2009 May | Hedgehog Digital

bing – microsoft’s new search engine

Filed under: SEO,online-marketing,search engine news — Tags: bing, Google, Microsoft, search engines — Felipe @ 28 May,09

Microsoft is preparing another attack against Google and according to AdAge it will be one of epic proportions as the software giant is lining up between $80 million to $100 million to invest in a marketing campaign for Bing.

What is Bing?

Bing is a new search engine that has been developed by Microsoft; with it Microsoft hopes to grab a bigger slice of the search market by providing a better search refinement.

To have better understanding of the proportions of Microsoft’s large-scale investment on the marketing of its new search engine, here is a quote from AdAge’s article:

The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing; the search engine hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That’s a big campaign — big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.

JWT has been tapped for the push, which will include online, TV, print and radio. Another sign of the campaign’s size: At a time when most agencies are laying people off, JWT added creative’s on the Microsoft business last week.

It won’t be the first time Microsoft launches an attacks ads campaign to try and grab a bigger slice of a market, the attack on Apple seems to be working as Apple’s value perception among 18-34 years old has dropped significantly.

One thing is certain, the group in charge of developing such Ad campaign have some rough times ahead of them as they devise a clever and convincing way to attack the search market (aka Google).

How would you do it? How would you convince searchers to switch search engines? Will this also change the search engine optimisation industry?

Share your thoughts in our comments sections.

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get the most out of your website with seo

Filed under: SEO,hedgehog digital — Tags: search-engine-optimisation, SEO, seo company, seo consultants — Felipe @ 22 May,09

Having an online business that is not well positioned in the search engines is like owning an ice-cream parlour in the middle of the desert, nobody will find you. In order improve your business web visibility you should consider hiring a SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) company.

There are hundreds maybe thousands of SEO companies out there, the intention of this article is to provide you the necessary information to help you choose the right SEO company and get the most out of its services.

The following has become common jargon in the SEO industry but it is worth re-emphasizing:

Avoid companies who guarantee first page rankings instantly, SEO results doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time for the search engines to pick up the changes and start indexing them, especially if the domain (URL) is not aged.

A professional SEO company should be able to explain each and every step of the optimisation process in a way that it is easily understandable by its prospects as well as provide a portfolio of previous and current works so you could evaluate its services.

Avoid SEO Companies that believe they can trick the search engine by ‘Black Hat’ techniques, eventually your site will be caught and de-valued in the search engines – these techniques can be keyword stuffing and buying links without declaring them.

Now that you know what to look for in an SEO company it is time to learn how to get the most out of its services.

First you need to provide as much information as possible, your business and industry, who your targeted market is, your business objectives, industry highs and lows, trends, provide them with a list of clients and suppliers, where your domain is hosted, etc…

Compile a list of keywords you would like your site to rank for, if you are not sure about it, do not worry, the SEO company will conducted a keyword research and identify the best keywords to optimise your site with.

In order to provide the best service possible, the SEO Company will need full access to your site’s ftp server and backoffice (CMS), not providing this details could slow down the optimisation process.

Cutting a long story short, the secret to get most out of search engine optimisation services is a good relationship between client and company, the more you give SEOs to work with the better will be the service provided.

Please feel free to ask any further questions about Search Engine Optimisation via our comments section or by visiting our contact us page.

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should google start to worry?

Filed under: hedgehog digital,search engine news — Tags: Google, twitter, twitter search, wolfram alpha — Felipe @ 08 May,09

Google, as we all know, is by far the most popular Search Engine in the world, and over the years its market share keeps growing and growing, Yahoo and MSN together represent one third of Google’s search market share.

Since its launch, Google has built a huge multi functional empire in the search industry, just like Microsoft in the OS industry, but it is well known that all empires fall at some point in History and Google’s is about to take two big blows that could cause serious damage to its fortified walls, two new search engines are emerging with the prospects of delivering faster and more relevant results.

The first one is Wolfram Alpha, search industry experts don’t consider Wolfram Alpha a direct Google competitor. Developed by Stephen Wolfram, the noted scientist and author behind the Mathematical computational software mathmatica and the book “A New Kind Of Science”, Wolfram describe its service as a “computational knowledge engine” and I personally like the term used by Danny Sullivan for Search Engine Land, Danny describes Wolfram Alpha as a “fact search engine” with no serious threat to Google.

Wolfram Alpha doesn’t crawl the web instead it works with a variety of providers to gather public and private information, with a staff of over 150 people to ensure the information is clean and tagged in a way that Wolfram Alpha can present. What is so interesting is the relevancy on search results and the amount of facts and statistics you get with a simple search like London, if you have some spare you can watch Wolfram presentation at Harvard here.

It was made clear that Wolfram Alpha has no commercial intention and it is not a threat to Google, but let’s wait and see if more and more people refer to its service, and millions of ads proposal start flying Dr. Wolfram’s way, then we’ll see if it won’t be monetized, how many cases like that we have seen over this new Internet era? Facebook, Youtube ring any bells?

The second and strongest blow Google will receive comes from social networking rising star – Twitter, Twitter’s new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, announced Twitter Search will start crawling links within Twitter posts and indexing them with an algorithm that not only takes into account relevancy but also reputation and hot trends on Twitter.

It is too early to tell how good the new Twitter Search will be Jayaram himself doesn’t yet know exactly how the algorithm will work, but if it succeeds in delivering fast and highly relevant results, Google should start to worry, because a Twitter crawler will crawl and index the links within tweets and this link (or page) might not yet be indexed by Google and this could make people refer to Twitter Search and not to Google, this has been labelled as “Real Time Search”. More to that in future posts.

Does Google have anything to worry about? Has Google got the strength and knowhow to fortify its defences against upcoming Search Engines? What do you think?

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Local Search Volume on Google Keyword Tool

Filed under: hedgehog digital — Felipe @ 05 May,09

Google Adwords keywords suggestion tool is now showing local search volume, the new feature will be handy for SEOs that operate in different countries that speak the same language.

Here at THUK the majority of our clients are based in the UK, with the local search volume we will be able to identify specific keywords with a high search volume in the UK and improve even more our search engine optimisation services by providing to our client’s sites what I would like to call a geo-targeted keyword research, e.g keywords with a high search volume in America might not have the same search volume here in the UK.

From Google:

“Local Search Volume: [Last Available Month]
This column shows the approximate number of search queries matching each keyword result. This statistic applies to searches on Google and the search network in the most recent month for which we have data. It’s specific to your targeted country and language as well as your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu. If we don’t have sufficient data for a particular keyword, you’ll see not enough data.”

Here are a couple of snapshots comparing results for the term “Online Marketing” using Google.co.uk and Google.com keyword tool. Notice that I use the Match Type: “Exact” which gives me exact numbers for the term I’m looking for.