Google owns the search engine world and Bill Gates is not happy about that, so Microsoft has been positioning itself to challenge the upstart rival on several fronts. The two are direct competitors for several cloud computing and SaaS solutions (Software as a Service) amongst others, but it is the bitter, to-the-death fight over the search engine market which is attracting mainstream attention.
Microsoft’s Bing is now providing the engine power for Yahoo! search users in Canada and the United States.
We shouldn’t underestimate the significance of what is going on. When this century is out, the Microsoft/Google business showdown is going to be analyzed and used as a business case study in how to gut a competitor.
Google commands a 65.8% share of the US search market, Yahoo! takes 17.1% and Microsoft’s Bing has a lowly 11% (according to Comscore’s July 2010 data). Continue reading →
We recently wrote on the Bing/Yahoo! merger deal which is Microsoft’s direct challenge to Google’s search engine and online advertising dominance. Just as that deal moves forward and North American Yahoo! users are now having Bing power their search results, a newcomer arrives, complete with Venture Capital funding.
Ten years ago a leading bank took me in as a customer and gave me a stack of marketing literature and business guides and one immediately caught my eye – it baldy advised me NOT to waste my time and money on engaging SEO experts to get my website ranked more highly because my website (if I had one) would rise to the top “naturally” as long as I had a good site offering what visitors wanted.
Without link building you will not get to the top of the search engine rankings for a common keyword or phrase (and here we are referring to external or inbound links which are linking to your site, not the ones you use to link to external resources and sites).
Negative ranking factors are those techniques or tactics which are utilized by a website but rather than enhancing ranking, they actually do the opposite – they result in ranking penalties. No-one would deliberately set out to achieve bad rankings for their website, but there are SEO practitioners and SEO techniques which will damage your site’s ranking and harm your online reputation.
Depending on who you talk to, Keyword Density is either extremely important, or it has no relevance at all and is a myth which is pimped by the ignorant.
There are numerous SEO myths out there which have been around since the dawn of html, but we have been getting more than a few question focusing around these four topic areas: personalized search, keyword density, external links and content.
We posted back in September on 
Some marketers claim there is certain traffic segment that cannot be converted; sometimes this is borne from basic maths looking at the conversion ratios, because it stands to reason you won’t sell to every single visitor. Where this claim breaks down is when marketers advise there are certain segments that will not convert, or worse still, that conversion rates for any segment are not within your own control.
