BrightEdge Weekly Search Recap – 8/26
This week’s top search stories included some recaps of last week’s Search Engine Strategies conference, Bing’s advice for SEO fundamentals, and some new Google updates. Read on for more details…
Microsoft is systematically killing off the mystery of Bing-Yahoo optimization. In addition to a post on quality content that we covered previously, Bing has now told us the 18 fundamental things that webmasters need to know about search engine optimization.
Cindy Krum, CEO of Mobile Moxie and author of “Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are,” has spoken at numerous SES conferences around the world. And mobile was once again a hot topic at SES San Francisco this year – mobile marketing was named by many speakers as a key component of the future of search.
In his session on Advanced Keyword Modeling at SES San Francisco, Bill Hunt from back-azimuth.com drilled down to the molecular level to analyze how your keywords and snippets match a user’s search query, and more importantly, that user’s intent.
Many things have changed in our little search world since that time. I thought it would be valuable to review that research to see what’s changed, but also identify a few things that needed a bit of a refresh. (Side note: Thank you to Julianne Zhang who was one of our many great interns this summer for helping compile this data!)
Google is experimenting with a new look for their search page. This alternate version has an independent scroll-bar for the left-column options and features a slightly cleaner overall design.
The six month anniversary of Google’s Panda update passed quietly yesterday – guess everyone was too distracted dealing with the latest tweak to the algorithm to notice. The only article I saw was by ZDnet reporting that HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson says SEO doesn’t work (seriously guys, three exclamation in the headline?).
Google is one of the front-runners in the bidding war for Hulu, with bids expected to be anywhere from $500 million to $2 billion, according to various reports. Amazon and Yahoo are also top candidates to buy Hulu.
Two weeks ago, I shared the first half of a “Do-Not-Do” list for SEM neophytes that I crowd-sourced from fellow SEM geeks on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. And now, the rest of the story…
A study by PageLever, an analytics tool for Facebook, showed that search engines are major traffic drivers for Facebook pages, making up 34% of all external referrals. Google was the leading search engine sending 27.57% of all external traffic to pages. This study analyzed 1000 pages, with a minimum of 10,000 fans each.
The social-powered Web browsing service StumbleUpon now claims to drive more than half of all social media referral traffic in the U.S., according to new data from StatCounter.