Hakuna Matata SEO

by Nick Stamoulis


Just about everyone over the age of 3 is familiar with “The Lion King,” arguably one of Disney’s most famous films (and rampantly successful Broadway show). One of the film’s quintessential songs is “Hakuna Matata,” which Timon and Pumba teach to young Simba. The moral of the song— no worries.


I’ve seen plenty of experts and clients fret over their SEO. Sometimes it feels like our entire industry lives by the will of the search engines and their algorithms. A new update comes down the pipeline and website owners are scrambling to make sure their site will pass muster. But it doesn’t have to be that way! SEO may not be totally worry free, but we are a lot closer to Hakuna Matata than you may think.

If you stay white hat, there is no need to worry.

Most algorithm updates are designed with one end goal in mind—to improve the user experience. Search engines want to keep their users happy and coming back, just like any other business. Delivering the best results for a user’s search is how they make that happen. This means combing the Internet for the most relevant sites, and hopefully that means yours.


Google’s Panda update that launched earlier this year was designed to take on content farms that were cluttering the search results. The low quality, spammy sites were not what users were looking for, so Google updated their algorithm to remove them from the SERP. A lot of site owners claimed to be unfairly affected by the Panda crackdown, but my company’s site, as well as the sites of all my clients, sailed through with flying colors. Why? Because I take a strictly white hat approach to SEO.

If you are a site owner or marketer looking to expand your knowledge of SEO, I suggest you start with the Google Webmaster and the Bing Webmaster SEO Guidelines and consider the information in them your line in the sand. When it comes to SEO, you have to play by the search engine’s rules if you want to succeed! Abiding by the search engines guidelines is white hat SEO. Read More...

37% More Incentive to Focus on SEO for Bing

by Jonathan Allen





Large search agency, Rosetta (recently acquired by Publicis), have conducted a study of organic search traffic to their clients' websites in which they measured the percentage contribution of organic clicks from Yahoo, 


Bing and Google and segmented the data into vertical markets. The study found that the Bing-Yahoo search alliance presented significant competition to Google in the financial services and retail sector.


The data pulled from over 10 million organic-referred visits from January through May 2011 paints a slightly different picture from other search market share data providers such as comScore and Experian Hitwise. 


Whilst this is to be expected, as all their methodologies are completely different, the Rosetta study corroborates findings by the other market analysis firms as it points to untapped potential in every sector.


Both comScore and Hitwise's recent market share figures are roughly the same, putting Google's dominance at 65%. Hitwise reports a combined 30% market share for Bing & Yahoo whilst comScore reports 14% and 16% respectively. Broadly speaking both analyst firms measure market share in terms of the number of search queries performed on the destination sites - a metric which comScore calls explicit core search. Hitwise has an additional metric called "search success", which measures how many searches led to a click on a website - and posits Yahoo and Bing at approximately 81% whilst Google searches only lead to a click 66% of the time.


The Rosetta study took a slightly different tack and estimated marketshare from a site owners perspective, aggregating organic clicks from search engines into specific industry verticals. It is noteworthy that the Hitwise search share success metric seems to be borne out in this latest. 


The results show that whilst Google is dominant in every industry in all respects, and in some verticals command a marketshare of over 75%, vertical markets such as financial services and retail actually had stronger competition from Bing and Yahoo. In financial services, Google's dominance was only at 54% and in retail, they only accounted for 60% of the clicks to the websites surveyed. Therefore, Bing powered search on Yahoo represents a more significant organic SEO opportunity in the retail sector, with almost a 37% share.

Hitwise and comScore also offer this type of analysis via paid-for services, but Rosetta plan to continue publishing this analysis over the coming year. Read More...

Google still in charge of UK search results

While Bing has made significant inroads to the goal of sharing the world search market with Google, it appears their efforts in the United Kingdom continue to fall short. Results information for June 2011 reveal that Google handles an astounding 92% share of all UK search queries. In fact, for the last 12 month period, Google’s share in the UK has actually increased. This in light of massive advert expenditures by Microsoft and Bing. In terms of worldwide growth, a great deal of Google’s recent success can be attributed to the growth in popularity of Chrome, Google’s browser. In many South American countries, Chrome has grown to become the browser of choice.


Bing results combined with their search partner Yahoo equal just under a 7% share. Yahoo is actually a larger search engine presence in the UK than Bing. Fortunately when Bing was put in place by Microsoft, their long term strategy was to use their search engine as a data generation tool. Microsoft wanted a greater understanding of what the public wanted in operating systems, browsers and other closely related to hardware applications to be. This information will factor into the Microsoft products of tomorrow. Read More...