Apple have recently announced that Bing will now be included as one of the options on it’s safari browser, which is currently used on the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and both the Mac and the PC.

This will no doubt help increase Bing’s share of the mobile search market which is continuously growing with the increase in portable internet devices. With the iPhone being a major player when it comes to mobile browsing, it’s an important step forward for Bing, who currently only account for a very small percentage of UK searches.

The Google suggest feature has recently been updated to help correct spelling errors as you type. This has the benefit of helping searchers get to the results they’re after without getting delivered to the “did you mean?” page.  Below is the image taken from the Google blog showing an example of spelling correction in action.

One of the most important things a webmaster can do as far as SEO goes, is to include an area of the website designed for regular, fresh content. This can take many forms, for some websites a blog is the way to go, for others a news section is more suited to the nature of the business. Whatever it’s called, the main benefits as far as SEO goes are the same.

Below I want to talk about the importance of indexable content and why having regular updates on your website can help increase your online visibility. This is slightly different to the business side of things and more specifically about how a blog can have aid SEO practices.

Once the website is optimised on page, the focus moves towards link building. Links are hard to come by these days and they are immensly valuable when it comes to rankings. One of the best ways to get links to your website is by utilising your blog/news section. People don’t tend to link to business pages – by this I mean no one will really be linking to your pages that are specifically relevant to your business, an about page for example. People tend to link to things they find interesting or things that are useful, things that probably wouldn’t be found on your main website.

The blog however gives you a place where opinions can be expressed, more topical matters can be discussed and link worth posts can be placed. You can use it to show your expertise, or your involvement in your specific market. Keep it regular and up to date, so your readers know they will have something to get back to.

Blogs or news sections can be used for link baiting purposes. Link baiting is the process of creating content that is designed to attract links, and there are so many different options for people who want to create link bait, no matter what market they are working in. Without a blog this content has no where to go. This can be the difference between an alright SEO campaign and an exceptional SEO campaign.

The importance of a blog or news section on the website is undeniable. Without one you can really slow down an online marketing campaign.

It’s been covered a lot for quite some time, but site speed has now officially become one of the factors of Google’s algorithm. The idea is that google wants to provide users with the best experience possible, and the speed at which a website loads is one of the things that influences this. In order to keep users happy, Google will use the speed at which a website loads to determine it’s position in the search engine results.

This doesn’t mean that site speed will be a major factor in where a website ranks. It’s well known that Google’s algorithm contains over 200 different factors, with differing importance on each. What this means is that if two pages were to match up exactly on all the other factors, the quicker one would generally rank higher. The importance of site speed in the algorithm has not been revealed but it is certainly something to consider if you want your website to be as optimised as possible.

Thankfully there are a lot of tools out there that can make diagnosing any issues with site speed that much easier. If you want to learn a bit more about how to improve your site speed you can check out this post on site speed at Weboptimist.

Google has also been a bit fan of keeping the homepage minimalist, which is why it came as such a shock to users to find that last week it started to automatically apply a background picture to the homepage.

Having raised numerous complaints about the feature Google has since stopped these images from automatically appearing and instead offers users the option to manually set a background image. The move is seen by many as a way of keeping users that may otherwise start using Bing due to the visual impact it has.

WHatever the reason, Google’s hompage is becoming more and more cluttered with the additional feautures, and although it may still look quite bare it’s moving away from the minimalist feel it’s kept for so long.

You may have noticed a change to the Google search results over the past few weeks as they have recently rolled out a new layout.

With the major changes being the addition of a new left hand column on the side of the page providing quick access to the most relevant search tools depending on the query. The sidebar can help suggest related queries and gives users more control over Googles universal search feature which helps to integrate news, products, images, and videos into the search results.

The changes, which have come under a lot of scrutiny over the past few weeks, are comparable to Bing’s sidebar. With Bing being the only other real competitor to Google with the announcement of Yahoo no longer being a search provider the competition between these two companies is becoming stronger.

Below is a screenshot of Google’s new sidebar followed by an example of Bing’s sidebar

Google

Bing

Google have just announced their acquisition of Picnik, a browser based photo editor that can be used to edit photos directly without having to leave your browser. At the moment the majority of people will be using software on their computers to edit photos.

Picnik allows uploads of photos from the majority of social media/photo websites including Picasa, Flikr, and Facebook and being cloud based allows you to edit your photos from any computer with internet access.

At the moment all the search engines are announcing numerous deals with social media sites to integrate results into real time search. Google’s deal with Facebook now means that Facebook content is included in Google’s search results when deemed relevant.

The latest move means that news pages, photos and blog posts that fan pages publish can now potentially show up in search results, helping to drive traffic provide another reason for businesses to consider using social media as part of their online efforts.

While inclusion of facebook content will most likely be integrated slowly, we should see it more and more of it as it gets rolled out.

Google has announced a new feature to be applied to it search results in an attempt to make them more personalised – Stars. Stars are replacing the search wiki feature that was previously available in the search results and allow you to click on the start marker next to any result or map and when relevant these results will show up at the top of the results page in future.

Stars are useful for selecting websites that will be of interest for future reference when looking for relevant topics. You can use them to select your favourite football team or your favourite online community to help bring these up in future search results.

The stars feature will be available for all signed in users, so you will need a Google account to benefit.

Over the past few years there has been a massive increase in the amount of websites that have blogs integrated into them.

For those of you who don’t know what a blog is, take a minute to read our article what is a blog?

Along with social media, blogs have become a way of keeping people updated and letting them interact with your business. Although they can seem like a lot of work, there is often a good return on this investment in time, even for the most unlikely websites.

By keeping an up to date blog you can communicate with customers, give them an opportunity to provide feedback and also help broaden your reach in the search engines. Covered below are some of the main ways in which a blog can help your website.

Crawl rate

A blog will provide your website with a section that is regularly updated with fresh content, which search engines love, and can help increase the overall crawl rate of the main website also.

Long Tail Keywords

More blog posts mean more pages. With more pages comes more of an opportunity to target different keywords in the search results. By writing a blog posts about a specific topic, e.g. a new product release, you are also giving the website an opportunity to rank on terms relevant to the product. This can be a very effective method of driving targeted traffic to the website, think about the amount of people that will look for reviews/specifications of products online before buying them. If you can provide this information for them you are one step closer to converting them into a sale.

Links

Links are an important part of SEO. Having a blog helps to get your website involved in the online community focused around your product or service. If you can get referenced on other relevant and authoritative websites, this will usually mean a link to your website or page.

Customer Interaction

If you provide relevant and regularly updated content, not only do the search engines love it, but you will attract people who have an interest in your product or service. Although these people may not be direct customers, the influence they can have on your business both online and offline can be huge. By also offering customers the opportunity to interact with you via the comments on the blog you can gain a lot of valuable information about your product or service.

It may still seem like it is a lot of effort to integrate and maintain a blog on your website, but if traffic helps your business grow it’s definitely worth it. Setting up a blog shouldn’t be too difficult depending on what you want to do, you can either integrate a blog into your website like ours, or you can use a free or paid blog hosting service. There are pros and cons to each depending on how you are going to best use the service.