Big news was announced last week – Yahoo Search is officially powered by Bing’s organic search results.

There have been clues that this would happen including evidence of testing throughout the summer, but now it’s official.

Bing!

There is also chatter that Yahoo’s paid-advertising platform will be powering Bing’s ads this fall.

It only makes sense that the both organic and paid ads would be driven by the same product…stay tuned!

The Owner Community blog over at HomeAway had a great article in their newsletter about 11 types of travelers that might rent vacation homes in the fall.

I’d argue that these tips aren’t ONLY for vacation rental managers; hotel and resort managers could hop on the bandwagon also.  Keep in mind, in many locations “Off-Season” is longer than “On-Season” in this economy; the lines between seasons are blurry.

Here are some tips for maximizing your fall, and the possibility of turning your “slower” season (between summer vacation and holiday getaways) to your busiest. The ideas here can be developed for nearly any location, although some do require Mother Nature’s help.  You can’t peep at leaves in Palm Springs!

1)  Leaf Peepers – This is big business in the Northeast, but some locations have great color but not a lot of recognition – get the word out if you’re a great destination for seeing the fall colors.

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I read a great article today over at StateOfSearch.com on optimizing images for search engine rankings.  It was put together nicely and a great resource for “how to” tips on making your images rank in Image and Universal search.

The tips aren’t all that different from what we’ve been saying for awhile now, validation is always nice, but putting all the tips together makes the underlying theme of image search apparent: ALWAYS use keywords where you can.

As with most things ranking – keywords are king – and should be chosen for images with as much thought as they are for the content on your page.  Start your image optimization with fresh keyword research.  I’d take this a step further and see if anyone is searching for your keyword AND image keywords appended together, such as {Keyword} + photo, photos, pictures, pic, pics, image, images, etc.

Once you’ve found your keywords, assign them to the images you have on your website.  You don’t want to overdo it – so maybe one or two keywords per image.  After you’ve assigned them – you can do this by listing the URLs and the photo descriptions in Excel – start optimizing the photos.

Here are the steps according to the comprehensive article cited above: (more…)

Here is another quick update on Google Webmaster Tools.

They recently enlarged their data in the “links to your site” report.  Finally, Google seems to be showing a healthy list of all the links that point to your own website.

This improvement means that Google Webmaster tools will become one of the goto tools for measuring how many links point to your website.  One nice feature is that they also break the links down by which page they link into, so you can get a better sense of your “deep linking” strategies.

Read yesterday’s article about the exciting “search queries” report that talks about improved data in that report too.

Google has recently improved its Webmaster Tools by improving its “Search Queries” report which lists:

• The top search queries for which your site appeared in search results
• The number of impressions that query received
• The number of clicks each query received
• The Click Through Rate (CTR) of each query
• The Average Position of each query

It starts by showing a nice graph of impressions vs clicks:

And then really gets amazing by showing details of clickthru rates and rankings, query by query:

Three reasons why this is important:

1. Google now provides authoritative data of where you rank for each keyword phrase.  It actually averages the position if you showed up in multiple spots and it shows which pages showed up in each spot.   No more guessing!
2. By producing the Click Thru Rate (CTR) for search results, Google may actually be revolutionizing the SEO industry.  We can now see how often a high ranking by itself doesn’t convert impressions into clicks. Finally, SEO companies like Blizzard Internet can impress upon customers the value of writing compelling titles and descriptions (which increase CTR), the value of worrying about sitelinks, the value of coming up in multiple spots.  To put it bluntly, we can focus on clicks from Google instead of rankings.  Looking at the data, it is clear that a high ranking doesn’t automatically lead to a click
3. Google is demonstrating it knows the CTR of specific queries and websites.  I believe this is the first step to a major change in Google’s algorithm.  My prediction is that soon you will move up or down partly based upon your CTR.  Better start improving those CTRs if you want to keep the top spot!

It should come as no surprise that CTR could become part of the algorithm.  Google has ranked PPC in AdWords for a long time based upon click-thru rates… why not move that into its organic algorithm?  I think it is gonna happen!

Want more evidence?  Google also has a load-time monitor in its webmaster tools, and your load time is now part of the organic ranking algorithm.  Google knows that websites that load fast are more enjoyable by its users… so it bumps them up a bit.  If I were Google, I would start lowering websites that have below average CTRs for specific queries… they are a waste of search engine real estate.

I recommend you start investing in improving your CTRs of your important keyword phrases… start by writing and testing better titles and descriptions.  Stop stuffing keywords in there.

Want to know what is next?  Bounce rates! Google knows if users do a search, click on your site, and bounce back!  Another sign that you don’t deserve to rank for that keyword phrase.  BTW, this factor is also already in Google’s Adwords algorithm.  I bet we are talking about that in the next year.

How many monitors to you use in your workspace? I have 2, sometimes 3 when my laptop is open.

Everyone at Blizzard Internet uses at least 2 monitors and our developers have 3.  One employee told me that “you will pry my 2nd monitor from my cold dead hands before taking it away from me.” So, that pretty much sums up how they feel about it.

I HIGHLY recommend that you get your employees at least one more monitor because:

1. It will increase their productivity. I have seen research that productivity can be increased by anywhere between, 9-50%, that alone is worth the cost. I read this in Computer Weekly, the USA Today, and the New York Times.
2. It’s cheap. 24″ screens are now less than $300.
3. They will love (or at least like) you more. This will increase morale and increase productivity.

Check out my productive team:

Larry, the master of his own domain and master of coding, uses 3 monitors to rule the world.
Matt optimizes his productivity when optimizing websites using dual monitors.
Angelina Doglie is working as slow as molasses with her single monitor.

See more pictures of the Blizzard Internet Marketing Team being productive on on Flickr.

There have been a magnitude of SEO / SEM strategies come and go in the last 15 years. Some were so easy to implement that everyone implemented them to the extreme. Then the search engines devalued those strategies and marketing sleuths discovered more.  Having a strong presence in a variety of places on the web was and is one technique. When done well, this can bring you rewards, but we are still seeing abuse.

You may be sabotaging your business without even realizing it by leaving duplicate content across the web.

Why is that important?
If you have ever seen the movie Multiplicity ©  (1996 by Columbia/Tri-Star)  with Michael Keaton as Doug Kinney who cloned himself.

Andie MacDowell played his confused wife. You may recall it became more difficult to know which was the original Doug. Which clone gets the credit for the good deeds or the bad ones?  His trust factor went down and his integrity was seriously compromised.

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