This is an interesting way to give a non-bias opinion on the best search engine. Use Blind Search to search for a phrase and then choose which column provides the best search results for that query. The choices are Bing, Yahoo, or Google. The columns are randomized with every query.

Due to some hacker tampering with the results page we can’t see what most people are choosing as their preferred search result.

TIP: Don’t test it using a search phrase that you are familiar with. Instead, try something you’ve never looked up, like “who was the 23rd president?” or “weather in Helena, Montana”.

Try Blind Search

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While it is interesting to see how the hot social networks stack up in terms of traffic, I thought I’d also take a look at how well Facebook is doing compared to other Web giants like Google.com, Yahoo.com and MSN.com. To my surprise, Facebook appears to have become a real challenger to these Internet juggernauts, who are relatively old compared to the social network that started out in 2004 as a university student-only service and only really opened up to the public in September 2006.

So what we are seeing here is a very fast growing SOCIAL network that showing traffic trends that could overtake both Google and Yahoo. This is very significant because while Yahoo is more of a destination search engine that frames its site to be a fully functional website, more people are using a social network on a regular basis AND at an increasing rate.

With visitor stats this strong it’s even more important for you business to dive into a social marketing campaign. You might be using search engine marketing and other forms of lead harvesting, but unless you are present on the social networks, you are missing out on a very large part of viewership.

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While Google gets all the attention, it’s easy to forget that the search industry is much more than just Google. There’s are many tools that provide search results on a wide range of topics. While Google might provide a global search on a broad range of keywords, many search engines hold very strong niches in many different industries.

For example here is a short list of a few non-google search engines that are based in very specific niches.

Westlaw – Online legal research services for lawyers and legal professionals

PubGene – Visualize and navigate current understanding of genes

Bioinformatic Harvester – Crawls and crosslinks bioinformatic sites

Daylife – News search engine, organizing and distributing the world’s news

Topix – News aggregator which categorizes news stories by topic and geography

Yahoo! News – Top news headlines on current events from around the world

HotPads – Real estate, house, and apartment search engine

Zillow – Search engine for real estate and homes

GlobalSpec – Search engine of engineering and industrial products

Indeed – Job search engine

Picsearch – Image search search engine

PriceGrabber – Online shopping search engine

mySimon – Price comparison shopping search engine

Bing Shopping – Microsoft’s shopping search engine

The best approach to search engine marketing is to diversify your search marketing portfolio. The little dirty secret about search engine optimization is that you ultimately have no control on how search engines display your website. Each search tool uses a different algorithm to determine their best results and it is a constant battle to stay at the top of the search result page.

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Live.com, Microsoft’s major search engine, now redirects to Bing.com. I did a quick test search comparison using our company name, LEVELTWO, and I found very different results from Google’s results for the same search. Bing returned many more social network results than Google. Our Twitter account was ranked third on Bing, which Google ranks it 8th on their search engine. I think this is a good thing since social networks will often provide more current and up-to-date information than a static website.

Videos
Another interesting (maybe annoying) feature is the autoplaying video previews. By simply holding your mouse over the video search results the video will automatically start playing with sound. While this was a cool feature, I was quickly overwhelmed with multiple videos blasting sound through my speakers. However there is a mute/unmute button on each video which makes browsing video previews much less assaulting to your ears.

Search Categories
Over on the left side of the screen you’ll find a search categories list that are dynamically generated according to your search phrase. I tried several different types of broad searches and they all returned a different list of categories to accompany my search.

Overall, I think Bing is an improvement over Live search. I don’t foresee people leaving Google to use Bing as their primary search engine, but this friendlier platform certainly makes Bing a great secondary search engine.

Bing.com

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After the click – Understanding what those visitors are doing once they reach your website, specfically if they are not calling you or filling out a form.

5 reasons to track after the click:

1. The tracking cookie is saved on the visitor’s computer for 30 days after the visit so you can know if they click now and return to your website later.
2. Return on Investment (ROI) is the most important metric. Your cost per click or click through rate might be great, but unless you know how much you are making for every dollar you invest, the other metrics are useless.
3. You can expand on keywords that provide the most ROI and generate even more profit.
4. Keywords that contain a brand or company name may provide a lot of traffic, but when you track the ROI of these keywords you might find that they provide little to no profit.
5. After you know the visitors that are taking some kind of action on your website, you can then determine where your most active markets are located geographically and develop a campaign specifically targeting those buyers.

In order to track after the click activity (using Google Adwords) you will need to make use of the Conversion Tracking feature (pictured below).

The set up is really simple. The first step is to name your conversion action.

TIP: If your forms all send the same formated message and there is no way for you to tell where each specific form came from, it’s important be very specific when naming your conversion. In the example we named our conversion “Landing Page B Contact Form” because we have 4 different landing pages for this client and we want to know which page is getting more leads.

The rest of the setup is really straight forward so we’ll skip to the next page after you save the action and get your conversion code.

On this page you are presented with the code to place on your “thank you” page.

Read related blog posts about Search Engine Marketing

• Effective Landing Pages, 7 Tips
• What is Search Engine Marketing?
• How to do Keyword Research for Search Marketing
• What is Dynamic Keyword Insertion?
• What is Clickthrough Rate and Cost Per Click?
• How to make your Website more Trustworthy
• 4 Reasons why Traffic Quality is Important

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Do you know the search marketing language?

Previous posts:
What is Search Engine Marketing?
What is Social Media Marketing?

CTR, CPC, PPC, ROI, DKI… It’s all pretty confusing when those crazy internet guys start talking in their foreign language. Let’s define (in plain English) two common terms in search marketing, Clickthrough Rate and Cost Per Click.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR) is obtained taking the number of people who clicked on an ad and dividing it by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if your ad had 2,500 impressions in one month and it received 194 clicks, it would have a CTR of 7.8% for that month.

It is important to know that different industries will have varying levels of successful CTR. What may be a high clickthrough rate in one industry may be considered low in another. So, it’s difficult to determine an average CTR for everyone. For large volume industries that get millions of nationwide searches a day, you may find that 2% is a great CTR. However some campaigns may find a CTR of 14% to be their benchmark.

The reason it’s important to strive for the best clickthrough rate is because the more people that find your ad to be relevant, the lower your cost per click will be (specifically citing Google Adwords ranking formula).

Cost Per Click (CPC) is the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines or other Internet publishers for a single click on its ad that brings one visitor to its website. This term is much easier to understand since it’s so straight forward. No formulas needed. Well… Let’s do one, just for fun.

Pretty simple, right? Cost per click is just how much you pay per visitor that comes to your site through an ad that you place on a search engine. You want this number to be as low as possible so you won’t be spending a fortune on your search engine marketing.

Still confused? Yell at us by leaving a comment below. We’ll answer your toughest questions or delete the comment.

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Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal has some interesting thoughts about what Google’s new activity on Twitter means.

Now that Google has entered the game they give more value to Twitter. They have validated its dominance of communication and microblogging, which is probably one reason they stayed away from Twittering in the past.

Google did not start blogging until it acquired Blogger, other search engines were blogging AND revamped their Blogger platform. Meaning that Google was not about to start blogging and legitimize the practice as an open form of communication until their owned blogger and could influence the direction of blogging as a whole.

So what do you think? Now that the biggest key player in the industry has started microblogging is it now a legitimate channel of communication?

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