search engine marketing. Many search engine optimisation companies and webmasters have ignored meta desciptions for years, writing them off as 'old-hat' and of no real value. With this update though, spending time on your meta data will once again be a fundamental part of online marketing.

Some search engine marketers are already reporting changes in the ranking of their sites since the recent Google update, with many suspecting historic click through rates already playing a part.

Fast Track Room Booking is a meeting room booking system developed by Intelligent Information Systems (iiS). Having worked with iiS for a number of years, providing Pay Per Click advertising management, they asked us to improve the natural rankings of the website via SEO and link building.

SEO advice

We started by looking at the keywords their market used when searching for this type of software and helped them place these keywords into the site and the copy. We then advised them on some of the more technical elements of SEO that the site needed to have in place in order to make it more search engine friendly and to help avoid Google penalties.

Inbound link building

Once the website was in better shape to attract and convert traffic we started building links to the site. We encouraged links from other relevant websites, looking for links that would help generate targeted traffic as well as boost the Google rankings.

The result?

So far we have generated first page results for many of the main keywords including “room booking” and “room booking software”, terms which now bring in hundreds of new visitors each month as well as additional enquiries each week. As the number of in-bound links grows, the list of keywords the website will be found for will also grow, and the positions within the search results will continue to improve.