The site, which Yahoo! owns by more than 30 percent, is the most popular search engine in Japan—accounting for more than half of total traffic.

While the local search engine will use Google, company reps say that it will not affect its partnership with Yahoo!.

Under the Search Alliance deal, Bing will power the main sites of Yahoo!.

If you feel that the numbers can improve, then you should invest in a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. It will allow your site to be easily found by consumers on search engines.

In any online business, attracting traffic is the most basic key to success. If potential clients can’t find your site, then how will you convert them to customers?

SEO will allow you to reach thousands of clients per day whenever they search for your product in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

Businesses can easily avail of SEO services from professionals. These service providers will give you weekly reports about your visitors and their interaction with the site. This is where you will base site adjustments and improvements.

These days, all businesses need websites, and lawyers are no different. If not, they need it more than other professionals.

Representing a person in court has a social aspect. The lawyer needs to know the defendant to defend him well. This is where social media can help.

Imagine if you’re a lawyer, and you have a Facebook account. Your profile grants your peers access to you in a comfort of a click. They’ll reach you if they need legal assistance in anything and everything.

On top of that, your clients can pass on your Facebook account to others. It’s like a digital calling card. Plus, you can link the Facebook account to your business website to boost your SEO campaign.

A SEO campaign offers the following advantages:

•    Better ranking for your website
•    Create awareness about your service through blog posts
•    Educate your readership through the creation of informative content on your sites
•    Relationship building with your customers

Based on ComScore’s latest report of the US search market, Bing’s first year in the industry finished with good growth rates and even better growth prospects.

Through its first year, Bing expanded its market share from 8.4 percent to 12.7 percent. In comparison to Google and Yahoo!, Bing was the only search engine to expand its search share for the past year.

Google maintains is dominating hold of the search market with 62.6 percent, which marked a 2.4 percent drop. On the other hand, Yahoo! dropped from 19.6 percent to 18.9 percent.

While Bing shows promise, it still has more challenges and obstacles. After all, they still have the lowest share among the top three search engines.

Source: Vertical Leap press release

Upon launching Bing, Microsoft obtained feedback from web administrators and search engine optimization (SEO) specialists about the testing version of Webmaster Tools.

Users reportedly asked for more transparency on how Bing indexed sites, and they also requested for information regarding analytics.

With the feedback in mind, Microsoft designed a new version of the Webmaster Tools that accommodated the feedback of the Web administrators and SEO specialists.

The new version has three areas: crawl, index, and traffic.

The new version allows users to customize how a site is crawled or indexed, submit URLs for index or block, and view detailed information about how the search engine indexes the site.

Microsoft says that it will be adding more features within the next months.

According to Yahoo! search engine marketing director David Roth, optimizing strategies for Yahoo! and Bing are very similar. Both search engines consider the same factors in their ranking systems.

Roth believes that many sites are now optimizing for Bing, especially since it will have a larger portion of the search market by the end of the year—thanks to the deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft.

“But rather than changing the way SEOs optimize based on this market shift, we’re seeing them simply devote more resources to the newest of the three engines,” said Roth in a column from Search Engine Land.

To help SEO departments, Roth says that they should compare data of Bing Webmaster Center and Yahoo Site Explorer app.

Source: Search Engine Land

These days, major brands have profiles in Facebook and Twitter, where they can interact with clients and customers at a more casual level.

Twitter is crucial for SEO and advertising. Brands with a Twitter account can use it to update people about its latest developments, offers, and products. Companies can also use its Tweets to redirect browsers to its sites.

Social networks contain a vast market that spans all demographics. In the last estimate, there were over 400 million member in Facebook and more than 80 million in Twitter.

The company offered tips on how to customize search engine marketing strategies to make SEO campaigns more effective at ranking in Bing.

Experts differentiate Bing to its competitors by highlighting the search engine’s value for user experience. Bing factors how browsers interact with the site to determine its results pages.

For example, when a person searches for ‘PC Monitor’ and clicks the top result to land at The Daily Monitor, an online newspaper. Logically, the browser will click the ‘back’ button to return to the results pages. Bing factors this type of user incident when it ranks sites.

Bing algorithms learn by observing. Since it currently holds a growing share of the search market, SEO experts need to start integrating user experience strategies to their SEO campaigns.

Here are some outdated SEO techniques:

Keyword Stuffing – Content is still top priority. But, approaches to creating it have changed. Inserting the keyword on every sentence no longer improves search rankings. Search engine rankings now have a more effective way of searching for more relevant content.

Reciprocal Links – Google has publically said that it does not like reciprocal linking. While it is still effective in some cases, the general rule is to no longer use this. Instead, focus on better user experience.

Paid Linking – Unless a site is thematically-related to yours, do not get a paid link. The general rule is to pay for a link that you think will be helpful for your browser/customer.

Social networking is increasing its influence on search engine optimization (SEO), which is a vital for the success of any online company.

Experts do not know how big an influence social media will be in SEO in the future, but, for now, they acknowledge its strength as an SEO tool.

More and more companies are using social media to boost their marketing efforts, and the same can be said for SEO.

While some companies do understand SEO, most of them do not know how to integrate their SEO campaigns with their social media profile.