This is not really news, it has been like this for a couple of months, but it is irking me to an extent that I want to write about it.

This is possibly due to the merger between Yahoo and Bing search but for the past couple of months now Bing is not showing South African regional results any more. It was never GREAT at showing South African search results, but at least it made an attempt at regionalising. Today, if you go to www.bing.co.za it automatically redirects to www.bing.com, and any search results would be for the international market.

We have some SEO clients who ask us what can be done to ‘optimise for Bing’. The answer is - not really much.

The big difference between Bing/Yahoo on the one hand and Google on the other is that Google seems to understand the value of offering results tailored to the local market.

I think it is a real competitive advantage. The problem is that the individual countries that make up Europe, Africa and South America all have relatively small Internet populations. This possibly drives the decision made by search engines such as Yahoo and Bing that geographically localising search for these markets is not worth the effort since the volumes are too small to justify the effort and expense.

Yahoo never had any geographical differentiation in its search results as far as I can remember.

The irony of the matter is that taken together, the Internet population volume in these countries add up to a considerable amount and I think that Bing/Yahoo is really shortsighted if they do not consider regional search in future. Until they do that, Google will still be the undisputed leader in search and the whole Search Engine industry will remain a one horse race

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A month or two ago Google published on their official blog that they have implemented customised search for everyone doing search even when you are not logged into your Google account.

For the past couple of months or even longer Google has started to keep track of your browser habits when you were logged into your Google account. The would then tailor the search results to an extent on those browser habits. So this means that if you were looking for specific products and services and visited specific sites, and a week or two later you looked for the same type of services, Google would keep track of that and show the sites that you visited previously in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

But this was only if you were logged in. Then, early in January this year (2010) they implemented this for everyone browsing, not just if you were logged in. Making use of cookies, they would track the sites that you visited often and if your search is related to that site, your favourites sites would be given preference in the search results.

What does this mean for SEO practitioners and website owners?

A couple of things. Firstly, it is becoming more and more important to make your site ‘clickable’ in the search engine results so that you get more visitors and click throughs. Suddenly the old semi-abandoned workhorse of SEO, the Meta Description tag, gets hauled out and dusted off. Remember that in a huge percentage of cases Google will show the Meta Description tag in the search engine results, even though it is not formally used for ranking. If your Description meta tag is written well enough, you could well get more click-throughs when people see your result in the search engine results. Remember, even if you are on the first page of Google you are still competing for attention with 9 other results as well as a lot of sponsored ads, and these sponsored ads have often been honed to perfection to get the maximum click-through rate. It is becoming time for people focused on natural results to start thinking like PPC gurus - how can I structure the title and description of my site to get the most click-throughs to my site?

But that is not all. On Friday 9 April, Google published in their blog in Webmaster central that they will now be taking site load speed into consideration when looking at site rankings. Information about site loading speed is collected through browsers using the Google toolbar and your site’s loading speed is compared to other sites in the same geographic area.

You can view Google’s perspective of your site’s loading speed in your webmaster area under the ‘Labs’ tab, and then you can also download and install a ‘Page Speed’ Firefox plugin that will analyze your site’s loading speed and make suggestions as to where you can improve it.

The SEO landscape is changing and we’d better keep up!

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Firstly, the question comes up: Why would you want to ever change your domain name? The thing is that often when you register a domain name, especially if it is a new process for you, you might not think of the long term effects and impact of the domain name.

For example, you might have registered the domain name with a too long name, or one that does not fit in completely with your branding. Both of these happened to me - I registered the main domain name for the hosting side of my business as www.internet-web-hosting.co.za. Recently I decided that this name is a) too long and b) not in synch with the branding that I wanted to build for my company’s products and services. I therefore decided to change the domain name to http://www.tm4yhosting.co.za.

What exactly is involved in changing a domain name? Actually there is no such thing, it really involves closing down the old website and recreating it on a completely new domain name.

When you have been well-indexed in the search engines and getting customer enquiries and sales through your website then this is a very dangerous thing to do since basically you are destroying your old site and starting from scratch with the new site.

Theoretically there are ways in which you are supposed to retain all the old history about your site in the search engines and just transfer all the reputation and links to the new domain without any loss of visitors or position in the search engine rankings.

Well, that is all theoretical! In practice, the following happened.

We closed down the www.internet-web-hosting.co.za site down in December 2008, after transferring all the content across to the new site. We also set up a 301 redirect from each page on the old site to each page on the new site. Now, a 301 redirect is the message that you send to Google that the site has permanently moved from one domain to another. This is the message that is supposed to tell Google that the new site is now replacing the old site.

Within a week all traces of the old site had disappeared - but the new site had not started to show up either! This is the worst of both worlds to be in. At this stage I went in with my Google webmaster account and deleted the old site and added the new site. On websites that I had control over I also updated the link and removed the link to the old site and pointed it to the new site.

After a couple of weeks, according to the Google webmaster account, all the links that were previously pointing to the old site were now being redirected to point to the new site, so according to Google the new site had over 2000 links coming in to it, nevertheless, the new site was still nowhere to be found in the search engine results pages.

It is now 4 months after the exercise had taken place. The site is slowly making an appearance in the search engines, however, its performance is erratic to say the least. Some weeks it is within the first 20 results, other weeks it drops out of sight to position 100+ somewhere. The pagerank was non-existent for the first three months (understandable, since Google only updates the publically available Pagerank every three months or so) and with the Page Rank update early in April, it started to sport a pagerank of 1. The old site had a page rank of 4.

The conclusion is: Think very carefully whether you really want to change that domain name. In fact, think very carefully about the domain name before you register it. Despite the so-called measures that can be taken to move a website from one domain to the other, the new domain definitely starts from scratch and will take a good couple of months to regain its position in the search engines - with a lot of extra effort.

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Recently I was given a report by someone about a check that was done on the web page on how SEO friendly it is. One of the things I noticed was that the concept of keyword density still featured prominently in the document.

The fact of the matter is (as far as anything in the SEO world can be said to be ‘facts’ - educated guesses, then if you wish) that the keyword density of a page and the way that it influences your page’s ranking in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) might just be a myth. Is probably a myth. Well, let me state my personal opinion - is basically the same as the flat earth theory - it feels like common sense but is really just not true. (Not my own analogy, I have to hasten to add, this is also someone else’s opinion on the whole matter - see also http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/keyword-density-seo-myth/)

Why do I say that ?

Apart from that fact that one can show the famous examples of pages that are ranking well in Google for certain terms with these terms having a keyword density of exactly 0%, it is also a fact that nowhere in Yahoo or Google’s patents of their search engine algorithms include any reference to keyword density at all.

The point is that in B.G. days (Before Google) search engines didn’t have much else to go on with regards to trying to figure out what a page is all about, however, Google’s algorithm completely changed the way that search engines work. Admittedly, we all know that the alorithm is this BIG SECRET with the BIG SECRET recipe for the BIG SECRET sauce, however, if you look at the following article from SEOMOZ where they rank the factors that a group of Internet Marketing/SEO experts deem to be important, one can see that ‘keyword density’ as such does not even feature, although one can argue that it is similar to the factor ‘keyword use in body text’.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

My own stance on it is that I do not ever measure keyword density explicitly. Yes, it IS going to be more difficult to rank for a page if your main keywords that you are trying to rank for does not even appear on the page, so obviously it makes sense to use your keywords in your web page itself, however, I do not obsess with keyword density measures.

Keywords should be used in the following places in a web page:

• In the title of the page
• In the H1, H2 etc tags, although if I can’t get that done since I am using a CMS that doesn’t allow for using these tags in the headings of the page I do not obsess about it either
• In the url of the page, if possible.
• Keywords should also certainly be used in the body text of the page. But please write your content for your website visitors, and not to comply to some arbitrary rule that is as outdated and mythical as the abominable snowman.

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We often get requests from clients to ‘link them to the search engines’.

This always puzzles me - what exactly do they mean by that? Normally when I enquiry about what they really want, it is to appear on the first page of Google…

They need the Magic Internet Fairy!

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