Couple of months ago, few leading search engine experts dismissed suggestions that Microsoft’s new search engine, BING, could ever challenge Google. But time changes fast, and now the same experts have admitted they were mistaken. As of October 2010, Bing is the fourth largest search engine on the web by query volume.

Introduction: Bing is the Web Search Engine (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) and is the baby of Microsoft. It was unveiled by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO in May 2009 in San Diego. Microsoft designed Bing as a “decision engine”, rather than a search engine. Bing attempts to decode the overall meaning of a phrase, rather than place an emphasis on individual words.

Appearance: Bing looks similar to Google. The basic home page displays the Bing logo, along with a text box ready for a new search - but as per the experts opinion there are a number of key differences behind the scenes that change how Bing works.

On daily basis Bing changes the background images, which make the home page more attractive. The images are mostly of noteworthy places in the world, though it sometimes displays animals, people, and sports. The background image also contains information about the element(s) shown in the image.

Market Status: Before the launch of Bing the market share of Microsoft web search pages had been steadily declining. Since the launch of Bing in the USA, Microsoft has increased its US search market share. In July Bing search engine increased its US market share from 8.23% to 9.41%, while Google’s share fell 1% to around 65%. Google’s own data says, “Word “Bing” is the seventh most popular search term on Google in Australia”.

Growth Factor: Day-in-and-day-out Bing is growing faster. Microsoft has recently signed a long-awaited deal with Yahoo. This will see the new engine power searches on all of Yahoo’s websites. As per the information, together Bing and Yahoo will control 30% of the market.

International: Bing is now available in about forty languages and has been localized for many countries.

Webmaster Services: Bing allows webmasters to manage the web crawling status of their own websites through Bing Webmaster Center. Additionally, users may also submit contents to Bing via (1) Bing Local Listing Center, for businesses to add business listings onto Bing Maps and Bing Local and (2) Soapbox on MSN Video for users to upload videos for searching via Bing Videos.

Expert Opinions: The experts admitting that they were mistaken are now encouraging businesses to get on board and use BING for there business expansion.

Jim Stewart, Chief Executive, Stewart Media, have agreed to make Bing part of a company’s SEO strategy, but also asks to be careful considering the targeted market.

Jasmin Batra, the Founder of Arrow Internet Marketing, says “Bing has managed to survive the “novelty” factor by providing its users with relevant links”. Market certainly required some change as it was becoming monopolised with Google being “the” search engine. Competition is all the time good”.

Paul Fisher, Chief Executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, says “Bing’s introduction in the market has shaken up the internet world. In truth it’s good for the industry with more resources and also good for the advertisers and consumers to have more than one dominant player in the market.”

Chief Executive, WebSalad- Jason West, have started explaining Bing and its benefits to his clients. He was happy returning from the United States where Bing was the scorching topic amongst the SEO experts. “There are more people starting to use it, and so definitely I think you could say Bing is something you cannot ignore any longer”, adds Jason West.

Chris Thomas the Chief Executive of Reseo, initially warned businesses not to become too excited about Bing, but now he advises to start thinking about SEO and even advertising with Bing.

Google, the leading web search engine, have always focused and tried to provide the most relevant search results for location related search query. Although Google, work hard to detect and list the most useful location information, it some times was showing incorrect results and so there is now an option to make the changes to incorrect or irrelevant information.

Associate Product Manager, Mack Lu, at Google, published a blog post couple of days ago and announced the changes to Google’s location-related results. With the latest algorithm, users will now enable to always see their location setting and make changes to it. This new interface is implemented and will be available in more than 40 languages soon. Location setting is moved on the left hand side of the result page. Users can now manually change their location preference by adding a new zip code, city or country.

Continuing with the existing privacy policy, Google, have remained the same and have not made any changes about how to use location information to improve search. It would be of great help for searches made for hotels, restaurants, and sights or preparing for a trip.

To learn more about our new interface and how we use location in search, check out Google’s help center.

Social gaming is a serious business these days, and Google seems to be determined to become the major player in this space. Couple of weeks ago, in a blog post Google confirmed to acquire Slide, a social-media company, founded by PayPal expert Max Levchin. The proficient team of Slide will soon join Google’s team. This latest adopted baby of Google, possess an extensive history of building new ways for people to connect with others across numerous platforms online.

Google’s acquisition with Slide is undoubtedly one of the obvious signals that Google is planning its moves into social networking. Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms. Google will now try to provide more and better tools to communicate and connect.

Eric E. Schmidt, Chief Executive, Google’s earlier confirmed that “social networking was important to Google as they believe that search will be better with more social information.” Lots of questions are floating in the market about Google trying to compete with Facebook, but the fact is not that, as we are trying and working on something new and exciting for the Google followers”.

Google paid somewhere between US $182 million to $282 million to purchase Slide, the creator of games - Super Poke and Top Fish. Also Google have invested great money ($150 million) in Zynga, the biggest online social gaming company, according to sources briefed on the investment.

With the widespread internet presence, promoting and increasing the traffic of your website is an important part of making your site a successful one. Forum Posting has taken on an important stance to boost and improve the SEO efforts. Additionally, Forum posting is one of the best free way to bring traffic to your blog/website. It’s a good Link Building Method, which most SEO firms and Webmasters use.

One must learn the correct way of posting the forums to gain the targeted traffic. To get the maximum advantage of Forums, it’s indeed very essential to post relevant forums, as in-applicable and policy breaking forums may get edited or deleted by the forum administrator. Also if require, administrators may not allow any links in posts for such non-relevant content. Therefore, post appropriate forum, to get the benefit of quality inbound links. Getting back links from forums that are reputed can be favourable for your site.

Before creating a forum post keep the following points in mind:

Research Keywords/Phrases for your Forum Posts: Before posting forum and optimizing the content, research and decide the keywords to be used. Use the keywords/phrases that are the most relevant to the topic and are frequently searched. This will help to gain maximum organic search engine traffic. Free keywords search tools (Google AdWords, Keywords Discovery, and Wordtracker) are available to find the right keywords/phrases to be used. Do not randomly stuff your forum post with keywords. It will not only make a post unreadable, but will quickly get flagged as potential spam by search engines.

Relevancy to the niche subject: Writing forum posts on general subjects for a niche forum won’t help, as it will gain very little or no organic traffic. If you add to the discussion in a meaningful way, people will be more likely to trust your inputs and will visit your website.

Make it Interesting: Avoid repetitive subjects, the one already discussed. Hot topics with controversial thread titles are more likely to be discussed than the monotonous topics. Conduct research and find fresh ideas to make the article debatable. Include factual points to make it interesting.

Search and post on forums with high traffic To get the maximum benefit and exposure, search the post with high visitor traffic. Forums with less traffic will not help you achieve your purpose.

Post grammatically correct forums: Before you submit your post, make sure the content is spell-checked and the text is grammatically correct.

Large Amount of Content: More the content, more are chances for search engines to crawl you soon as search engines do not solely look at individual forum posts, but crawl an entire page.

Writing Style or Well-Written Forum: Give your post a good text formation, as it will be easier for the readers to follow your thought and increase the chances from posters to contribute.

Add signature and website link Forums allow members to create a signature. Signature is an important part of a forum profile. Here you can add a link to your website and if want can describe it in few words. Signature now will appear below all your posts. This will help the people interested in your post to contact you and visit your site; hence your site traffic increases. But remember, that you don’t just advertise your site; as this may be considered a spam and deleted.

Did Google Instants launch Killed SEO?

Doesn’t seem so but we will quickly know this from user feed backs Google says, The most important consideration for marketers or anyone who creates content for SEO copy of the website or however, is in the bullets…

Steve Rubel says that it will make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - the dark magic that helps websites appear higher in search results -totally irrelevant

Here’s one key passage from his blog post:
Q: Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?

A: I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.

The whole concept is really based on lot of user tendency reports it seems(Which Google Usually stores), usually even we would have noticed that people will type query and then look for perfect fit either on first or the second page, Google had nicely interpreted it to put that in quicker searches to give websites a benefit of not being in a queue to get the perfect solution of the query typed. Obviously on other side of coin the queries will be tweaked because of suggestions in Grey which instant gives… so might be our focus should be understanding user tendency to get better and best results for the keywords

Google’s results will be now instant and quick!!

This was under way since long, I was really keen to know what is Google going to do to really push the limits of the technology

Here are few features to understand Google Instant: Click Here

1) Query Google as you type.

2) As per normal human tendency you type slow but read fast so you can start scanning from the first letter you type to get the exact results

3)This will save lot of time for internet searchers(Avg of 2-5 seconds as Google says)

4)Its a mix match of 15 new technologies

As Google Says in Launch FAQ’s “Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8. Please note, users on domains other than Google.com can only access Google Instant if they are signed in to a Google Account. We will continue to add new domains and languages over the next several months”