Last week Microsoft launched their new search engine, strangely named Bing. The online press is littered with bloggers dissection and viewpoints – none of which I think is particularly interesting. Comparing Bing with Google is like comparing Apples with Oranges – no one is going to replace the mighty Google with straight search and therefore the only way for Microsoft to begin to compete with Google and Yahoo! (which is their clearly stated target) is to offer a richer information experience – and to this extent I believe Bing may potentially provide this.

I say may potentially provide this – as at this stage I just don’t necessarily see it. There are some supposedly cool things about Bing – but at present they are pretty much limited to the US so I can’t even tell their relevancy. Apparently for example, if you type in “weather” as well as search results it will give you an actual weather forecast for your region based on your IP address – this did not work for me.

The most interesting possibility for me however is Bing Travel. Once again most of the services don’t actually work outside of the US, but if they do, it stands to be an extremely useful tool and something that may have quite large impacts on the travel industry. Last year Microsoft acquired a company called Farecaster which through using historical data supposedly analyses an airline ticket price and forecasts whether you should purchase that ticket now. Bing Travel has integrated this technology into the search results as well as an immediate scanning of airline and travel booking sites to get the best fares. The Bing Travel home page looks more like a travel booking website than a search engine. Choosing to search for a flight from Los Angeles to Phoenix Arizona gives me search results from numerous websites in ascending price order and in the prominent left corner a 7-day price prediction that says buy this ticket now as fares are expected to rise by $50 (of which the algorithm is 80% confident of being right). That is pretty cool.

Microsoft reports research that says that 42% of all travellers 1 to 4 weeks researching their travel a staggering 17% a month or more. They also say that 52% search 3 or more websites before booking their airfares (Google reports similar stats saying: that an average holiday booking online takes 29 days of research from 12 separate searches with the user on average visiting 22 different travel websites.). Bing Travel is aimed at giving more power to the traveller and reducing their need to do so much search to get the answer they want. Beautiful if workable – although I would question if this takes the fun out of the whole travel research process (isn’t the wishing and dreaming of travel nearly as much fun as the excursion itself).

Bing Travel also incorporates the ability to filter your searches based on airline classes or how many stopovers you want etc; or in the case of hotels amenities such as restaurants and swimming pools; and it incorporates a host of content from MSN Travel. In most ways Bing Travel hardly distinguishes itself from an awesome travel portal – but the reality is that it is not a travel portal it is a search engine and this supposedly means it will not be limited to the content and databases from which it will pool endless amounts of content from. With rate predictions amongst other services only available in the US currently there seems a very long way to go before Bing Travel really has an impact on travel downunder, however, should it continue to develop on our initial glimpses I think it is potentially an exciting prospect.

Links, links, links – doesn’t SEO do your head in! I recently received a report on a website we look after in Australia by a completely independent company. The report identified that we had links to some partner companies in a predominant area on the website and suggested these be removed because they were damaging our sites search engine rankings. Ironically on the same day I received an email from the partner company asking me to change the link to something else and to make it more obvious. I can’t win on one side I am asked to remove the link on the other asked to push it. SO, I decided that once and for all I have to get a stand together on outbound links and their value.

I have spent a fair amount of time thus reading everything from webmasters tools to SEO blogs on everyones’ theories on outbound links – and trust me there are many theories. It is now pretty much my belief that outbound links from your website to others will, if not extremely considered, damage your overall search engine campaign. There are exceptions – but in general this argument is built on that same argument that I have made time and time again – that Google is not stupid and the continual gaming of the system is long-term ineffectual. In this post I explained how the linking algorithm was originally conceived (briefly, built on a premise of the Internet as a platform for sharing of academic documents when one author linked to another authors work this was seen as a vote of confidence or relevancy for that work) and equally how the growth of reciprocal linking campaigns or pay for links were not in the intention of the search engines algorithm built on this basis – hence they completed discounted these links. Reciprocal links might be of value if the link coming to your website is from a page with a higher page rank than yours – but in general they are worthless.

Putting it in real simple abstract conceptual terms – every link to your site earns a point plus some weighting for the page value the link comes from. A link from a high value site with a complementary theme to yours may get you a vote of say one for the link and 0.5 for the site value. Now on the flip side every outbound link you lose a point plus some weighting based on the value of the site you are linking to. That weighting is inverse – the lower the value of the site you link to, the less similar the content, or in Googles terms if the site is in a “bad neighbourhood” then the higher the deduction from your overall “link count”. In this way if reciprocal links are going to work then you want them to come from pages with much high page value (and whether that is purely the Page Rank value or not is debatable) than your own so that you net result is somewhat of a gain – but that also depends on how penalised you are for you link back.

The area I am still unclear about is whether there is any value in outbound linking at all. We make websites so is it not in our interest to link to complementary services for our clients, a hosting company, an offline designer for business cards and stationary, and so on? Well under the argument that every outbound link counts as a minus one from your overall link count then certainly no! But then, on the other side of the coin – the Internet is built on a premise of documents being shared and links being the fabric of the network of these documents. Without linking how would Google find all the trillion web pages – so it seems unlikely that outbound links are completely penalised. But it is certainly the case that the outbound links must be to websites that are complementary to you – that will have as minimal negative impact on your website. The use of the link within the content and its’ descriptive anchor text are surely very important here.

I have talked about this before – the anchor text – that is the text that the link to a site is placed on is extremely important in the Google algorithm for establishing what that link relates to. For example if you have a hotel in Brighton and a travel story links to your website on the words “hotel in Brighton” then this has massively more value than if the link said simply “The Adelphi.” We know it applies for inbound links – but regularly ignore the value the same practice has when making outbound links on your own website.

I guess the one solution to the conundrum is to add the “nofollow” tag to all your outbound links. We assume this tag tells search engines that your link is not a vote for that website – but does it really? I am not sure. Theoretically the “nofollow” tag is saying that I have put these links in my site because they are of relevance to my readers but not to be considered in the overall value of my website. But isn’t this argument completely against he ethos of make blood good websites that your readers enjoy and use, linking to relevant content for your users and you will rank well in search engines. Focus on the user and Google is clever enough to reward you – that is my starting point for anything!

Most website administrators create a site map, but do they actually know why they do this? There are two main reason for creating a site map and both of them entail completely different forms.

Firstly, there is the site map for the customer, that helps them navigate around your website. This usually takes the form of hyperlinks and sometimes even a short excerpt about each page. The link to this site map usually appear somewhere around the website footer.

The second type is the one that we generate to tell search engines about our site. These contain elements that can significantly assist search engines in cataloging your website and therefore your sites performance in search engines rankings.

Site maps should firstly be generated in XML. These can at a later date be changed to an RSS or Atom feed which will tell search engines when URLs are added without having to go back and resubmit your site map all the time, but initially you want Google to know of all your pages and a feed will only give the recent URLs. The alternative options is a straight text file (.txt) but I am not a huge fan of this as it allows only one URL per line and misses all the frequency and priority information.

An example XML site map would look like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-9″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www,sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://xebidy.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-04-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

The two most interesting tags are the frequency and priority tags. The frequency tells a search engine how often the content of the pages is likely (not necessarily exactly) to change. The different options are:

• Always
• Hourly
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Yearly
• Never

An important point is that although you are only indicating the likely frequency of your page updates you should be as accurate as possible. If you state that your content is updated weekly and search engines consider this information when setting their index stats for your site and it is not the case then the search engines may not return to those pages even monthly, meaning you could go for some time without getting your fresh content indexed.

The priority tag allows you to set a relative value of between 0.0 and 1.0 for each page. Unfortunately it is unlikely that the priority you assign to a page will effect the order in which your pages appear in the search engines (as we know there are many other factors that influence that) however it does tell search engines the order of importance of your pages as you deem them. It will help search engines to determine which pages in your site to index first and it will increase the likelihood of your most important pages appearing in the search databases. Finally an important point is that you will not gain anything by setting all your pages priorities high as the priority is relative to the other pages on your site so your important pages wont be considered over the others.

Once you have created your site map the next step is to advise search engines of its existence. In Google this is easy, you simply submit the site map through the webmasters interface – this is certainly the best way. Alternatively, you can specify the location of the site map into the robots.txt file – this is a good method for when using an RSS for your site map. Ideally you should do both.

For more information on site maps check out sitemaps.org

Heres’ an issue that everyone faces as more resellers of products appear on the Internet – the issue of duplicate content.

Say you write great content for your website, but then you share that content with all your main affiliates or suppliers, for example, a hostel might give the same content they use on their home page to Hostel World or a tour company might do this for STA Travel, what will Google and other search engines think when they see the same content?

We know that duplicate content is frowned on and we know that those sites that have plagarised content are devalued by Google in the search results rankings even to the point of being banned for sometime. The risk is that by supplying the same copy to your partners you are in fact risking having your content considered as duplicate content and having your own site devalued.

For example, Hostel World, STA, eBookers and so on are always going to be considered more authoritative websites than your own – they have thousands of pages, thousands of links and are good quality sites. They probably have higher page rank than you too. So, when Google reads your content on their site it is highly likely that Google may interpret that content as theirs and penalise you for copying them. Now thats’ not on!

What about if some of these sites even pay for cost-per-click ads on your name. Well it is surely not a bad thing if you are say Base Backpackers and STA Travel are promoting your brand in the search results so as they sell more of your products is it? Perhaps it is. After all the sale always has a cost of commission. If you are coming up in the search engines number one for your brand you are hoping that you will secure the sale yourself – thereby paying back the investment you have made in web marketing and getting that amazing site. You don’t want to be giving away revenue for someone else trading on your name without actually doing anything for themselves.

These are interesting conundrums for the travel (and other industries). Perhaps it is time to turn against the hands that have fed us for so long, the STA Travels, the Hostel Worlds and so on. When it comes to the web you are all on an even footing and perhaps you are right to say no to large commissions and demand that these companies produce their own content about your product or even not trade on your name in the search engines.

An interesting email came across my desk the other day about some well-known guys in Australia that have been launching a number of new sites promoting Northern Territory travel.

The interesting point pertained to how long a new URL exists before it gets’ any decent Google rankings. Our URL at Xebidy has only be going since February and we have only just gone up to page rank one after the recent Google page rank shuffle. Not exactly a meteoric rise – but it is not something we ever working on.

The interesting thing was that these guys had given themselves at least 8 months, citing the middle of next year to be when they would start to be up the rankings. I personally was a bit surprised by this speed – a bit quick in my opinion. But these guys are good and they do have a huge amount of websites to leverage off.

Then again we also know that Google looks for sites owned or operated by the same web masters etc and discounts the value of their links etc. So perhaps they are being optimistic. I am intrigued to watch.

It is of more interest for my own two pet projects, Breathe and Travel Generation. Both are new URLs and both are due to be launched early in 2008. How long will they take to have any impact on the search engine rankings? 12 months perhaps.

Best we follow out own advice and start comprehensive Internet Marketing now!

I sound like a broken record as I harp on about the importance of links, but I just want to clarify some very important issues with links that have been effecting so many of your web rankings in the past few months. Many sites have seen a decline in their search engine rankings – yet they have lots and lots of links, why?

As I said in a post last month about the Importance of Links Google has long disapproved of reciprocal links and now they have pounced “bad neighbourhood” links and buying links.

A bad neighbourhood is formed when you have lots of links from sites that have nothing to do with your sites content. Links from fashion websites, car sales, even shoe websites pointing to your hotel or travel site. Google simply sees right through this and simply not counting these links. It has not been established as yet whether your site is also being penalised for actually having these links. Likewise, listing you site on link farms (sites that serve no other purpose than creating links), or the most recent fad of three-way link schemes are definitely heavy frowned upon – they are simply cheating!

Worse, for hostels that have got themselves listed in such sites, I foresee it is going to be one hell of a battle to get yourselves removed.
Also in a post last month I introduced you to a cool tool for looking to the anchor text links of your competitors for your selected keywords. The anchor and title texts in the links to your website are very important. As part of the clampdown on rogue linking Google is placing much greater emphasis on the relationship between the content on your site and the content on the sites linking to you. One of the main methods for doing this is by looking at the title and anchor text in the links. The back link tool I gave you earlier this week is the first place to start in analysing your links and those of your competitors to establish the value of these.

Since Google has introduced these changes many established sites have seen themselves fall down the ratings. On the flip side the opportunity exists for you to improve your rankings now.

Following my rant last week regarding the amount of work involved in SEO and companies that charge just $99 per month I have been inundated with queries regarding just what is Optimisation (as opposed to Internet Marketing as expressed in my post). See my post here. So, I thought it prudent to give brief summary of some of the elements I consider to fall into the on-site optimisation category.

1. Keywords and content

I have discussed before (see relevant posts here) some of the methods of researching keywords and the importance of selecting the right keywords for your website. The goal is to generate more and better quality traffic to your website. The rule is to focus on 5 to 8 keyword phrases. Your chosen keywords should be contained within the main content generously. The ideal situation is to have your main keywords at the beginning of the page and toward the end of the page. Keywords can also be made bold to emphasise them as long as this is done liberally. The most important rule however about keywords relative to the content is that the content must make sense to the reader (see my earlier posts on The Art of Writing Web Content).

2. Image Optimisation

Images should be labelled with your keywords and the alt text used to clearly identify the image using where possible your keywords. Alt text enables web readers with disabilities to have the image described to them. Search engines can’t view images either and so use the alt text to build up their database of information regarding your site. Using keywords in your alt text helps search engines build up a “picture” of your website.

3. Meta data

The use of meta data in the web page head is believed to influence search engine rankings less and less. However, there is some minimum data that should be supplied; including the author of the website, the date the website was created, the type of content (whether it is general or adult), and a description of the website. One of the biggest mistakes in meta data is to stuff lots and lots of keywords into both the keyword meta tag and the description meta tag. At the most the description and keywords should be about 250 characters long each. The text in the description meta tag may also appear in the search results so consider these carefully.

4. Title and heading tags

Earlier this month I posted a piece on the importance of links in which I discussed how a search engine page rank algorithm mimics the concept of referencing other published articles in a scientific journal or similar. As an extension of this concept search engines place weight to the structure of the document. The title of the web page therefore being considered the most important – that which draws the reader in and is most often referenced. Subsequent headings are given weight at a diminishing rate. Using your keywords in your titles tells the search engines that your keywords are important to the overall theme of your website.

5. Other optimisation techniques

There are other factors which are perhaps the most important. These mainly centre on the physical code of your website. Ensure, firstly, that search engines can index your website thoroughly. Search engines can not navigate flash (and many can not even read the content) or other fancy dynamic menus, therefore, ensure that all pages within your website can be reached through simple text based links. Text based links describe the purpose of the link better to search engines than image links (and once again you should use your keywords here). Moreover, search engines will deprecate the value of your website if they find dead links – that is, links that don’t go anywhere. Likewise, search engines do not like dynamic URL’s nor URL structures that are heavily deep in folder structures. The reason is that search engine programmers fear the search engine spider may become trapped within the website URL structure linking round and round within the site. Websites containing deep folder navigations and long dynamic URL’s (those usually containing the question mark) are often abandoned by search engines before the whole site has been indexed.

Finally, this is probably one of the least talked about elements and one of the most interesting for us at Xebidy. There are a few rules that should be applied to the development of all websites to make the search engine ready. One of the most important ones is the code to content ratio. In my opinion sites should be developed in CSS as much as possible thereby removing any formatting code from the actual web page and storing it in a separate file. Likewise any Javascript code for menus etc should be stored in a separate file. Code order can also be used to advantage. As I said before the higher that keywords appear in your content the greater weight they are given by search engines. If you main content appears higher up the coded page the more important it will be viewed by search engines. In this way if menus etc. exist in the left hand columns techniques such as relative and absolute positioning and floating the divs left and right can be used to not render the website correctly on screen without necessarily coding in strict chronological order.

These are just some of the main techniques we would use in getting your website ready for a search engine to visit and therefore index. However, as I clearly stated in last week’s rant these are only the start of any effort to increase search engine rankings and are certainly not sufficient to guarantee high rankings – nor maintain them!