For those of you with a good memory and those that follow uber geek news you may recall an agreement about a year ago where the Microsoft Bing search engine would start powering the Yahoo search results.

The driver behind the agreement is to release the burden of Yahoo competing head to head with Google in search technology, allowing them to focus on what they do best; providing a content portal and selling ads.  From Microsoft’s standpoint they are committed to making the investment in search technology and this provides another source of revenue and traffic for them.  I see this as a win-win for both companies and webmasters alike, who have one less search engine to worry about.

More recently there has been an announcement of layoffs of Yahoo! Search staff which leads us to speculate the transition to Bing search results is imminent.

Most webmasters heavily rely on Google traffic and rarely even consider the optimization effort for other search engines.  This has been a fine strategy but if you are not thinking about this transition you may wake up to a decrease in search traffic.  Another point of interest is that Bing has been gaining market share and may become increasingly relevant.

Here is a breakdown of market share:

• Google Sites 63.70%
• Yahoo! Sites 18.30%
• Microsoft Sites 12.10%

For WhyDoWork here is a breakdown of our search traffic:

1. Google 91.28%
2. Yahoo 4.14%
3. Bing 1.69%
4. Other 6.27%

Now in theory you may assume that after the switch we will see 5.83% bing traffic but this is not necessarily the case.  If we rank poorly in Bing relatively to our competitors we will see a decrease in search traffic after the switch.  If we rank better relatively to our competitors in Bing we will see an increase.

So How Can You Rank High In Bing?

Truthfully the answer is that the same techniques used in determining your Google ranking is conceptually the same as what determines your Bing ranking [backlinks, keyword optimization, meta tags, title tags, url keywords, etc].  If you would like to read about this theory here is a detailed analysis from SEOMoz, the webs authority in SEO.

Should I do Nothing to Optimize for Bing?

Not really.  While your conceptual website design and SEO techniques should be the same there are things you can do above and beyond.  A great technique is to run search query tests for main keywords and deep links for search terms you expect to rank well for.  See where you rank and analyse the people who are higher in the rankings then you.  What are they doing different?

The Open Site Explorer is my favorite tool for this type of investigation.  Check out your competitors backlinks vs your own.  Maybe it will give you some tips.

Good Luck!

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Last week I logged into Google Webmaster Tools and noticed something different; the keyword report now showed how many impressions, clicks, and your average position in Google search results worldwide.

Cross section this information with data in Google Analytics, and it’s a goldmine. I’ll show you!

First you need to choose something on your site you’d like to improve. A key source of revenue for WhyDoWork.com are our work at home job listings. Improving traffic to this area of the site will result in more revenue (more traffic = more money).

With that in mind, I logged into Google Analytics and looked at the top referring keyword to the jobs page this week. It turns out a lot of traffic to that specific was coming from search engines for the keyword “data entry jobs”. Here’s a screenshot:

click to enlarge

Next, I want to see some details on how we actually rank for that, and related terms in Google. This used to be a challenging metric to pull, but it’s easy now in Google Webmaster Tools. All I did to generate the report below is search for the text “data entry”:

click to enlarge

Based on the screenshot above, you can see that in the last week we’ve appeared in search results 720 times for the keyword “data entry online jobs”, but only had a click through rate of 13%. It’s likely low because in the last column you can see that our average rank on Google is position 7.8 (likely most often the 8th result on page 1). If we were ranked #1, we’d still get 720 impressions, but our click through rate would be extremely high.

Look a few rows down and you can see that “captcha data entry” has generated almost as many clicks, with only about a sixth of the impressions. Since we’re ranked 3.4 on average, this might be a search term worth working on our ranking for.

Using the above tools in combination can help you find relationships between data on your own sites, and hopefully use that to understand what key terms you should be optimizing for maximum traffic; and we all know my favorite formula:

more traffic = more dollars $

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Canadian telecom giant TELUS recently commissioned a survey targeted at over 1000+ employees to study their opinions and attitudes on flexible work. The results were promising:

• 47% of respondents work remotely at least a few times a month
• 46% of workplaces currently offer a flexible working program
• 89% of employees agreed that allowing for flexible work makes a company more attractive to work for
• The majority of respondents say they are just as productive (48%) or more productive (39%) when working outside the office

These statistics do a great job of speaking to the growing trend of telecommuting. Given WhyDoWork.com provides a hub for those who work from home to share information, find flexible work, and connect with other telecommuters, that’s good news for us!

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