Sure, Google may account for 70% of all search traffic, but that doesn’t mean it’s that high for your client and their target market. There are times when the search engine of choice for your customers will be Bing.

A client asked if it would be worth investing time and focusing efforts on increasing their Bing search results. After a little time in Analytics, I thought the answer was, without a doubt, YES!



Why?



The target demographic for this client was older people, 45 years of age and above. Based on ComScore’s survey from 2007, older demographics tend to use Internet Explorer. We decided to look at the analytics and see what we could find.



After looking at Analytics, we saw that a majority of their site’s visitors (over 58%) used Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer’s default search bar obviously employs Bing

The question is, does their organic traffic line up as well? 



The combined traffic from Yahoo and Bing is 8438. That is roughly 36% of the organic traffic to the site which is a little higher than average.

However, when we look at the organic rankings of this client, we can see that the average rankings for Bing are a lot lower than the average in Google.

Out of the 36 targeted keywords for this site, the average ranking in Google is position 11. In Bing the average position of the targeted keywords is 29. How much more traffic could the site receive by focusing a little more effort on the Bing side of search?

The trends:



After looking at other clients who target older demographics I found this trend was fairly consistent. 50-60% of their traffic used Internet Explorer. Yahoo and Bing organic traffic accounted for as much as 55% of their organic traffic, and Bing rankings were, on average, 20 positions behind.



Though Google may be our focus for a majority of our work, there are times, and clients that need to have Bing as a more central part of their SEO strategy.

When Bing is More Important than Google is a post by SEO expert David Malmborg. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

[jwplayer mediaid="22069"]

Initially the Panda update was called the farmer update by the search engine marketing industry because it seemed to be targeting content farms and low quality sites that were spamming the search results. It was originally launched in February 2011 and was credited with affecting up to 12% of all search results pages. The purpose behind Google Panda was to identify low quality content vs. high quality content and was named after one of Google’s lead engineers, Navneet Panda. He instituted machine learning into the algorithm to find patterns through low quality sites and high quality sites such as how much advertising is on a site, how much duplicate content is present, how much unique content is located on a site, analytical information and page load speed. If you feel your site has been negatively affected by the Panda update, it is important to look at the content found on each page of your website. First, see if your content is unique to your site or whether it is scraped from another site. Make sure that your content is unique as possible. Look at all the content on your site and remove those which are not unique. It is important to understand that Panda is a series of updates and Google is always updating the algorithm or the ranking search factors. If you haven’t seen effects from Panda on your site yet, there is a good chance that you might see them in the future. A good content review is a great way to be sure that your site remains Panda friendly.

What is the Panda Update? [Video FAQ Series] is a post by SEO expert David Malmborg. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

My very first blog post here at SEO.com was titled SEOs are Marketers Too. I don’t know if I realized how forward thinking this concept was at the time. It seemed pretty natural to me, but as I learned more about this industry, I realized that not many others saw it the same. However, today, if you don’t embrace the concept, you might be doing a poor job at SEO.

With Google and Bing using social media signals in ranking factors, and Google Panda slapping sites with poor content (or for just being generally poor) in addition to implementing machine learning so analytics, structure, and click-through-rates make a big difference, it is more obvious than ever that SEOs are not dealing with just search rankings and keywords.

You not only need to be knowledgeable about SEO and search engines in general, but it is vital that your SEO is fully integrated into your entire marketing strategy. In this post I try to graphically illustrate how search is center stage in online marketing.

Whether it is content marketing, company outreach or PR, site design and development, analytics, or even off-line marketing, it can all be greatly enhanced by the touch of an SEO.

The Search Centric Breakdown

Content Marketing

Let’s start with content marketing. Everyone knows that when it comes to search engines, content is king. But are you leveraging that content in the best way possible? Are you maximizing link value from this content? Whether it is content that will exist on an internal property/website or on a third-party site, the content should be maximized and your SEO should be aware that it is hitting the Internet. Guest posts, webinars, podcasts, videos, blogs, forum questions/answers, and whitepapers should all pass through your SEO to ensure that links are properly attributed to keywords and online promotion of the content is beneficial to search strategy.

Company Outreach

Company outreach is really becoming a vital part of online marketing teams. Typically handled by the PR department, director of communications, or some other fancy title, it is quickly blending with the SEO team because most company outreach is picked up by the search engines. Public relations is nothing new – the idea of telling stories has been around for more than a century – but the way of getting that story to the masses is completely different than 10 years ago. A good friend of SEO.com, Dan Bischoff mentions that PR is “just starting to see the light when it comes to SEO benefit. In fact, most PR agencies don’t even get it.”

Beyond that, PR doesn’t just cover press releases and news interviews. There’s this thing called social media that is taking businesses by storm. And that social media marketing also affects search rankings. So is it important for your SEO to be involved in your company outreach?

Site Design & Development

There is no easier way to say this than: Google is learning what good design is. And it plays into your search rankings.

If it looks and feels like a site from the ’90s it will be negatively affected by search engines. If it takes too long to load, it will be negatively affected. If the code is so bad that search engines choke on it, yeah, it will be negatively affected. Branding, conversion rates, and the number of ads on the site all affect the search engine rankings.

Because of the Panda update from Google, too many bad pages with useless content and poor structure will bring down your site. Your SEO needs to be involved in your site design, your site structure, and your development code, because they know what the search engines like.

Analytics

Rand Fishkin does a brilliant job explaining how Panda forever changed SEO. It can be summed up in two words: “Machine Learning.” This new, shiny piece of the algorithm gives Google the ability to start pulling patterns from analytic and quality identifiers. Conversion rates, bounce rates, time on site, and click-through rates can all be measured by Google. With machine learning, Panda then recalculates these metrics and compares and reshuffles the results based on what it learned from these users’ experience metrics.

Off-Line Marketing

In the future, I think Google will put a lot of money into figuring out what people are doing off line. This is already evident with their social media push through Google+, but I expect it to become more of a focus. This focus will also include knowing what businesses are doing off line as well. Find ways to let search engines know what you are doing off line.

Integrate your marketing campaign to take advantage of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other search engines. Integrate your off-line marketing with your PR team. The ultimate goal of your off-line campaigns should be to create brand advocates who will generate content on your behalf. Search engines see this, understand it, and promote you because of your fan base. Off-line marketing is enhanced by online aspects, and your SEO needs to be involved.

Feed the Search

Ultimately, Google and Bing are working hard to maintain position as “center of the web,” and the best thing to do is feed these search engines from all different angles. As an online marketing manager, it is crucially important that your marketing campaigns are search centric.

As an SEO, it is important to understand that you are a marketer as well. Successful SEOs maximize marketing campaigns to feed the search. It’s no longer just keywords and link mongering, it’s online marketing 2011.

Main Graphic Embed Code:

<a href="http://www.seo.com/blog/marketing-search-centric/"><img src="http://www.seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Search-Centric-Infographic-thumb.jpg" alt="Online Marketing around Search Marketing" width="575" class="" /></a>

Let me know if I’m missing anything, of if you have feedback on the graphic.

Is your Marketing Searchcentric? It Needs to Be is a post by SEO expert David Malmborg. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Yo peeps, tweeps and fbeeps!

SEOmoz is looking for a reason to come to Salt Lake. They’re calling it a #Mozcation. They are looking for the best place to go, but the obvious choice is SLC. I know it. I know you know it. Now we need to let SEOmoz know it.

I have tapped into the

• OSE API
• RavenTools API
• MajesticSEO API
• Authority Labs API
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Trends and Google insights
• and most definitely the Google Adwords Keyword Tool

and they all point to the obvious destination of the 8-0-1 (That is the area code for Salt Lake City).

I even shook my magic SEO 8 Ball and it said “ask me again.” And I DID – and it said “FO SHIZZLE MY NIZZLE.” (which I believe translates to “Most Definitely”)

This really isn't me.

In all my research, I have calculated that there are at least, but not limited to, 1,276 reasons (correlation != causation) why #Mozcation should be in SLC.

Below are a couple of my reasons for having #Mozcation here, what are yours? (Add your comments below, or comment on mine, because I know they’re research sound and proven.)

Giddy Up! (Sorry but you might not see the Comments if using Google Chrome)

1,276 Reasons #Mozcation is Coming to SLC is a post by SEO expert David Malmborg. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

How many times have you looked at an XML sitemap and said, “Why are these URLs in here?” One time, I was getting so frustrated doing an indexability audit for my client because Google wasn’t paying attention to canonicals for a variety of reasons. One in particular was the XML sitemap not pointing to the canonical, or clean version of the URL, but to the ugly URL with tracking parameters.

It begged the question, “If I tell Google of a page through the XML sitemap, and then immediately command that page to give credit to another version through the canonical, what will Google believe? If the site isn’t consistent, how is Google supposed to be consistent?“

Who uses a sitemap generator and calls it good? I know I did. Who audits that sitemap to make sure the generator picked only the good URLs? Hmm… How do you audit thousands and thousands of URLs from an XML sitemap?

In addition to this problem, earlier in March, SEOmoz did a Whiteboard Friday with Duane Forrester, the new senior project manager for Bing’s Webmaster Tools (embedded below). About eight minutes in, Forrester talked about how important it is to Bing to have a clean, even “hyper clean” sitemap. An XML sitemap must pass a quality threshold for Bing to recognize, use, and trust it. This means that you don’t want 404 pages, 301 or 302 redirects or URLs with different canonicals.

Again, the question is: How do I easily audit the quality of my XML sitemap?

Well, after finally putting some serious thought into it, here is one of the easiest ways for anyone to audit their XML sitemap:

Parse the XML sitemap

There are 100 ways to skin a cat, so if you can write a quick script to do this, by all means, go ahead. For the non-nerdy type, there is a pretty simple process using Excel to get all of the URLs from your XML file.

1. Go to the XML sitemap of your domain.
2. Right click on the page and select “Save As…”
   

 

3. Change the file extension from XML to HTML because Excel can parse and read HTML files only, the file should now be “sitemap.html”.
4. Open the sitemap.html file with Excel. Note: You may get a message to Open as Text” and that is OK. It should look like this:
   

Clean Up the Excel File

Here is the easiest way to strip everything else out of the file so you just have your URLs.

1. Add a row above all the content.
2. Apply filters to the top row of the sheet.
   
3. We are only interested in the tag so we will filter column C for only the tags.
   
4. Copy and paste all the URLs to a new sheet (keeps it clean).
5. Find and replace all the and end tags with blanks. You now have a clean list of all the URLs within your sitemap.
   

Audit the URLs

Now that you have a list of the URLs in your sitemap, it is time to audit them for 404s, 301 and 302 redirects and any canonical issues. I recently discovered this great tool for the job and I am so glad I did. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool has got to be one of the “must have” resources for an SEO. It is expensive, but well worth the price if you need to dig into a site (and it works for Mac and PC!). They do offer a free version that will allow you to crawl up to 500 URLs, which will work for this example. So now that we have a list we’re going to upload it to Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider.

1. Export your list from Excel as text file because the spider can only upload text files (It would be great if that changed .
2. Open up the SEO Spider and change from “Spider” mode to “List” mode.
   
3. Upload your file and hit “Start.”
4. PREPARE TO BE WOWED!

The Spider will crawl through your lists and return loads of valuable information (too much to explain in this post). For this exercise, it will list all the HTML status codes for each URL. You can easily filter by HTML status code to see 4XX type errors, 3XX redirects, server errors and more from your XML sitemap.

The tool will also create a list of canonicals that each URL has. I can then go through these to correct any listed URLs that are different from the canonical I want to report to the search engines. To make it extra fluffy, the tool has the ability to export everything back to Excel where you can slice and dice your reports to your heart’s content.

This is one of the easiest ways I know to audit an XML sitemap. If you have any other ways to make this easier please feel free to chime in and share.

1 Easy Way to Audit your XML Sitemap is a post by SEO expert David Malmborg. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Yesterday, Google launched the “farmer update,” an update to clean up spammy content farms from the SERPs.

Content farms such as eHow, eZine, Mahalo are effected drastically in their rankings.

Now let’s connect some dots!

• About.com is a content farm.
• About.com is not effected by farmer update (Not confirmed, just what I am seeing).
• About.com is owned by The New York Times …

What do you think? Conspiracy? Thoughts?

Tip of the hat to TJ

Content Farm Update Conspiracy? is a post by SEO expert David Malmborg. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

During Pubcon last November, Matt Cutts asked in his keynote how many SEOs where focusing on the snippet found in the search results and doing Click-Through-Rate optimization. Not too many people raised their hand. Matt grinned and said something to the effect that CTR optimization might be worth looking at.

Fact: Google’s search results are what separate it from all other search engines.

Google’s goal is to continually provide better, more relevant search results to answer visitors’ questions quicker. Some of the biggest enhancements Google is making to accomplish this goal are subtle-but-important changes to their results pages. None of them are new and mind blowing, but the common thread that runs through them can indicate – and maybe predict – where SEO is going.

Changes in the SERP

Site Previews: The Site Previews feature was launched in November last year, and even though they aren’t the biggest hit in the SERPs, I think it is the most telling change that Google has made. As shown in the screenshot below, the Site Preview shows a searcher the page before clicking it. One of the features highlighted by Cutts and Google was the content indicator that shows where the snippet came from.

The snippet indicator is intended to help visitors see why that page is relevant.

Rich Snippets: Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Google is pushing rich snippet codes. Though the concept of rich snippets isn’t new, Google is launching new snippets – the latest being a shopping snippet that gives reviews. Once again the purpose of the change in the SERPs is to help indicate that the page is relevant to the search query.

Location Indicator: The location indicator is one of the most praised changes by SEOers. It allows a person to change the location of a search to get results relevant to that location.
This can be important if you are looking for local businesses and news. Once again, they are trying to indicate that the site/page is more relevant to the search term. (Catching the idea yet?)

Title Updates: Last week I blogged about a noticeable trend where titles in the SERPs are not matching up with the page title. This was not a new change to Google, but many of us are seeing it more often. Much like a meta-description, if the title doesn’t seem relevant to the content of the page it will be updated by Google to match the search query. And where does the new title come from? The content and headers found on the page.

The Common Thread

The point I am trying to make is that each change Google releases seems to pull and rely more on the relevant content of the page.

• The snippet highlighter shows the relevant content of the page.
• Rich snippets show the unique code that makes the page relevant.
• The location indicator helps provide localized relevant content.
• New SERPs title comes from more relevant content.

Predicting Google

In this same Pubcon session, Matt Cutts said that SEOs who try to stay “ahead” of Google will be the most successful. I think that because of recent events like JC Penney getting penalized and other companies gaming links, Google is showing strong indications that content relevance, and even Brand Authority, are valuable ways to increase your search results.

Content is King … Again

We may just be seeing SEO coming full circle where content and relevancy is more important than links. This time it is much more sophisticated then keyword placement, though. Now on-page optimization will rely on indicating relevancy with content, code, third party reviews, relevant rich media, company information like addresses, contact information, and much more. I feel we are coming on to a day where SEOers will become site marketers rather than link brokers. I look forward to the day.

Let me know of any other indicators you are seeing that show the importance of on-page relevancy.

Changing Landscape in Google’s SERPs May Indicate a Shift in Relevancy is a post by SEO expert David Malmborg. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

_____ UPDATE _____
So it has been shown to me by my personal mentor, D-Patt, that Matt Cutts discusses this in a video a little while back. The last 30 Seconds of the video speaks to me (obviously), and I would assume to many, since I showed my examples to a number of people who hadn’t seen this before. It talks about how everyone is familiar with Google changing the snippet, or description, but not many webmasters are familiar with the fact that Google will change the Title when necessary.

However, not to be distraught about it, this post leads into a great followup I plan on writing today. Because even though the concept is not new, I think it may be happening more often.

So with that, I leave you with the Matt Cutts’ video, and my own “discovery” of Google changing the Title tags.

____________________

What if Google treated the page title like a meta-description within their results pages? What if they changed it, used content or a header as the title that appeared in the results?

This would be game changing.

And I believe they are already testing the idea.

Is There Another Explanation for This?

I have noticed (more then once and with multiple websites) that Google is NOT displaying the title tag in the SERPs. They are ignoring the page title and providing their own title that they may deem to be more relevant.

I’m not sure why this is happening, I think Google may be just testing the idea. But if it is happening, it could be a scary thought.

Don’t Believe Me? See For Yourself:

Try searching for “Forex Strategy”.

Look at the third result: www.forexstrategysecrets.com

Notice the title in the SERPs: “Forex Trading Strategy.”

Now look at the actual title of the page: “Forex Trading Strategies | Forex System | Forex Trading Course”.

Further insight

When this was first brought to my attention in November, this page didn’t have a title tag and was still ranking on the first page for “Forex Strategy.” When you performed the above search you would get the same results (same title, nearly the same position).

At the same time the results for the term “Forex Trading” had the exact same page but with a different title: “Forex Trading.”

Do you see the problem? Same page, no “meta-title,” but the search results for different keywords returned different titles.

Later that week a title tag was added, but after nearly 2 months Google is still not using the new title in the search results for “Forex Strategy”.

Where did they get that title?

The term “Forex Trading Strategy” is the first part of the H1 heading, and it may be helping to dictate the title. The funny thing is, the term “forex strategy” is not used at all in any of the content of the page. So where is Google getting the title? That, I can’t really answer, and all other examples are completely random as well.

This isn’t the Only Occurrence

I have seen this with multiple sites, in many situations, and in different Google search engines (France, and Malaysia). I’ve noticed it with pages of global eCommerce sites, small tile stores. It’s happened with home pages and deep pages. I have seen the source of the title vary from the URL, an H1 header, or something else where I can’t make the connection.

How would SEO change?

If Google started ignoring our optimized title tags –- the #1 element of on-page optimization –- and treated it like the meta-description, how would that change the way we work? It might be worth thinking about, because the day may be coming.

More than anything else, I think this will increase the importance of on-page relevance, and optimization. I have a second post coming out with more detail on this thought.

What do you think? Anyone else notice this? Does anyone else have an example they would like to share? Please comment.

Evidence Google is Ignoring the Title Tag is a post by SEO expert David Malmborg. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Debate Follow-up: The Necessity of the 301

Photo by B Tal on flickr

For those who missed the first post, here is the debate: Are 301 redirects of the non-www version of the site needed, or still considered best practice? If not, what do you recommend? Is the Canonical replacing the need for the 301?

After reading the responses and looking further into the situation, I’m going to share 4 reasons the 301 redirect of the www/non-www is a must.

Get robots to the right address

One of the fundamental elements in search engine optimization is making the indexation of a website as easy as possible. That is why we create the Robots.txt file and the XML sitemap. I think the 301 redirect of the non-www to the www or visa-versa, is on the same level of creating ease for the search engines.

Many expressed this, and I agree that the search engines are getting smarter and don’t need the redirect in place to understand what is going on. However, I am a believer that you are rewarded for making their job easier. There are other ways to help the Google and Bing know which version of the site is correct — Webmaster Tools being one. However, nothing is more telling to the search engine then the 301 redirect. Why make the search engines guess?

Links to the Right Address

There are many who worry about not getting the full link juice of redirected anchor text links. However, I think Kris Roadruck hit the nail on the head in his comment when he said, “Doing [the redirect] can help would-be linkers know which is the proper address to use when linking.”

Many times when I build a link for my blog or for a client, I simply copy and paste the URL straight out of the address bar. If the 301 redirect isn’t in place, there is know way to tell if you should build links to the www or non-www version of the site. Even if you believe the link juice doesn’t get divided between the different versions of the site, getting the right link from the beginning is still ideal and should prove to be more beneficial.

Where the Link Juice Flows

Having the canonical in place is not a good enough solution to simply replace the 301. If you are skeptical of the link juice being passed through a 301, than I would think that you would be even more skeptical of the link juice that passes through a canonical tag.

The canonical makes for a good safety net overall — if you forget to redirect the /index.html or something to the home page, for example. But when it comes to how the search engines treat a canonical, I tend to be just as leery as Ian Lurie. For one, the canonical tag is newer to search. Not all engines are treating the canonical equally. Sure Google says its almost equal to a 301, but that isn’t how Bing sees it.

And Quick Note on Branding

This may not relate exactly to the debate, but since I received a comment about it from Bill French I thought I would talk about the topic of branding. Although Bill may be correct that the non-www version of the site is cleaner, and the www is no longer necessary, I really believe that having the www in place will be more beneficial for link building purposes.

This is why: like I said before, I copy and paste almost all of my URLs from the address bar. However, when it is a top level domain, and I’m pretty confident in its spelling, I’ll type them out. I am so ingrained in typing the www into the hyperlink, I rarely go back to check if it is right or not. Once again link juice aside, you probably have a better chance of getting exact links to the site when you use the www.

En Fin

Overall, the 301 is such a simple thing to implement, that I can’t see why anyone would not put it in place. Overall, I think the pros of redirecting the non-www version of the site to the www out weigh the cons.

Special Thank You

I wanted to give a special thanks to all those that participated in the debate (Nothing says thank you like a link):
Kris Roadruck
Ash Buckles
Rick Hardman
Matt Siltala
Andy (Didn’t provide me a link)
Jill Whalen
Hugo from Zetaq
David Leonhardt
Sam McRoberts
Jacob Stoops
Kelly Hammer
Bill French
John Andrews
knutselen
Michael @ Email Marketing

4 Reasons Why the 301 is a Must is a post by SEO expert David Malmborg. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

On my personal blog, I have a little section called “David’s Dilemma.” I thought I’d bring my dilemma to the SEO.com blog. It’s a pretty simple concept, I ask a question, and you leave an awesome comment. Remember this only works if you leave a comment.

photo by Marco Bellucci on Flickr

Back Story

Last week, I wrote a post about quick and easy ways to see if a page was optimized. My second point was about checking for the 301 redirects of the non-www version of the site. It’s simple and in most cases it is one of the first things that an SEO would do to optimize a site, right? However, I was a little surprised about some of the comments I got: “The 301 redirect from the non-www to the www is actually not necessary in most cases these days.”

Now I know the engines are getting smarter and don’t need the 301s in place. But really, are we not even recommending it anymore? Hence the dilemma:

The Debate

Are 301 redirects of the non-www version of the site needed, or still considered best practice? If not, what do you recommend?

Different Idea

One of the commenter’s gave this idea:

“We are working in a linking environment where 301’s have been noted to pass no anchor text and possibly less link juice than believed. If you take this into account, you might see that automatically 301ing www/non-www URLs could reduce a site’s link juice over time.”

Instead, they recommend leaving out the 301s and implement the canonicals.

Let the Debate Begin

Ok, so now is the time for you to respond, and leave your mark on history . Next week, I’ll mull over all that you have to say, and give my fully educated opinion on the subject.

Thanks in advance,
David

Debate: The Necessity of the 301 is a post by SEO expert David Malmborg. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.