You may think that there is a new search engine in town – Bing. They have advertised online, on television, and even in magazines, as being the next big thing in search engines. But, if you have around awhile, you recognize who they are. They are MSN Live. The Bing search engine is actually a reincarnation of Microsoft Network’s original Live search engine which has been around for over a decade.

Because of the new name, people think that Bing is new. In a way it is, because of the technology that is used to bring results to the consumer. It is not based quite so highly on paid advertising like Google is, and it is not littered with ads like Yahoo is. The results are presented in clusters, with less advertising, making it very effective for people with limited searching skills.

As a website owner or developer, you probably think you should spend all your time concentrated on getting listed on Yahoo or Google, and yes, you have to cover those. But, you should also consider working on getting your site listed on Bing, too. Because of the amount of advertising that that Microsoft is doing, and the fact that so many people who buy new computers have their browsers already set to Bing, you should make sure that your website is submitted to the Bing search engine.

When you go about working to get your web site listed, be sure that your content is completely new (rehashed content will get you rejected from the listings), your pages are free of errors in the code, and your navigation works correctly. These will all help you to get listed easier, more often, and closer to the top – without ever having to pay any money to be there.

There are many parts to a good website and a successful online business. The most important is a good product or service, one that people can trust, one that has value and one that fits into a particular marketing niche. Even the most perfect product or service will not sell if people can’t find it. Nowadays, people won’t be able to distinguish you from your competitors or even find you at all if you don’t have a good knowledge of keyword tools and how they are used to get you high up in the search engines.

SEO – or search engine optimization – is a means of building your website in a way that the search engines will find it attractive and rank it high for a particular list of keywords. Determining what the appropriate keywords for your product are, can be one of the hardest things you do, you shouldn’t just pull them out of a hat. However, there are now many keyword tool generators available that can help you find what exactly people are searching for when they are searching for you.

For instance, if you are a Realtor, your keywords need to be a lot more specific than “real estate”. There are a million Realtors online and you want people to find you who are looking for a real estate agent in your area, with your particular skills or expertise. If you specialize in foreclosures in Phoenix, for example, you might use keyword tools to determine that “Realtor”, “buy foreclosure”, and “Phoenix” are the best words for you to use.

Knowing what keywords to use for your particular site is one of the most important things that you should spend time on because it is what really drives people to you. These are the people that will fit your niche and are the most likely to buy what you have got to sell.

When was the last time you had a good look at your website? Not just look at the design and the color, but had a look at how the search engines see it. Is your website full of tables and unnecessary coding that confuses search engines? Is it dependent on Flash or JavaScript that prevents it from being seen by the search engines? A good SEO audit will tell you all of this and more, and help you to get your web site to the top of the rankings.

There are many companies that offer free SEO audit services as a means to selling you their SEO optimization services down the line. You should be aware that some of these are scams, and some of them may try and sell you services that you don’t really need. So, before you hire a company, just take a look at how your site currently ranks in comparison to your competitors.

A good SEO audit will review all of your code on all of your pages, ensuring that it is up-to-date and compliant with all the latest browsers. It will also help you devise alternatives to any Flash or Java technology that you may be using for navigation (these can prevent you from ranking high with the search engines).

Perhaps the most important part of an audit will be to determine what your keywords should be. A good SEO company will be able to give you precise details on what keywords will work for you, and what ones won’t. By learning your correct keywords and how to place them throughout your web site, you will have a better chance of ranking high without having to pay for placement. Getting all your clicks and impressions without paying for them is the best way to make your business a success. Get a FREE SEO Audit today!

Here is one for the WTF books: Google just changed their search page slightly to make it very 5-year old friendly. You'll notice the flattened quality of the main Google logo, the extra square buttons on the main search page, and the extra large appearance of everything. In addition to that - Search Engine Results Pages have an entirely new look as well.

Preliminary tests show that this is only a cosmetic change and that actual search results remain unaffected.

Check it out

If you have a blog, then you are probably familiar with spam. People will comment on your site for the sole reason of promoting their own blogs. They do not read your posts, they just comment, asking you to sign up for their new pharmaceutical website. Not only is it annoying, but it can also take away from other useful comments. It can also destroy debates and conversations that have been sparked by your post. If you want to know how to get rid of blog comment spam, here are a few tips that can help you.

Many people automatically approve of blog comments. This is a setting on most blogging platforms that will allow anyone to post on your site. This does save time, because you do not have to personally approve of your comments, but it will lead to more spamming. If you are having a blog comment spam problem, you should consider manually approving of all of the comments that go under your posts.

There are also programs that you can use to help eliminate spam. For instance, when you start a Wordpress blog, you will automatically be able to enable a program called Askimet. This program is designed to block blog comment spam. But it is not perfect, and it will need your help to learn. If you discover that a spam conmment has come through, do not just delete it. If you mark it as spam, Askimet will learn not to let similar comments through.

One final option to help you regain control of your blog posts, is to only allow comments from registered users. You can do this at two different levels. You can block all people who are not registered to your blogging platform. Or you can block comments from all people who are not registered to your specific blog.

One of the keys to online marketing success is getting quality visitors to your website. You can get all the clicks you want, but if they aren’t people who are truly interested in what you are trying to sell, whether it is a product or a service, then you won’t sell anything. Getting qualified visitors to your site is turning out to be a lot easier than it has in the past, by using YouTube for SEO.

If a picture tells a thousand words, imagine how many a video tells. You can put up all the text links you want to your website, but there is something special about a video, especially one that you have recorded yourself. If you have a product, a short video describing and showing that product in action does much more than a webpage can and now that you can use YouTube for SEO; you can integrate your video right into the most common search engines.

The first thing you have to do is record a video, making yourself into an expert in your field, giving advice, answering a question, or describing how to solve a problem. If you have a product, show it, use it, or have others tell about it. Then, you submit your YouTube for SEO placement by uploading it to YouTube, giving it a great title and tags, linking to it on your website, and submitting that page’s link to the search engines.

Google places a higher relevance to video than it does most text, so if your video is relevant to your keywords and provides some informational content, then it will appear high in the listings, often with other videos that paid to be placed there. By taking the time to create a video, upload it, and link to it, you can get a lot of good, qualified traffic to your site almost overnight.

We all want to get more people to visit our site. The best way for us to do this is by getting a higher page ranking on search engines, like Google. So how do we raise our sites ranking from 93rd, to 3rd? Well, one of the best ways to improve your site’s location is by building your links. This can take a lot of time and effort but it is worth the trouble. If you don’t want to spend the time, you could always buy your links. Most people agree that buying links is a bad idea and here are two reasons why.

First, you’ll start receiving bad traffic. When you build your own links, you can pick and choose what sites are related to yours. If you find sites with common interests, you are going to find viewers who will enjoy your site as well. Buying links will associate you with websites that are not closely related to your content. This might bring in a lot of traffic, but most people will see your site and leave. You need to build good traffic if you want your website to be successful.

Second, you could receive penalties. Google is one search engine that is not happy with the recent trend of buying links. If Google catches you doing this, they could mark your site as a spam site, which will greatly lower you, and possibly remove you from their overall site rankings.

So what should you do instead? Taking the time to build your own links through social networking will have many positive impacts on your site. It will make you more connected with the internet community and it will also bring in the type of traffic you need. Searching for similar sites is also a good way to get new ideas and to check out your competition.

As the owner of a website, you have so many choices that you need to make, especially regarding what development tools you will be using. We all know that just putting up a website with static content won’t make it anymore, so more and more webmasters are utilizing Wordpress, in part because of its many SEO benefits.

There are two types of Wordpress that work with SEO – the software that you can use online, and the downloaded Wordpress that you can put on your own site. Most people choose to upload their information via the program online because it is much easier and does not require you to have the technical skills to install the software. If you do this, however, be sure that you have a backup of all your work on your own computer.

If you are going to be using Wordpress because of its SEO you should spend the time working with wordpress themes to create something that is more SEO-friendly and resembles proper content management.

By taking the time to properly design the style and theme of the site, and produce as much quality content as possible, you will have much better results from the search engines. Although much of SEO is decided by complicated algorithms, there is a human factor involved. So, keeping your website as legitimately informative and interesting as possible will help it stay high in the search engine results.

You will also rank higher if, by using Wordpress, you keep your content fresh, relevant, and always changing. This way, the search engines will pick up more and more content from you and continually rank you much higher than your competitors.

If you wanted to know how many pages of your site were indexed by Google, the answer was simple, you just search site:www.example.com and the number of pages that Google shows was also the number of pages that Google had in its index. Google Webmaster Tools simplifies this process by providing an easy to use dashboard that shows the number of pages from a site that are included in Google's index. Google Webmaster Tools also conveniently displays information about how many inbound links a website has.

Creating more pages on a consistent basis will provide more strength and relevance for your website. Unfortunately, creating content is a very time-consuming process, that's why you should have us create content for you.

Page Titles matter for SEO - Big Time. It is critical that you correctly optimize page title tags.

Let's Take a look a the basics:

Page Titles provide an opportunity to include keywords.

Page Titles are what the user sees as the blue, bold, clickable text within the Search Engine Results page (SERPs).

Look at this graphic of a Google Search Engine Result Page:

In the example above, the search query is "laguna niguel real estate". You can see that in the results provided, the first line - which is the blue, underlined, clickable link text also matched the search phase exactly. This first line of the displayed search results is the page title.

In terms of HTML, the page title is contained within the opening and closing 'title' tags.

Let's take a look at how the page title appears on the website itself...

Page titles provide a general idea about what information one will learn by reading the website. Along with Meta Descriptions, the page titles give the searcher an idea of why they should be interested in your website. If your page title gives them what they want, they are likely to click through to your website, and prove to Google that your website content is relevant for their search.

To make sure that your page titles are completely optimized, take a look at getting a custom SEO checklist.