We are always interested in the pros and cons of a particular service we wish to use. It is important for a business firm to understand the working and benefits of these facilities of online marketing. Well your wish is granted as we discuss the benefits and the detriments of both these web techniques for marketing.

For the first timers PPC, pay per click is the paid advertisement appearing on the sides or bottom of the web pages that takes the users to your website. This method can be a quick way to get the flow of traffic towards your page. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process to get your site enlisted in the search engine result pages (SERPs) through web optimization. These two are completely different methods to channel the browsers in the direction of your web pages.

The bright side of PPC is that it is simple and rapid way to set an advertisement campaign working on the web. The apt use of keywords will get your ad and the revenues rolling on the same day as it is posted. This tactic is much easier when compared to the in-depth research and work required for SEO process. There are numerous search engines like Yahoo, Bing, Google and many similar interfaces that offer the PPC services. Many people would prefer this mode of approach to get profits right away.

The darker shade of PPC is visible when you pay high prices for availing these services. Every click has its price, so in due course you may not get desired results through this approach. Competition is the main drawback here as the auctioning process to get the best keywords can be a costly affair. SEO does not involve such challenges.

Playing by the search engine rules, running the race for indexing and page ranking has just move the bar of web marketing to a new high in these past years. The SEO has a slow and steady progress and when your site is older it gets better. Websites come to the internet to be the long term player, whereas you cannot say the same thing for PPC.  Even after few months your favorite blog or website can be found through a regular search, but an ad could be gone in few days or as per the changing trends and rates.

Marketing approaches are fighting with each other on the cost criteria and same is with SEO and PPC services. A layman may think these two are sides of the same coin but an expert can tell there is much more to each of these web marketing techniques. The PPC services gets the major benefit of traceability, the number of clicks can be tacked easily. SEO is seen battling with duplicate content, keywords, links, landing pages and URL limitations. In case you use both of these methods for publicizing your products you may have to prevent keyword cannibalization in a more intellectual manner.

Using different resources to achieve the same target makes it easier for us to reach the goal quickly with much ease. Competing with SEO or PPC alone may not take you very far from the beginning site. Learning from various approaches is the best way to conquer the digital marketing field.

A company having both set of teams should work hand in hand to get into organic listings and share their finds as far as terms or strategies are concerned. It will be a win-win situation for your firm and the benefits are bound to reach you in one way or another. Healthy competition is welcome, but only criticizing or showing thumbs down trick to other can lead to loss.

Discussion to execute ideas like the structure of landing pages, overall concept of a campaign, target audiences or research findings on a specific project can be a reason for the whole company to celebrate. Knowing the pros and cons of one another, shielding the drawbacks to overcome them and exploiting the pros for better revenues should be the combined goal of the two teams. Use of various tools to efficiently get the desired results is an essential aim of the company.

The web world is frequently varying and to keep up with the changing trends is the major challenge for all digital marketing companies. In the end, all we want and desire is success to maximum possible extent so go ahead and aim for the stars.

Duplicate version of your web page is known as the print version. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo penalize website postings that are very analogous as they seem like a copied data to the crawlers. Your website could have products listed and displayed in repeats based on their importance like price, quantity or availability at times. When the search engine is shown that the site is a legitimate part of the original content it will spare the site re-indexing or red flagging process. Rel canonical comes to your rescue when such a problems arise.

Apt use of Rel canonical

Search engines observe every change in your website and its related tags. Without complete know-how, using rel canonical can hurt your well designed and reputed site. Rel canonical is easy to use, but the correct application of this tag makes all the difference. Use rel canonical tag on the print version to direct it towards original page. You can just edit the <head> tag of the page without any modifications in the side of the server.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have search engines that identify rel canonical tag. The Search engine considers this tag only within a specific domain or sub domains, not across various multiple domains. The complete link set from your canonized page may or may not pass on to the other.

Improved Page navigation

Browsing a site can be improved using rel canonical in cases where redirecting a page would not help. URL format may be the important criteria, as some products require category and sub-category page formats.  To prevent risking re-indexing and red flagging of print versions rel canonical tag comes handy.

Checks multiple URL creation

Session IDs are frequently generated and 301 redirects may not be possible in such cases, rel canonical can be put to use here. URLs with tracking code that check link clicks or measure paths can have rel canonical tag. Keep your URLs relevant and sensible, so that adding a rel canonical doesn’t change your visitor graph extensively.

Some rel canonical benefits

In case you have ‘page not found’ error rel canonical will allow indexing of the page during repairs or redesigning of web pages. Search engines following a heuristic approach to find the canonical in case of a 404 error. You should follow the rules as you use rel canonical for relative paths and search engine processes your website in a regular format. Slight differences in your page content may be allowed while using rel canonical you must prevent chain of rel canonical to ascertain optimum canonization.

Rel canonical tag not required for the following:

1. Novel sites need not have rel canonical. The print version pages can be avoided when you have the opportunity to design it accordingly.
2. Moving to a single page from a complete site through canonization would not be a smart choice, as it could ruin years of hard work. Search engines de-index such pages and your ranking could be affected on a large scale.
3. Pagination may not involve repeated content, canonization because there are some techniques to keep crawlers off slightly similar pages.

Wrapping up the guide

Partial knowledge is harmful and this proverb suits best if you are using massively altering tags. After through solution searches if rel canonical is your only way out, use it gradually after repeated analysis and testing. Each search engine has its own way of processing such tags, so well informed use of such tags is recommended.

Everyone wants to compete and enhance their internet property for more pertinent marketing and prevent content duplication. Hence, it is essential that we use rel canonical tag wisely.

Although released just over a year ago, Bing has successfully managed to power itself with 30% of the market share by following a few strategies. The search engine followed high profile advertisement campaigns and an agreement with Yahoo to power its rejuvenated Yahoo search. Bing also profited with some bad Google publicity which collectively contributed to the search engine’s fast growth in just a year’s time.

As a result, with the search engine’s growing market share, SEO experts have been working hard on testing the new algorithms of the search engine, trying to understand how and what factors it considers for ranking websites on the web. With every new testing, Bing is believed to be proving its standard in the search engine industry which is automatically diverting more traffic towards its services. Henceforth, learning about Bing and its services is now an extremely important factor for all SEO experts, web developers and designers.

Here is a quick guide on Bing and its SEO strategies that all SEO masters should be aware of when optimizing their web pages on Bing.

Bing SEO Official Resources

Updating visitors about its new releases and features is one of the most important factors for Bing. As a result, the search engine created a huge online community comprising of official forums and blogs that would keep its visitors informed about the search engine’s new ideas and strategies.

Bing’s webmaster tools

Apart from its expanding online community, Bing also released its Bing Webmaster tool box, similar to Google webmaster tools. However, with certain extra and interesting features, such as a more polished interface and successful “Audience Intelligence” metrics, Bing’s Webmaster tools prove its superiority for all website owners.

Bing SEO Vs Google SEO

Both Google and Bing are two different search engines, and also follow different strategies to rank their websites. The difference between these two Search Engines can be easily analyzed by a tool named Bingle.

The tool compares the search results of both, Bing and Google side by side, thus highlighting their differences together. An example of the tool has been mentioned here below.

Both search engines have secretive algorithms that they follow for their ranking systems. The result displays the homepage on top of both search engines due to its high rank, inbound links, exact match domain, etc. However, from here onwards, the differences between the two search engines begin. Below is a list of differences that you may come across when using the two search engines for your website.

• Backlinks in Bing are less important: Comparison of the backlinks strategies in both the search engines show that the first page results in Bing have lesser number of backlinks as compared to those in Google.
• Page Rank in Bing is less important: According to Google PageRank algorithm, only the top ranked websites appear on its first page results. On the contrary, websites with pageRank 2 or even PageRank1 appear on the top 10 result page of Bing. Hence, a Google based page ranking system will have less importance on Bing.
• Fresh Content is less important: Google recently introduced its Caffeine update system that boosts all websites with better search engine rankings for their regularly posted fresh content. However, Bing being a new search engine doesn’t yet have the right indexing speed as Google which hence makes fresh web content quite irrelevant on the web.
• More Flash content friendly: Google hates Flash, while Bing prefers webpages with flash animations.
• Inbound anchor text is more important: Anchor text from good sources is just one factor that is important to both the search engines. However, according to the comparison made, Bing emphasizes more largely o the importance of anchor text.

<head>

<title>I love dogs</title>

</head>

The backlink to this page is:

<a href=”http://example.com”>Dogs love</a>

With this, Bing gives more importance to Backlinks.

• Page authority is important in Bing: Usually, webpage authority is provided to only the top level domains, particularly the authoritative organizations like .edu, .gov, etc. The page authority of the domain also determined by the domain age and for Bing, page authority is a major factor.

Bing SEO tools

So, if you are planning to optimize your website on Bing, here are a few Bing SEO tools that can prove to be really helpful for your website’s ranking.

• Internet Information Services SEO Toolkit (IIS): An effectual toolkit designed and released by Microsoft itself, the internet Information Services SEO Toolkit helps you boost your website’s SEO, hence ensuring it a top spot in the Bing ranking. The toolkit includes basic SEO services like website analysis, sitemaps, robots.txt removal, website index function, etc.
• Bing Keyword tool: A free and widely used keyword checker released by WordStream, the Bing Keyword Tool helps its users find and select better keywords for their web pages.

With these new tools and updates, Bing now seems to be slowly catching up with search engine trends created by Google.

If your site pages have good content, submit them to buzz and digg. Both have a high chance of getting your page indexed.

Now, ideally this does make sense because both Yahoo Buzz and Digg are popular source of latest content for search engines but why would ANY search engine share this kind of information explicitly with the SEO community and webmasters?

Whatever the reason is, I am pretty sure we will see a spike of traffic going up for both Digg & Yahoo in coming weeks!

As published in Financial Times on November 22, 2009, Microsoft is in talks with various news publishing companies like News Corp who owns The Wall Street Journal (in US), The Times (in UK), Daily Telegraph (in Australia) etc to have them de-index or remove their content from Google. In return, these media companies will get paid!

If that happens, we all would be really interested to see how will Google react. Will they pay more than what Microsoft offered? And if they do, we will see a new money making opportunity for the media companies to pull back their sinking ship. If search engines starts fighting for the exclusive rights of the content, we will be in a new era of web search.

Microsoft is in talks with News Corp to De-index its pages from Google

We may even hit the era where more players join the search engine war. Every warrior shows the unique content. So if I want to read health news, I will go to, say, healthyengine.com (a fictitious search engine which publishes exclusive news about health industry) instead of Google because Google does not have the rights to publish those news!

Microsoft's Bing will now power Yahoo's Search Results.

But what does it really mean to your website rankings? How would it effect your SEO efforts? Our experts analyzed its possible consequences and are trying to answer some of the questions you are probably wondering about right now. Read on…

1. Should I optimize my website for Yahoo! SERPs now ?

There’s no need, really. Especially since Yahoo! will henceforth use Bing’s algorithm to show its search results, which basically means you will be wasting your time if you optimize for Yahoo!

2. Will my site’s current rankings change on Yahoo?

Yes, it should since Yahoo! will now be powered by Microsoft’s search technology which means search results should be the same on Yahoo and Bing. This deal will most like be a boon to those webmasters and SE Experts who are ranking well on Bing. Obviously, we’re not very hopeful about the current top rankers on Yahoo!

3. What about Yahoo! Search APIs, site explorer etc?

Honestly, even we do not have a clear answer to this. We think, however, that it would now be influenced by Bing (Microsoft) results as well. We’ll of course let you know when we know ourselves

4. Will Yahoo’s (paid) directory submissions be any useful for my website rankings now?

Yahoo’s paid directory submission has never been the factor of your organic search ranking. So no, it will not effect your ranks.

So here we are, providing you a first hand account of the latest buzz in the Search Engine World along with our humble opinion about the same. We’d like to know your feedback about this development and its possible consequences. Don’t forget to drop your comments below. We’ll keep you updated with more information as it comes.

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Bing - Could it become the king? (Image Courtesy: geniusreviews.org)

Another interesting news was the increase in the number of keywords used in the search queries. People are using up to 5 – 8 words in their searches.  You can read more about the actual statistics at the report here.

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