In yesterday’s Yahoo! Search Blog, they announced that they’ve begun a test incorporating Microsoft’s Bing search results in their pages.  They are displaying both natural and paid search results, but only in about 25 percent of Yahoo’s search results pages.  Here’s what you can expect to see:

Further, Yahoo! says their mobile search product will begin to incorporate Bing mobile search results in the coming weeks and months.  Notable is Yahoo’s assertion that they will “continue to innovate and enhance the overall consumer experience around those core listings.”  This means that while the search results themselves will be generated by Bing, other on-page features or enhancements will be driven by the Yahoo! Search team.

For this and other reasons, you will continue to see how your keywords rank in natural search results across Google, Yahoo! and Bing throughout and following completion of the Yahoo!-Bing search integration within the Yield Web Marketing Suite and our Natural Search Optimizer.  It is entirely possible that your keywords may rank slightly differently across Yahoo! and Bing based on a variety of factors throughout the integration process.

For all of our customers, rest assured we remain on top of these changes and will work to ensure all changes are seamless to you, even as we continue to keep you abreast of these changes as they’re occurring.  If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact your customer success rep.

One of the best ways to ensure your website ranks well for your most important keywords in natural search results is through in-bound links to your site.  But how do you attract them (short of begging other website owners to link to you)?  We’ve got some tips and tricks below that will help you build links to your website.

Before we get started, though, just a quick reminder about links, link juice and the social etiquette of linking:

First, not all links are created equal.  Google, Yahoo! and Bing all evaluate links to your website relative to the quality of the source of the link.  So, for instance, if you get a link from The New York Times it’s vastly more important to the search engines than if Yield Software links to you (we hope one day soon we’ll be in the same league!)  In practical terms, what this means is that the NYT link has more juice than the Yield link, and when the algorithm is determining what your page rank should be, it’s weighing the link juice of each individual link.  Other types of sites that provide powerful link juice are links from .gov sites and links from .edu sites, in addition to links from mainstream media source sites or very popular blogs such as BoingBoing or ReadWriteWeb.

Second, link unto others as you would have the link to you.  If you hope to generate lots of great links to your site, you must also be someone who sensibly links regularly.  The social etiquette of the Web dictates that website and blog owners conscientiously link to the sources of news, information, reference material or other sources of content; this, in turn, will inspire web publishers to link to you.  By declaring you’re a good netizen, people will want to engage you more.

Now, on to those recommendations!

“Top” Lists

One of the all-time best ways to get people to link to your content is through lists.  For instance, the top 10 best ways to evaluate a purchase.  Or three things to consider when making a purchasing.  Remember that your “Top” lists should have some relevance to what your site is all about, but SHOULD NOT be an overt promotion of or commercial about your products and services.  These should be objectively helpful lists that people would intuitive want to share with friends or colleagues or family members (for instance, in their own blogs or via a tweet on Twitter or in a post on Facebook.)

Video

After social networks, like Facebook, video is the hottest segment of the Web.  People can’t get enough of video!  So a good way to get people to link to your site or your blog is use video.  It’s super easy to embed a video in your site (especially if you’re publishing your website or blog on a content management system like WordPress).  As with “Top” lists, be sure to choose videos that relevant to what you do, sell or serve.  If you produce and publish your own videos (which you should!), again, make sure you’re doing something that is going to be useful to people.  How-to videos are hugely popular on the Web, particularly if it’s about something emerging that people want to do but don’t yet understand.

Photos

Believe it or not, photos are still very popular and capture people’s eye.  Photos that capture an amazing moment, or are somehow instructional in nature can always drive interest, links and traffic to your site.

Downloadable Content

Publish content on your site that is new, unique or unlike something folks can get elsewhere.  Perhaps it’s a how-to guide relating to your industry or the services you provide.  If you have the budget, commission a white paper or a study on some important aspect of the work you do.  Or maybe you’ve been doing a great job with your blog over the last few years and have a collection of blog posts that, when taken together, make a terrific e-book on a subject relating to your business or work.  There are a whole number of online e-book publishing sites that enable fast and easy production, and which you can then offer for free download on your site.  It’s easy to say, “oh, no one cares as much as I do about the thing I do” — but guess what: you’re NOT that unique!  If you love what you do, chances are there are a whole bunch of people (potentially tens of thousands, even) who share your interests and passion.

Graphs and Graphics

Another great, link-worthy strategy for your website and blog is the use of graphs and graphics.  From simple charts and graphs created by Excel to timeline graphics, tag cloud graphics and workflow illustrations, folks love great visuals that bring into specific relief that which may be difficult to imagine.  There are many free or low-cost graphic creation tools across the Web (do a search!) that enable you to simply plug in a number of data points and return a beautiful illustration that you can copy and publish.  If you have a little budget, you can also always hire graphic artists to create stunning visualizations of either data or workflow or technology stacks (among many other options.)

At the end of the day, content, even in the 21st century, is still king.  If you consistently publish good stuff on your website and blog, it will be link-worthy.  And when you do publish, don’t be shy about publicizing that fact.  You should copy the URL of your new content and paste it into tweets on Twitter, your Facebook updates, your LinkedIn updates and any other sites where you can provide updates of what you’re working on.

Once you’ve gotten into a rhythm, be sure to see how your site is ranking for your keywords across Google, Yahoo! and Bing. If you’re a Yield Software customer, you can do this quickly and conveniently by clicking on the Natural Search tab in the Yield Web Marketing Suite and checking your link counts.  You’ll also be able to see the sources of those links so you can evaluate how well you’re doing in terms of link juice / link source quality.

It’s been another big week in Silicon Valley. The annual Ad:Tech San Francisco Conference is wrapping up today after playing host to 12,000 visitors and a huge range of exhibitors anxious to show off the ways in which they’re innovating across traditional, online, search and mobile advertising.

At the same time, Facebook kicked off its Developers’ Conference, called F8, also in the Bay Area. Like Twitter’s conference last week, the gathering is for third-party developers of applications that live on Facebook itself and across its growing ecosystem. Founder Mark Zuckerberg (pictured above, at the opening of F8 on April 21, 2010) announced a stunning array of changes and new initiatives that will directly affect the nearly 500 million people who visit the site each month.

But wait, there’s more: Google, Apple and Yahoo!, all headquartered in the Bay Area, released their quarterly earnings reports this week. And what earning they are:

Google, though disappointing analysts, saw revenue increases of more than 20% over the same period last year, bringing in a total of $6.7 billion, with profits of nearly $2 billion. (What’s to be disappointed about?) Search advertising remains the principal driver of Google’s revenues and profits.

Yahoo!, which everyone said was on a death watch, also produced respectable results for the quarter. Revenues were $1.6 billion for the first quarter of 2010, a one percent increase from the first quarter of 2009. Income from operations for the first quarter of 2010 was $188 million. Nearly all this was driven by display advertising across its network.

Not to be outdone, Apple also reported stunning results last quarter, which officially made it bigger in terms of market cap than cross-town rival Google. Total revenues for the quarter were nearly $15.7 billion, with profits at nearly $3.4 billion. They’re selling more Macintosh computers, iPhones and iPads than ever; only iPods saw a small decline in sales—about a one percent decline. Increasingly, however, Apple is deriving significant revenues from sales of apps, various forms of entertainment and advertising.

Reading this, you might ask “What recession?” While Silicon Valley did see some impact from the Great Recession, which most economists believe is now over, it wasn’t as adversely impacted as many other sectors of the economy. And its rebound is pretty darn impressive.

Capitalizing on the robust return to growth of online display, search and mobile advertising–not to mention the massive adoption of smart gadgets like the iPhone and iPad–Facebook is moving aggressively to expand its ecosystem across much of the Web. In summary, Facebook’s new default is “globally social” – which is to say, it presumes all members of the social network want to be social not only on Facebook but wherever it may have extended its tentacles across the Web.

For instance, if you see a “Like” button next to an article on, say Huffington Post, and you click on that button, your endorsement of that article will appear in your news feed on Facebook for all your friends to see, comment on and share. That this button exists at all on HuffPo has to do with Facebook’s new Open Graph effort, which provides website publishers with simple tools to integrate Facebook features and functions directly into their own sites.

This new initiatives also means that the HuffPo will be more personalized to you – showing you, for instance, what your friends on Facebook previously read and shared on HuffPo.

Like Google’s search advertising engine, AdWords, Facebook will target ads to its users. But instead of using the words typed into a search query to dictate what sort of text-based ads to serve around search results, Facebook will target ads that are mostly text but also include a small graphic based on what users have declared about themselves in their profiles and news updates. It will also factor in your age, location, gender, education, and other demographic, psychographic and geographic considerations.

Facebook believes it can help advertisers more precisely deliver ads that are directly relevant to the person who sees them. Moreover, it’s hoping that because users see ads that pertain to their immediate needs, interests or desires, they’ll be more receptive to those messages. All of which, of course, should lead to better ad click-through rates, increased sales, and lower costs to market products and services.

At Ad:Tech, all the buzz what less about the kinds of ads you might expect to find on networks like Yahoo’s or AOL’s new Advertising.com platform, which serves the AOL network, and more about how to integrate better into the interactions and conversations you might find on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. While advertising on networks is still big business, ad-buys on those properties are now a default in any ad plan. Everyone in the business is more interested in those 500 million monthly visitors to Facebook or the millions more who are publishing billions of tweets across Twitter’s network every day.

Another big topic is how best to leverage advertising on smart phones like the iPhone and Blackberry, and on tablet devices like the iPad – and how best to efficiently integrate advertising into the hundreds of thousands of apps people place on those devices.

Given the pace of technological innovation, you’d think the advertising models for all this new technology would be a little more advanced. But you’d be wrong. Seasoned pros and young entrepreneurs alike are struggling to find the right ways to best leverage the range of new advertising channels effectively and efficiently, and which also integrate well into the new experiences all this technology makes possible.

Whether leveraging mobile search to get relevant coupons and offers into the hands of those who’d use them right when they need them, to whether and how to place ads in apps like Condé Nast’s Epicurious such that they’re seen as helpful is still being hotly debated.

What is clear is that the future of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies remain pretty darn bright. Not to mention those earnings.

In August we ran a post about getting your site listed in Google’s 10-pack.  This post has been our number one read post to date, so I thought you might appreciate additional tips on tweaking your local business center listings across Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

1. Submit complete forms.

All three local search centers include a wealth of information that’s of use for people doing searches (i.e. your prospects!), so be sure to fill out each form completely (the hyperlinked “Google”, “Yahoo” and “Bing”, above, will take you to each).

For example, if you have a bricks and mortar storefront, you can indicate your operating hours. If your site then appears in Google’s 10-pack listing and someone clicks on your listing, it will say whether or not you’re open for business – in real time!

Also be sure to choose the appropriate categories for your business – and yes, you can choose more than one. Choosing more than one category helps ensure you site is shown in local searches for those categories (nevertheless, show restraint: only choose those categories that genuinely refer to your business).

As you can see in the screen shot below, Spa Bar, a day spa in San Francisco, has included its operating hours (and as I write this, the spa is open – hmmmm . . . maybe it’s time for a facial) but is listed for one category only.

Its competitor, Tru Spa, also located in San Francisco, lists its operating hours and six categories, as you can see in the screen shot below.

2. Ask all of your customers to give you a review – on multiple sites.

Customer reviews comprise a major component of the local search algorithm. And, as you can see in the screen shot below, Google is now including a link for “Reputation Trend,” which links to a trending analysis on the review site Judy’s Book.

This means it’s becoming increasingly important that you become very strategic about getting your customers to leave reviews for you – on multiple review sites.

In this shot for Luminous Day Spa, you can see that Bing is pulling information from the CitySearch directory, including “menu” and “reservation” hot links, and it’s showing that the spa has a rating of 9/10 (we’re not sure how that is calculated).

Other review sites you’ll want to consider include:

Local review sites for your city/region – These include CitySearch and Yelp, to name just two popular review sites.

Travel sites — Fodor’s and HotelTravel.com are two popular sites.

Google Reviews – Anyone with a Google account can leave a review simply by clicking on the little “comment” icon that follows any search engine listing (provided the person is logged in to Google).

Yahoo! and Bing Reviews – The review function works similarly to Google’s.

3. Upload your own images.

Although all three search engines let you upload images, you can upload more than just one or two to Google’s local business center. If you don’t upload your own images, you leave to chance exactly what image Google is going to show – which could be unflattering, to say the least.

For our day spa example, many of the spas used photographs of people getting facials and massages or images of their interiors. You can also upload your logo and YouTube videos.

Small plug: If all of this sounds a little overwhelming, consider putting Yield Software to work. With our new Local Listings JumpStart package, we can get you on the map and in your local search results quickly and effectively. To get started, schedule a free 20-minute consult with a Yield Software Services Expert today.

SES Show Update and Three 10-Pack Strategies

We’ve been at Search Engine Strategies–San Jose since Tuesday. The themes we’re hearing repeatedly: mobile is going to be huge, review sites are going to be huger, and social media is now part and parcel of the SEO / search fabric.

Because we love you, our small and mid-sized business customers, we attended the session, “Search Engine Optimization on a Dime,” and pricked-up our ears when we heard this stat from David Mihm, Director and COO of GetListed.org: more than 40% of all searches had a local (or geographic) intent.

What was eye-opening was his statement that Google sees potentially 500 million local searches per month! (No one is quite sure of the exact number.)

Local search is when someone uses a search phrase, such as “plumbers” plus a city, region, or state. When you search for just “plumbers,” Google will give you results based on your IP address – which is also considered a “local search.”

For local search, the end all and be all is getting into the Google 10-pack, the name for the map and its ten website links that often takes up the #1 listing position for many local searches.

According to David, the 10-pack levels the playing field for mom and pop businesses – which makes sense as it propels ten lucky sites to the #1 listing. So how do you get your site listed in it? David outlined a few strategies:

1. Get listed in Google’s Local Business Center.

Submitting your site is free, but you must do this step manually as it requires that Google verifies your company via an automated phone call. At the same time you claim your business listing, you’ll claim your Google map listing as well.

When listing your company name, include one or two keywords that describe your company – i.e. A1 Plumbing and Heating Services versus A1 Plumbing.

Be sure to complete all the fields within the Google Local Business Center form, including whether you have free parking, your storefront hours, and if you accept credit cards.

“But I’m a virtual company, I don’t have a storefront!” I can hear you saying. “Or, I sell to companies all over the US, I’m not concerned with local.” Given nearly half of all searches have a local intent, it behooves you to ensure your company is listed in Google’s (and Yahoo’s) local business centers as people will often look for companies near them when sourcing products or services.

Also, Google’s Local Business Center just isn’t for bricks and mortar businesses –anyone can list a business as long as you can verify that it is a business.

2. Get listed in third-party directories.

Google sees its own Local Business Center listing as a trusted resource when it comes to local search. It also depends on information provided by third-party data providers. According to David, your site should be listed in the following:

InfoUSA – To get listed with InfoUSA and other huge databases, you must post your business name to Universal Business Listing. Submission is not free – you’ll need to pony up $30 a year.

Localeze – Submission to Localeze is free.

Best of the Web – A directory, BOTW features categories (much like the Yahoo! Directory, in which you should also get listed, and which also costs something to join). The cost for submission is $99.95 a year or a $299.95 one-time charge. Use the “Submit Site” link to add your site to the directory.

3. Get cited “locally.”

According to David, citations, that is, mentions of your company name, in the local press is a huge factor in ensuring your site is part of Google’s 10-pack. (Again, this makes sense.)

To get mentioned, volunteer for local community events and/or sit on civic committees. Attend local business fairs or hold contests. Sponsor community beautification programs. Send out press releases whenever you have company news or hire someone new.

You’ll also want to ask your customers to leave reviews on opinion sites such as Yelp as these reviews are now part of Google’s local search algorithm. (Notice in the screen shot above that all 10 sites have reviews.)

Small plug: the Yield Web Marketing Suite helps small and growing businesses target their local markets through search engine optimization and via PPC ad campaigns on Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing.  Give our free 30-day trial a test drive if you’re not already subscribed.

The day has finally arrived.  Microsoft and Yahoo have figured out how to partner together.  And, it was all done under the unparalleled scrutiny of incessant press and blogger coverage.  Congratulations to Steve Ballmer and Carol Bartz.  You get an A+ for persistence.

There are a lot of purists and contrarians criticizing Yahoo for entering into this agreement, most of which presumes a loss of entrepreneurship, innovation and competitive advantage.  However, let’s set the story straight.  Yahoo has been struggling in the search marketplace for quite some time.  They have seen their market share erode and have not shown any signs of turning that around.  Google, through their simple user interface and continuous innovation, has claimed the search marketplace as its own.

What options were left for Yahoo?  Dethroning the market leader is never accomplished with a “me too” strategy.  Either they would have to out-innovate Google (which, given their history, would be nearly impossible) or they will have to compete with scale by “merging” with other like-minded competitors.  Why is this surprising to so many people?  The same story has been played out many times across a large number of industries.

Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder and recently-departed CEO, refused to let Yahoo be acquired by Microsoft, which turned out to be a huge mistake as the economics have gotten significantly worse since Microsoft’s first offer.  So, why did Yahoo persist in working on a deal under their new management?  Why didn’t they hold out for a better offer?  The reality is that there is only a single partner that they could legitimately work with to pose a competitive threat to Google.  That is a hard spot to be in, as there is no chance of getting into a bidding war and improving your outcome.  The deal was done because the benefits of doing a deal outweighed those of the status quo.

So, let’s talk about the benefits.

First, on the cost side, there are huge economies of scale to be had by having a single sales and, more importantly, a single development organization focused on search.

Second, many companies advertise only with Google because of the time and resources it takes to manage search campaigns.  Now, they can get significant distribution by advertising with Microsoft and reaching all Microsoft and Yahoo search properties.  This will cause many advertisers to consider expanding their search efforts to include Microsoft.

Third, for users life is simple.  Everything should be completely transparent.  They will go to the same web sites, with the same user interfaces.  The only difference is that the search ads will be served up by Microsoft (apparently with a “powered by Bing” tag on each Yahoo search result page.)

For advertisers, however, there are both pros and cons.

First, the pros: as we’ve seen in the financial sector, creating large-scale marketplaces for transactional commerce—such as the NYSE or Nasdaq—creates a more efficient marketplace and grows the market in aggregate.  So, a result of this union should be that publishers receive better calibrated revenue associated with each ad placement and likewise advertisers should pay more accurate prices for each click.

The downsides: first, prices for ads that were under-priced will see a rise as rates calibrate.  As an example, in our own client base, with the introduction and increased volume of Bing in the last month, we have seen sub-$2 per-click keywords at Microsoft become more expensive than the same keywords at Google.  Something to keep an eye on.  The other concern for advertisers is the mention in today’s announcement that Yahoo will serve as the “relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.”  Will this mean a non-premium advertiser (i.e. most of us) will be at a competitive disadvantage to the premium advertisers? Seems likely.

As far as Yahoo is concerned, it seems clear they have made the decision to focus on their core strengths – content and display.  This is the right decision in a trying time in their history.  And it’s good for Microsoft, too.  If they didn’t do this deal, we would have seen both Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s search efforts slowly fade into the shadows of irrelevance.  This would be devastating to consumers and advertisers alike who want and need to have choice.

It will take time for Microsoft and Yahoo to work out the details and integrate their platforms.  And the anti-competitive / anti-trust forces are already massing to oppose this deal, according to the Wall Street Journal, which might cause further delays.

In the meantime, the clock is still ticking for businesses trying to attract and acquire customers using search marketing.  Thus, companies of all sizes will still need to leverage all three search engines–Google, Bing and Yahoo–to meet their business objectives and outpace their competitors.  All of us here at Yield Software are here to help you do just that.