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

More than that, have you ever wondered as a web designer how to create and mainpulate images for your design of your site but you have never had the courage to wade through reams and reams of Photoshop tutorials. Besides, there are so many different versions of Photoshop - you tried a tutorial once and then discovered that it was for an obsolete version of Photoshop!

Then we won’t even go into how to learn the nitty gritty of PHP and Javascript. In fact, you might not even know the difference, or where to use what.

Lastly - learn Joomla and put all of this newly acquired knowledge to the best use. Joomla is by far the best tool to learn how to build websites, and with all of this supporting knowledge you will have a head start in becoming a web development professional.

Become part of this very exciting career field and learn the secrets of web development now.

Our full course starts on the 23rd of August - can you afford to miss it?

Read more about our full development course (or make bookings for individual modules) here!

We also offer a discount if you sign up for both courses at the same time (the discount will be reflected on your invoice).

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!

The cost of the course is R1750 and if you bring your own notebook, a discount of R250 will apply.

This is a hands-on course for people interested in learning how to use Joomla to build and maintain their own websites. It is meant for people with no web design experience, up to designers who are interested in making the move to Joomla.

Read more about our Joomla Training Course here!

We have just sent out a press release regarding the seminar through Bizcommunity (http://www.bizcommunity.com/PressOffice/PressRelease.aspx?i=123334&ai=38934)

Read more about the importance of doing SEO for a website here and make a booking for the free seminar:
http://www.tm4y.co.za/free-seo-seminar.html

The topic was about Online Reputation Management. Here is the slideshow presentation, but I also included a PDF writeup which I am making available as a free download.

Click here to download the PDF Report

Frankly, I do think that some of the ‘words’ tracked by the Language Monitor group (or website) only loosely fits the definition of the word ‘word’ (if you follow my meaning through this convoluted linguistic minefield…)

Ok, let’s start at the beginning.

In the beginning was the Word.. Sorry couldn’t resist that. My aplogies.

Let’s try again.

The The Global Language Monitor (an incorporated company operating out of Austin, Texas) has been tracking new words in English since 2003.

Last week Wednesday, the 10th of June 2009, the English language passed the 1 000 000th word mark, with the millionth word being ‘Web 2.0′.

It beats other contenders such as ’slumdog’ and ‘jai ho’.

The GLM makes use of software to track word usage not only online but in global media. For a word to ‘make it’ into the English language, it needs to have 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution, and depth of citations.

That may all be very well, but I just can’t help feeling that some of the words are not really WORDS as such, but rather amalgamations of existing words which then take on a new meaning.

For example, the question was raised why ‘twitter’ was not part of the race to be the millionth word, and the answer was that ‘twitter’ is already a word, it has just acquired a new meaning today. Well, sorry, but ‘web’ is also already a word…. It is only through its use in conjuction with the number 2.0 (also already existing, not so?) that it acquires a different meaning.

So I am not fully convinced.

Be that as it may, SOME words I do agree are new, such as the word n00b (commonly used by games and other technical geeks to describe those annoying new people who ask stupid questions on forums and other websites without bothering to try and find out the answers first by reading through existing threads and sites).

N00b is apparently the only word with two numbers in the English Language (yes, it is spelt EN-ZERO-ZERO-BEE and not EN-OH-OH-BEE), but what about L33T (leet)? After all, n00b is a word from leet speak, not so?

An interesting point about the word ‘LEET’ is raised on Wikipedia, where it says that:

“a common characteristic of Leet is changing its grammatical usage to be deliberately incorrect”

So sometimes it is spelt l33t, sometimes 1337, and even in binary, 10100111001, to avoid ‘detection’. So even though the usage of the word ‘leet’ might actually be more than n00b, in terms of its MEANING, in terms of actual references it therefore slides way under the rader of 25 000 mentions…

Predictably, most ‘formal’ linguists are making up their own sets of words (most of which unprintable) as comment on the GLM’s results. They say that there is just no way to accurately measure these words and that Paul JJ Payack is just running the race for the ‘millionth word’ as a publicity stunt for his new book.

Be that as it may, my favourite ‘new’ word just has to be ‘misunderstimate’ - a bushism of note (and isn’t ‘bushism’ a new word too)?

Bing has actually released a bit ahead of time, unexpectedly making its premature arrival on Monday.

For a very short period both Live.com and Bing.com were running as separate entities and then Live.com started to redirect to Bing.com.

On the face of it, Bing offers lots of cool features although the interface and features differ whether you use a local version or a US version (you can set your location manually in the upper left hand corner). The US version, for example, brings up sub categories for a high level search that you might do, for example, as well as links directly to videos and images. In the South African version this just does not happen, which might make the South African user have a bit of a ‘huh?’ moment with regards to the hype surrounding the new version.

What we can see on our results that are quite cool is that a new hover window opens on the left with some summary text from the site as well as additional links that you can click to directly.

Apart from that, there are very strong indications that the actual results returned are still the same underlying results that were offered by Live.com. It does not look as if the basic underlying algorithm that brings back the search results has changed much since during the short period of time that live.com and bing.com were running in parallel one could see that the results were exactly the same.

This is actually a pity, since I am not sure that a cool and slick interface would be enough to give Google a run for its money. Flashy effects and cool graphics only go so far until you want the actual results to fit your requirements. Look how far Google managed to come with a plain white, minimalistic interface. It is not about the graphics, it is about the content. (A fact is often forgotten in web design as well….)

But given that Bing is still in Beta, there is still hope that the situation might change on the actual results set as well.

I say ‘normally’ since I know someone with such an amount of unshakeable trust in getting answers back from Google that they type in full sentence queries, for example: “what is the difference between tone and pulse phones”.

This exactly the question that came up recently in a conversation in the office (the alpha males who normally would know these sort of questions without having to resort to Google just being out of reach at that point).

Before she could start typing the question into Google, I had the brilliant idea of trying it out on Wolfram Alpha. Strangely enough, it didn’t know what we were talking about….

“Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” is the answer that came back.

Mhhmmm… let’s see what google makes of it: Yup, the answer to the question is there within the first three results.

I wouldn’t have thought that this is such a difficult question to answer for Wolfram Alpha, after all, it can tell you the height of Everest and the current temperature in Johannesburg, but yeah, it reminds me a bit of the Rain Man….