Earlier this year there was a lot of talk about a possible Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. As we very well know the deal did not push through. This time we can be sure that Microsoft is a lot happier having finally inked an important deal with Yahoo.

Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a 10-year agreement stating that Yahoo will be using Microsoft’s Bing as its search engine. In turn Yahoo will be the one taking care of the search advertisements appearing next to the Bing results both for Microsoft and Yahoo.

This is big news indeed because Yahoo Search will no longer be as we know it. The partnership is obviously strategically advantageous to both since they still lag behind the search giant Google. Microsoft did see an increase in market share when they rolled out Bing but ended up making a dent not on Google’s market share but on Yahoo’s. With Yahoo Search’s users migrating to Microsoft it is clear why Yahoo would want to use Bing to power their own engine. As for Microsoft this is a good sign that , as /a>, the tide is finally turning and “that things may be finally starting to look up for Microsoft.”

Google of course be on its toes with this news but since they have never been one to rest on their laurels it won’t be a challenge they will really be too afraid of. Add to this fact that search users, being deeply ingrained in their habits, will likely not be migrating to Bing in droves despite the new deal. I believe that it would take something more revolutionary than Bing for people to feel that the effort of shedding their old habits (however little that effort may be) is worth the reward of using a search engine (or whatever it maybe be called in the future) they are not familiar nor comfortable with.

In the meantime what is great for SEOs about this news is that with Microsoft and Yahoo using just one engine we now have one less engine to keep track of. At the same time this also means that we’ll have to ramp up our efforts in learning more about Bing and what makes it tick. We cannot discount its combined market share.

a

/a>

Earlier this year there was a lot of talk about a possible Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. As we very well know the deal did not push through. This time we can be sure that Microsoft is a lot happier having finally inked an important deal with Yahoo.

Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a 10-year agreement stating that Yahoo will be using Microsoft’s Bing as its search engine. In turn Yahoo will be the one taking care of the search advertisements appearing next to the Bing results both for Microsoft and Yahoo.

This is big news indeed because Yahoo Search will no longer be as we know it. The partnership is obviously strategically advantageous to both since they still lag behind the search giant Google. Microsoft did see an increase in market share when they rolled out Bing but ended up making a dent not on Google’s market share but on Yahoo’s. With Yahoo Search’s users migrating to Microsoft it is clear why Yahoo would want to use Bing to power their own engine. As for Microsoft this is a good sign that , as /a>, the tide is finally turning and “that things may be finally starting to look up for Microsoft.”

Google of course be on its toes with this news but since they have never been one to rest on their laurels it won’t be a challenge they will really be too afraid of. Add to this fact that search users, being deeply ingrained in their habits, will likely not be migrating to Bing in droves despite the new deal. I believe that it would take something more revolutionary than Bing for people to feel that the effort of shedding their old habits (however little that effort may be) is worth the reward of using a search engine (or whatever it maybe be called in the future) they are not familiar nor comfortable with.

In the meantime what is great for SEOs about this news is that with Microsoft and Yahoo using just one engine we now have one less engine to keep track of. At the same time this also means that we’ll have to ramp up our efforts in learning more about Bing and what makes it tick. We cannot discount its combined market share.

a

/a>

Visit link:
/a>

%excerpt.%

More:
/a>

img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-766″ title=”worli-sea-face-swami-stream” src=”http://seo2.0.onreact.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/worli-sea-face-swami-stream.jpg” alt=”worli-sea-face-swami-stream” width=”500″ height=”375″ />

Sea image: Creative Commons License by /a>

I’ve took a few days off this week on the coast of the Baltic Sea. We just went there without booking a hotel or something. I don’t know about elsewhere but in Germany the term apartment (ferienwohnung) is one of the most competitive tourism related keywords. In fact I started my full time SEO career back in 2004 optimizing for it.

When we arrived we were already in a hurry to find a place for the night and to go to the beach before sunset so we just drove around looking for an apartment. Most apartments were of course “occupied”. Then we noticed a huge “bed and breakfast” (in English) sign. That was it and a mobile number on it. Most of the apartments just sported a small sign saying apartment in German and displaying a local number.

After stopping I tried two of them because they looked nicer from the outside but to no avail, there was nobody on the phone. In contrast the mobile number led my to a friendly and forthcoming guy who quickly offered me a room tight there and at the same time called his employee to come over right away which she did 15 minutes later. Now guess where we stayed!

Half an hour later a man from Norway asked us about the room so we weren’t the only ones who noticed the sign.

Afterwards I amazed at how similar i behaved to the average searcher. So I want to tell you 5 things I learned about SEO from taking a few days off:

1. Be on top! Be number #1, be the first one to catch the attention. Show the biggest sign in the boldest letters.
2. Make your banner, landing page or sales page as simple as possible.
3. Write in English to reach an international audience.
4. Offer potential customers a simple and reliable way to reach you, here the mobile number.
5. Be there quick, react swiftly and minimize the fuss. Time is money so to say.

Then we went to the beach. Next post: 5 things swimming in the cold Baltic Sea taught me about SEO

Related posts:

1. /a>
2. /a>

img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-766″ title=”worli-sea-face-swami-stream” src=”http://seo2.0.onreact.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/worli-sea-face-swami-stream.jpg” alt=”worli-sea-face-swami-stream” width=”500″ height=”375″ />

Sea image: Creative Commons License by /a>

I’ve took a few days off this week on the coast of the Baltic Sea. We just went there without booking a hotel or something. I don’t know about elsewhere but in Germany the term apartment (ferienwohnung) is one of the most competitive tourism related keywords. In fact I started my full time SEO career back in 2004 optimizing for it.

When we arrived we were already in a hurry to find a place for the night and to go to the beach before sunset so we just drove around looking for an apartment. Most apartments were of course “occupied”. Then we noticed a huge “bed and breakfast” (in English) sign. That was it and a mobile number on it. Most of the apartments just sported a small sign saying apartment in German and displaying a local number.

After stopping I tried two of them because they looked nicer from the outside but to no avail, there was nobody on the phone. In contrast the mobile number led my to a friendly and forthcoming guy who quickly offered me a room tight there and at the same time called his employee to come over right away which she did 15 minutes later. Now guess where we stayed!

Half an hour later a man from Norway asked us about the room so we weren’t the only ones who noticed the sign.

Afterwards I amazed at how similar i behaved to the average searcher. So I want to tell you 5 things I learned about SEO from taking a few days off:

1. Be on top! Be number #1, be the first one to catch the attention. Show the biggest sign in the boldest letters.
2. Make your banner, landing page or sales page as simple as possible.
3. Write in English to reach an international audience.
4. Offer potential customers a simple and reliable way to reach you, here the mobile number.
5. Be there quick, react swiftly and minimize the fuss. Time is money so to say.

Then we went to the beach. Next post: 5 things swimming in the cold Baltic Sea taught me about SEO

Related posts:

1. /a>
2. /a>

Originally posted here:
/a>

%excerpt.%

View original post here:
/a>

Early this month I promised a post detailing the uses of the # in SEO. Here it is.

As I have mentioned before the hash is often overlooked, if at all used, by SEOs. A very unfortunate thing because it can not only help solve duplicate content issues but help you consolidate the link juice from all the URLs with duplicate content. How is this possible?

According to Randfish’s whiteboard Friday videos /a> and /a> the power of the hash lies in the fact that search engines ignore anything in the URL after the hash sigh. For example if you have a URL such as www.example.com/#10, instead of indexing the contents of this specific URL it will instead point to and index the contents of www.example.com. This is a very useful thing in SEO because this way you can get search engines to ignore pages whose content you don’t want to be indexed such as those with duplicate content. This is especially important if you have massive duplicates because all the links pointing to URLs with hashes will instead pass the link juice to the main URL, which in our case is www.example.com.

As Rand said some applications of the hash include:

• canonicalization;
• management of affiliate links; and
• ability to show limited content.

Of course with every good thing comes a problem. One potential problem with the use of the # is that for single page version of content broken into sections/chapters using the # will result in suceeding sections not being indexed. For example if we have a tutorial on SEO you can expect that it will be long. To make it easy for those that prefer reading the tutorial as a single page we can chop down the tutorial into sections. Hence we can get the following URLs:

www.tutorial.com (This will probably contain the introduction)
www.tutorial.com/#topic1 (will contain the first topic)
www.tutorial.com/#topic2 (will contain the next topic and so on)

As you can see the good thing about this is that link juice from links to the other  sections of the tutorial will instead be passed on to the main URL, www.tutorial.com. The problem with this is that since the search engines will ignore anything after the # it will NOT index the content of all the sections with the hash in their URLs. In essence only the introduction’s content (or whatever is in www.tutorial.com) will be indexed. As Rand pointed out though this shouldn’t be a real problem IF all your target keywords are already found in the introduction, which will of course require conciseness and good keyword selection on your part.

a

/a>

Early this month I promised a post detailing the uses of the # in SEO. Here it is.

As I have mentioned before the hash is often overlooked, if at all used, by SEOs. A very unfortunate thing because it can not only help solve duplicate content issues but help you consolidate the link juice from all the URLs with duplicate content. How is this possible?

According to Randfish’s whiteboard Friday videos /a> and /a> the power of the hash lies in the fact that search engines ignore anything in the URL after the hash sigh. For example if you have a URL such as www.example.com/#10, instead of indexing the contents of this specific URL it will instead point to and index the contents of www.example.com. This is a very useful thing in SEO because this way you can get search engines to ignore pages whose content you don’t want to be indexed such as those with duplicate content. This is especially important if you have massive duplicates because all the links pointing to URLs with hashes will instead pass the link juice to the main URL, which in our case is www.example.com.

As Rand said some applications of the hash include:

• canonicalization;
• management of affiliate links; and
• ability to show limited content.

Of course with every good thing comes a problem. One potential problem with the use of the # is that for single page version of content broken into sections/chapters using the # will result in suceeding sections not being indexed. For example if we have a tutorial on SEO you can expect that it will be long. To make it easy for those that prefer reading the tutorial as a single page we can chop down the tutorial into sections. Hence we can get the following URLs:

www.tutorial.com (This will probably contain the introduction)
www.tutorial.com/#topic1 (will contain the first topic)
www.tutorial.com/#topic2 (will contain the next topic and so on)

As you can see the good thing about this is that link juice from links to the other  sections of the tutorial will instead be passed on to the main URL, www.tutorial.com. The problem with this is that since the search engines will ignore anything after the # it will NOT index the content of all the sections with the hash in their URLs. In essence only the introduction’s content (or whatever is in www.tutorial.com) will be indexed. As Rand pointed out though this shouldn’t be a real problem IF all your target keywords are already found in the introduction, which will of course require conciseness and good keyword selection on your part.

a

/a>

Go here to see the original:
/a>

Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs all went out of beta last week. The funny thing is that I didn’t notice it till my husband pointed it out to me this weekend, which is more proof that Alex Chitu was right when he said, “If you think there’s something missing from Gmail’s logo, enable the “Back to Beta” feature from Gmail Labs to bring back the familiar logo. It’s that easy to pretend that nothing happened.” As further proof, who among you noticed it without someone (or some article) pointing the fact out to you?

Anyway the reason why I’m writing this post isn’t to just figure out how many people noticed the non-beta status of these Google apps. I am writing to find out what everyone thinks about my theory that the reason why these apps actually came out of beta is not only because the apps are “fully mature” but also because Google will now be shifting their focus on their next big product – /a>. Google Wave looks to me like an amalgam of the Gmail, Google Docs, and Twitter – but different and better. As Lars Rasmussen put it they designed Google Wave with one question in mind, “How would email look like if it were invented today and not 40 years ago.”

If you haven’t heard of Google Wave yet you can watch the preview below. I doubt that Gmail and other email services will become obsolete that fast, especially with most people being pretty resistant to change, but it is clear (please do watch the video to see what I mean) that Wave will be revolutionary not only for developers and businesses (focus on the open protocol used by Wave) but also for normal people in terms of the way we communicate. This takes real time to the next level, which can only be REAL real time. Sounds weird? Again, I urge you to watch the video.

a

/a>

Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs all went out of beta last week. The funny thing is that I didn’t notice it till my husband pointed it out to me this weekend, which is more proof that Alex Chitu was right when he said, “If you think there’s something missing from Gmail’s logo, enable the “Back to Beta” feature from Gmail Labs to bring back the familiar logo. It’s that easy to pretend that nothing happened.” As further proof, who among you noticed it without someone (or some article) pointing the fact out to you?

Anyway the reason why I’m writing this post isn’t to just figure out how many people noticed the non-beta status of these Google apps. I am writing to find out what everyone thinks about my theory that the reason why these apps actually came out of beta is not only because the apps are “fully mature” but also because Google will now be shifting their focus on their next big product – /a>. Google Wave looks to me like an amalgam of the Gmail, Google Docs, and Twitter – but different and better. As Lars Rasmussen put it they designed Google Wave with one question in mind, “How would email look like if it were invented today and not 40 years ago.”

If you haven’t heard of Google Wave yet you can watch the preview below. I doubt that Gmail and other email services will become obsolete that fast, especially with most people being pretty resistant to change, but it is clear (please do watch the video to see what I mean) that Wave will be revolutionary not only for developers and businesses (focus on the open protocol used by Wave) but also for normal people in terms of the way we communicate. This takes real time to the next level, which can only be REAL real time. Sounds weird? Again, I urge you to watch the video.

a

/a>

Read more:
/a>