If you have not heard by now, Bing and Yahoo are partnering to challenge Google.  At this point in time Google dominates 65-to-82% (depending on how you measure this…) of all search queries.  The landscape is obviously changing, Bing will gain more relevance, but at this point in time certainly not to Google’s expense.  After the merger Bing is estimated to have approx 28% of the market share.  Bing is definitely worth optimizing more for if this deal goes through, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions at this point in time and we’ll keep you up to date as soon as the dust starts to settle.

Something I have been working a lot this past month at Magro is link building. I have learned how important it is to get links to your website from other sites. This can be a very time consuming process, but in the end I know it pays off for the companies we do it for.

Something else I have been working on a lot is keyword research. By knowing the keywords potential customers are searching for can really help your ranking on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. I have been using a tool called Google Ad Words which shows me the amount of times a certain keyword has been searched locally and globally. Keyword research can help companies more ways than just for search engines, it can also help to decide what to name a video listed on YouTube. By knowing these highly searched keywords, you can increase the viewings of your YouTube videos, and website.

I have been learning about all the local search engines to submit businesses to such as Google Local and Yahoo Local. These listings should be step number one when listing a business. Also, I just learned of a new website, universal business listing, which can help to list a business to many different search engines.

Overall, my experience at Magro International so far has been excellent. Leonard and Julie are very willing to help me with anything I need and encourage me to as questions when I am unsure of anything. I like how they are actually teaching me skills that I will use in my future and I know over the next couple months it will only get better.

Kelly Cindrich

Business owners who fail to grasp that this is how consumers want to use Internet-enabled products have a lot of catching up to do the longer they wait to create an search engine marketing plan!

You can read their overview, but here is a short summary:  A company put a competitor’s name in its META tags and bid on their name for their PPC campaigns.  The competitor sued the offending company and lost, because the judge said that this practice did not confuse the customer.  But the decision will not create an end to cases like this, and further legislation could follow by other companies in similar situations.  So be careful when using trademarked terms in your Internet marketing efforts.  Even if you aren’t found guilty, you still might have to pay a lawyer to defend you.

Google has started including local results for searches that they think are supposed to be local in nature in the “normal’ Google results. Here is an example of the results when you search for: restaurants rochester michigan. You can see that not only does it put the local results above all of the rest of the results, there are also reviews by other google users. Using the example above, you can see that if you click on “more local business results” and scroll down a bit further, even restaurants with no websites like Hamlin Pub are listed with their phone number and reviews.

I strongly encourage all business owners to see what happens when they type in their business type and city into Regular Google and Google Local and see 1) If their site comes up and 2) Are their any reviews associated with your business (You want to know what people are saying about you online). If you can’t find your business information online, read this article with tips on how to get listed whether you have a website or not.