If your looking for something new to put that spark into your business’ SEO, changing your business name isn’t an easy direction to head. Changing your business name is going to require a lot of SEO work just to maintain your current Google ranking and user traffic. Be forewarned, unless your willing to put in some hours of SEO for your company name change, you could be looking at penalties from Google, lost customers, less traffic and confused users.

Don’t Touch that Domain Name

Your domain name is going to hold a lot of your search engine traffic, so switching that domain name and your going to take a serious dip in Google rankings. Changing your domain name will result in having to accumulate new links and social sharing signals. You’re going to need a good internet marketing strategy in place, like a PPC marketing, to get that website traffic going again. This is going to mean more money and time from you.

Keep Current with Your Business Contact Info

Along with the many things Google does, using an algorithm to correlate phone numbers, addresses and names (or NAP) to your business is one of them. Correlating these factors will determine your rank for local search inquires. In order to keep your rankings up there your going to need to update your Google+ Local, Bing Local, Yahoo Local accounts, and any other local listing account.

You’ll have to make sure all your old local listings are updated because old business listing can show as duplicate content and NAP corruption to Google, thus hurting your traffic and rankings more. If you change your business phone number you have to make sure that is also updated or you’ll face the same problems. Also (though it may seem obvious) make sure you change the name on your website, this is probably the easiest change you’ll make but a vital one to say the least.

Tag up that Title

If your going through the whole trouble of changing your business name you might as well put some keywords and/or locations of your business in their. By incorporating names and location in the title your increasing your SEO value.

An example of this would be “Coronado Eye Doctor”. Also take into account the title for social media benefits, does it have a ring to it?

Keep The Customer Informed

With all these changes and updates going on make sure that your customer gets the heads up on whats going on. On your website and/or your facebook page give your customers an alert that you’ll be changing your business name soon. This will help lessen confusion and keep those loyal customers.

So if your dead set on a new business name, be prepared for what might seem like a daunting task and hope that new business name is a winner.

Bing announced another launch and redesign of their search engine today. After making their search results cleaner and more accessible last week, Bing is turning its focus to a social search experience. So what is Bing offering besides new PPC advertising and display marketing tactics? Over the next few weeks before Bing officially goes live with the changes, a new three column design called Core Search, Snapshot and Sidebar panes. Today, we will be focusing on the new Social Sidebar.

Social Sidebar

Perhaps Bing’s most exciting and worthwhile change is their new social sidebar. Whenever you do a search (depending on how relevant Bing decides the search is) you will trigger a list of elements that correlate to your social network. The four elements that go into the search inquire are these listed: Ask Friends, Friends Who Might Know, People Who Know, Activity Feed. So what the heck do these even mean? Let’s dive down a little bit further.

Friends Who Might Know: When signed into your Facebook account, Bing will capture all of your friends’ interests and will suggest a variety of friends that might know about the subject you are looking for. For example, if I did a search for Pictures of San Diego, Bing could possibly go through your friends pictures and find tags that relate to San Diego.

Ask Friends: After performing your search, a box that’s connected to your Facebook account will ask if you want to ask your friends the same question. This is similar to “status updates”, but is now shown as a “question asked”

People Who Know: So far Facebook has been the only talked about network, so what if you wanted to use Bing’s rival Google +? Easy, since Google + consists of public pages then the profiles are free to crawl. When conducting a People Who Know search, Bing goes through not only your friend’s profiles but through every profile until it finds a list of People Who Know.

Activity: Activity is interesting because this is a continuous running feed of questions that you asked or have been asked by those you know. This is similar to status feeds or tweets from people you are following on twitter.

In all these are some pretty cool changes that will officially be seen within the next few days to weeks. Let us know what you think about the changes.

If you haven’t used Bing within the past day and a half then you probably haven’t noticed the new design change on the search results page. In order to

“find the results you want faster” Bing is giving us a brief look at their one of many redesigns. The approach Bing has taken is a much cleaner, less

cluttered search result page that contains a more polished look even for internet marketing users. As you can see the new design has removed the left

sidebar that previously held related searches, search history, and narrow by region. However, these haven’t been removed completely. Related searches are now seen right above the pagination at the bottom of the page. You will find a separate list of related searches on the right-sidebar. The old navigation bar is also being replaced with minimalistic search icon bar that gives you a list of options starting with; web, images, videos, maps,
shopping, health, local, and more.

ComScore reported December 2011 U.S. search engine rankings this past week with, to no surprise, Google still in the lead. On a more noteworthy finding is Bing surpassing Yahoo, coming in at the number two spot. When Bing launched as a search engine in June 2009, they were at a mere 8.4 percent search engine market share. As of this past year they now account for 15.1 percent of internet searches.

Google still dominates the market with 65.9 percent market share, and Yahoo dropped to the number three spot at 14.5 percent.

The reported search engine rankings for December 2011, according to comScore, are stated below:

• Google – 65.9% (up from 65.4% in November 2011)
• Bing – 15.1% (+.1 change from November)
• Yahoo – 14.5% (down from 15.1%)
• Ask – remaining at 2.9%
• AOL – remaining at 1.6%

More than 18.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in December, which is a two percent increase from November. 12 billion searches were placed on Google sites, 2.7 billion were through Bing (up 2 percent), and 2.6 billion on Yahoo! Sites. We are anxious to see if Bing will remain in the number two spot in following months, and maybe even further the gap with Yahoo searches.

Over a year ago, beginning on August 24, 2010, Yahoo! switched over to using Bing’s search results. Within the first week of the merger, the company Experian Hitwise, a leading global online competitive intelligence service, stated that the new Yahoo-Bing relationship had a combined 24.56% of the U.S. market share. At this time, Google was still maintaining a U.S. market share of almost 72%.

Now, fast-forward one year to August 2011. According to Experian Hitwise, the Yahoo-Bing relationship has gained just over 4% of the U.S. market share. This pushes their total U.S. market share from 24.56% to 28.99% in just over one year’s time. In this same period of time, Google has seen their total U.S. market share decrease by over 6%. They went from having a U.S. market share of 71.59% in August 2010 to 65.09% in August 2011.

So what is causing this increase in market share by Yahoo-Bing? Although there’s no clear-cut answer, there seems to be a few contributing factors. The Yahoo-Bing return-on-investment for advertisers has increased by over 10% in the last year while the Google Adwords ROI fell by roughly 12% in the same time. Also, according to Experian Hitwise, “Yahoo! Search and Bing achieved the highest success rates in…2011.  This means that for both search engines, more than 81 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website.  Google achieved a success rate of 66 percent.”

For now, the Yahoo-Bing market share gains seem rather minimal, but they are at least heading in the right direction. Do you see this shift in market share continuing?

Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google +, have recently begun to affect what comes up in your search engine results. The problem is not that people don’t understand that social media affects SEO, but how it affects SEO. Google released Google Social Search tool back in October 2009 and made it available to all users in January 2010. This tool basically allows you to find articles written by people you know and trust, the same basic concept as following someone on Twitter. What people really want to know is; how much does social media news really affect search engine results?

Back in December of 2010 Google’s Matt Cutts stated, “I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn’t use ‘social’ as a signal, and at the time, we did not use that as a signal, but now, we’re taping this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal.” Social media has fit its way into SEO and has started to alter traditional organic search results. If you are logged into your Google + while searching for something on Google, your search results will be different than if you were not logged into a Google account. If one of your friends has a web content that is related to the topic you are searching for, then Google gives that web page higher placement on SERPs. Google and Bing have both admitted that they look at their users’ social authority when making search engine ranking decisions.

Social media can influence search results depending on the number of times an author’s content is shared on a social networking site. If you are not connected with any social media sites, do not fret because there are steps that you can take to change this. To get more traffic through social media, you first want to build a presence on a social media site and stay up to date with your followers. Optimize your website for social media sharing, for example if you are based in WordPress you can install the Sharebar plugin to enable sharing. Lastly, you are going to want to constantly encourage your followers/views to share your content through other social media tools. Just because social media is booming doesn’t mean that traditional SEO is irrelevant. There will always be that group of people that don’t prefer social media sites, so traffic for non-social media site users will not completely diminish, but realize that traditional SEO is beginning dwindle, so changing with the times is not a bad idea.

For more information on this topic visit:  Quicksprout.com

Google is always taking steps to distance themselves from other competitors. Google Chrome was developed with the goal to outrank Internet Explorer as the leading web browser, but over time Internet Explorer has kept its popularity and its number one rank as the leading web browser. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been and continues to be to be a major benefit for Microsoft and an edge over Google.

Google’s use of Apple’s Safari, Firefox, and Google Chrome combined consists of approximately 48% of all web browser usage, while IE takes the remaining 52%. According to an updated report by Chitika, a company that provides data analysis, 75% of Bing’s traffic is a result from IE users, while only 40% of visitors to Google Search use IE.  Although Microsoft could use Internet Explorer as a weapon against Google, it would not prove beneficial considering they would lose that fraction of web surfers who visit and utilize Google Search. But if Microsoft did ever decided to lockout Google, it would definitely hurt Google a lot more than Microsoft.

People might think that Bing is doing so well because it’s the default search engine for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but that’s actually not the case. Computer manufacturers typically set up most default browsers themselves, based on who invests the most in buying default browser positioning. Google has been aggressive in this area up until around 2008 when Microsoft took over and led most of the remaining deals. But browser positioning is only one of Internet Explorers attributes. Internet Explorer’s popularity is not only credited to its easy use and brand name reputation, but its ability to remain the way users like it. If updating from Internet Explorer 8 to Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft not only provides the user with an improved browser, but also transfers over old settings from your previous browser. As Internet Explorer’s dominance continues, Microsoft will continue to hold bragging rights over Google in the web browser field.

Baidu, already controlling 80% of the search market in China, has decided to add a new aspect to their search engine. Since Baidu is already the leading search engine in China, they have decided to expand their horizons, implementing English-language search results to their arsenal.

Baidu has been working on this for a year now, but its first attempt at finding someone to run the English portion of the site did not go as planned. Baidu had originally teamed up with Google to run the English-language portion of their search engine, but Google objected to following Baidu’s censorship guidelines. While Google ultimately backed out of the deal with Baidu, it still owned up to 19% of the search market share in China.

Since the Google-Baidu matchup did not work out, Microsoft took the opportunity to fill Google’s spot. Baidu has publicly announced its partnership with Microsoft and reported that any English searches run through Baidu will show up marked with the Bing logo. Although Google runs the show as the number one search site, Baidu’s new affiliate company Microsoft has upped Google this time around. Google’s failure to comply with Baidu’s censorship guidelines might have been a decision they will soon regret. Baidu’s hope is that with its Microsoft partnership there’ll be no need for anyone to use Google’s search engine in China since Baidu is already the leading search engine company within the country.

For more information about this topic, visit:

• Search Engine Land
• Computer World
• Forbes
• Slashgear

What Google lacks in catchy television commercials, it more than makes up for in service.  Coming off the heels of those surprisingly memorable television ads, Microsoft’s Bing experiment has carved out a respectable slice of the search market share but hardly gained any traction against the Internet behemoth we all know as our homepage or as Google. Google’s share of the market floats at 65%, changing minimally from month to month, with Yahoo (17%) and Bing (13%) lagging so far behind their combined share doesn’t equal half of Google’s total share.  The search engine holds an unassailable position atop the search engine hierarchy.

This is perhaps a result of Google offering users more than just search results – Google has become a one-stop shop, affording users the ability to check their mail, get directions, watch the latest viral video, find up to date news sourced more than a thousand times, and even translate the website for that hotel in Reykjavik, Iceland, which doesn’t seem to have an English button.

6 Slick Tricks

Nonetheless, most Internet surfers are unaware of the many tools Google provides that does not warrant an insular tab at the top the page.  By entering specific codes into the search field, you can manipulate Google to do whatever it is you want it to.  Here are six of my favorite unknown tricks of the trade:

1. Spell Check:

Google is perhaps the fastest way to check your spelling.  By typing your word into the search field, Google will confirm a million times over the correct spelling or suggest an alternate.  Likewise, you can enter the “define” operator to instruct Google to show you only dictionary entries.

2. Calculator:

Yes, your computer does have a calculator.  So does your phone.  But sometimes those places are just farther away than a Google search bar.  Try searching an arithmetic nightmare like “538/14 * (17+284)/ 2”. Then go ahead and check it on your calculator and ask yourself which method was easier.

3. World Clock:

Trying to figure out if you can call that hotel in Reykjavik to book a room?  Search “time Reykjavik” to see whether or not it’s business hours.  Naturally, this is an invaluable tool in a world were you need to call London, San Diego, and New Delhi all in one working day.

4. Currency Converter:

Need to find out how many kroner you’re getting for your dollar? Type “100 dollars in kroner” to find out.  You can, of course, use Google to find out that Iceland is on the kroner before you begin converting.

5. Exclusion Operator:

This one is an oldie but worth repeating.  Search ‘ “masters” –woods ’ to see the untold stories of this weekend’s golf tournament.  That little minus sign may be all that stands between you and a torrent of unwanted search results.

6. File Type Operator:

You can limit your search results to specific file types.  Ever want to know what power points people have published on Reykjavik?  Search “reykjavik filetype:ppt” to be amazed.  Likewise you can search everything from avi to zip for your file-finding needs.

If you are not from the search marketing industry, you already know that rankings fluctuate. They change over time and this is were SEO companies use ranking reports checking how rankings change over time, looking at the trend and seeing the benefits of these ranking improvements in terms of traffic, conversions and ROI. Knowing that ranking change all the time due to different factors such as personalization, geographic location, all sorts of Google One-Box algorithms, Google Subscribed Links, Image Search, Video Search, Real Time Search, the search engine results page (SERP) may always look different from two different people. So I decided to check last Google commercial that was aired during the Super Bowl. This is actually not a new commercial, it was uploaded by Google online on YouTube last November 19, 2009 and many people in the search industry already knew about this commercial. A full set of all their other video commercials can be found on YouTube’s Search Stories.

I took a deeper look into the search results and replicated each search query to see how these results were different from the actual results below: (more…)