SEO

According to Comscore’s calculations, Bing received 18.1% of all searches in the United States for the month of November. Google still rules the roost, owning 66% of all searches.  To put this into context, 18.1 billion explicit core searches were conducted in November, with Google ranking first with 12.1 billion. Bing ranked second with 3.3 billion searches, followed by Yahoo with 2 billion, Ask Network with 464 million and AOL, Inc. with 253 million. So with an 8.8 billion search difference between Google and Bing, the question remains: Does Bing matter for SEO?

The answer? Sort of.

While Bing’s numbers don’t seem impressive all by themselves, it’s important to note that the total number of searches occurring on Bing has doubled since 2009.

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2013 Could be called The Year of A Thousand Google Changes. Ok, maybe not a thousand, but there were quite a few changes last year. Penguin saw another major update. Google encrypted organic keyword referral data. Hummingbird brought us semantic search.  And Google Authorship was reduced. The constant state of flux kept marketers on their toes, tweaking and adjusting their approach to building and maintaining websites that will meet Google’s elusive criteria for a “quality” website. SEO success used to be fairly easy, and within the grasp of anyone with a vague understanding of the internet. But 2013 changed all that.

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You may have missed it, what with all the fuss over Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, but back in October, Google released Penguin 2.1. According to Google, this update affected about 1% of global searches, which is quite a bit for an update. So if you noticed a change in October you may have been hit. So how do you recover from the latest Penguin update?

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The internet is flooded with articles claiming SEO is dead (again). Thanks to Google’s most recent three updates – Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird, the mantra around the ‘net has become, “Create epic content. Focus on keyword themes, not keywords themselves. The links will come naturally. And the visitors will come naturally. Thus, your rankings will increase naturally.” Sounds easy enough, right? If that’s all it takes, why the heck would you pay for SEO? All anyone needs to do for a little DIY SEO is to build a great site, create lots of good content, and all will be will with the world. Right?

So imagine how confusing it can be to webmasters who attempt this type of DIY SEO, only to learn that Google can’t index their website or won’t index their website, and their traffic crawls to a standstill.

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The recent sweeping changes in Google’s algorithm and analytics have left some website owners and SEO pros shaken. Those who leaned heavily on link building have been hit especially hard, dealing with lost rankings and traffic in the wake of the shift to semantic search. These marketers did not heed the calls of the last two years to focus on audience development and content rather than link profiles. But, Hummingbird has officially forced the issue. However, the new SEO is not all that much different from the old ways.

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The search world has been aflutter since Google announced the Hummingbird Algorithm a little more than a month ago (even though the actual algo update happened a month before that). The update, which affected 90% of global searches made huge waves around the internet. Many webmasters felt at least a bit of a pinch, but some folks lost all of their local SEO rankings over the last six weeks or so.

There are plusses and minuses to Hummingbird, with the main benefits befalling the user. Hummingbird seeks to be responsive. The goal is to truly understand the context of a user’s query, rather than simply matching keywords on a page. Hummingbird, coupled with many prior Google updates has forced the SEO world to re-think local internet marketing.

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Now that Google is 15 and almost ready to drive a car all by itself (see what we did, there?), the search engine has decided to act like a full-on teenager and reinvent itself. First, they decided to encrypt all keyword referral data from organic search in Google Analytics. Most SEOs knew the change was going to come around eventually, but most people assumed that 100% encryption was a few years off. So that news set the search marketing community abuzz. The second change was one that actually happened a month ago, but it happened silently; behind the scenes, and was only officially announced last week. Hummingbird, the new search algorithm, was designed to help Google better handle complex search queries. This update aims to parse out the actual intent of a user instead of just the rote matching of keywords to the query. So, will the Hummingbird algorithm change the way we approach video marketing?
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