Bing, Microsoft’s Search Engine, has just reached their first birthday. I am not sure if anybody noticed or if ant SEOs actually care. After all, this is pretty much a one horse Google race. Bing was introduced in June of 2009 and has steadily grown it’s market share over the last year.

Research firms have calculated that Bing’s market share is anywhere from 9.43 to 11.8 percent in the United States. Bing and Yahoo! are still in the process of integrating both search engines into a more formidable opponent for the three ton elephant, known as Google.

Bing and Yahoo! better come up with something quite revolutionary in order to compete with Google Caffeine which is providing fresher content in their SERPS, Search Engine Result Pages.

According to Google, caffeine has changed the way that Google is indexing information into their data centers. Not only is Google delivering the results much faster ( by about 50%) they are indexing much more information as well. They are delivering more search results than ever before. As peoples’ expectancies for the best search results increases, so does Google’s desire to deliver the most relevant results. If you are an SEO, it is more important than ever to help your client deliver  quality content to their audience as well as get them quality back links. The game of SEO is ever changing, and the rules are different for each search engine. It is more important now, more than ever, to select an SEO company, that offers a full online marketing plan rather than just a simple SEO strategy.

Google is now pushing site owners to embrace a wider marketing strategy online, rather  than back linking alone. Blogs are more important than ever because they post new fresh content, and with Google showing real time results in their SERPs from social sites like Twitter, which gets well over 19 billion searches each and every month, businesses should jump on board rather than wait and react.

As more people search online and as Google has more data that tracks users’ search habits and queries, Google will only get better and the sites that make it onto that precious first page, will need to get better too!

If you are looking for some easy backlinks for SEO purposes and targeted traffic for your blog, we have a couple of quick tips for you that will turn you into a blogging rock and roll star in no time at all.

Yahoo Answers

Head to Yahoo Answers and look for questions that people have asked that relate to the topic of your blog. People are digging for answers, and who better to provide the solution than you? To get a good feel of how to provide a good answer, take a look at “Best Answers” for your niche market. Best Answers will also give you ideas on what to write about in your blog. Whenever you can solve people’s problems, traffic and customer’s are sure to follow.

Google Trends

Google Trends helps you identify what is a hot topic in your market right now. With Google Trends, you can identify what keywords to write about today. Of course, you can also identify what topics or keywords are losing popularity as well. Once again, by writing about current and relevant topics, readers will come.

Google Wonder Wheel

The Google Wonder Wheel is great for when you are wondering what to write about. (I couldn’t resist saying that). The Google Wonder Wheel is a nice free keyword research tool that is now accessible in the left hand margin of their search results page.  This tool will help you drill down into very small segments of your market which will help you target long tail phrases, and we all know that the money is in the long tail. They don’t call it mining the long tail for nothing. The results that the Google Wonder Wheel shows are based on user searches. So, you will have near perfect insight into what your audience is looking for.

SEO for Firefox

This next tactic is a bit more time consuming but very effective nonetheless. Here are the steps.

1. Install the SEO for Firefox Plugin and enable it
2. Run a search for a keyword in your market -> then, select show options -> finally, select blogs from the categories button.
3. Next, select the “100” option
4. Now, you will need to export the results in a CSV file to you hard drive. To export the CSV file, click the export button that is just under search box.
5. Now the valuable information that we are looking for is in the Y! Page Links column. This is letting you know the number of backlinks. At this point, I would sort the data based on the Y! Page Links in order from largest to the smallest.
6. The final step is deciding what to write about. Take a look at the posts that interest you, get your creative juices flowing and blog to your hearts content.

I remember when I first switched over to Google as my search engine of choice. This was in the early 2000s. I had regularly used Yahoo to that point, but I would often find myself having to run different queries in order to get what I was after. Basically, they were not delivering the results that I was looking for.  Thus, began my dabbling with other search engines of the day.

What I loved about Google (and still do) is that they more often understood my intent the first time around when I searched, and I also liked their no nonsense interface that was not all cluttered with ads and news items. The accuracy of their search results outperformed the other search engines and this is what has kept me and many others hooked on Google to this day.

With Google Caffeine, Google has taken a step further in understanding a searcher’s intent by delivering what is known as blended results. Blended search results are nothing new, but now Google has perfected them a bit more. With the new Google SERP, you can now be shown images, news, twitter posts, Google Products, videos and related searches based on your query. Google is also more quickly sifting through the value of Social Media sites by delivering the most relevant sites higher in their SERPS for a given topic.

Google is not just providing their search results faster. They are also providing relevant results faster for your search. This helps Google keep the Lion’s share of  the searches performed by end users.

Google knows human behavior quite well. Maybe they know us even better than they care to admit. One thing that is certain, when it comes to search behavior, is that we want our results relevant and fast. That is why Google has focused on delivering their results even faster than before. The Google search engine has always been quick, but now it’s faster than ever. Many tests that we have recently been run on the beta version of Caffeine have shown that search results are being delivered at an average of twice as fast, when compared to the last version of Google search engine.

You can tell how fast Google is delivering search results, because they publish the speed at which at they delivered your search query on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This appears right next to the number of results that there are for your keyword.

For example, when I search the term “google caffeine”, the following data is published by Google on the SERP.

It is impossible to compare the search results for keywords against such sites as Bing and Yahoo since they do not publish the speed at which they deliver their SERPs, and who can blame them. There is no sense publishing this data unless they are up to speed with Google.

We live in a microwave society today to say the least. We want everything done for us our way and in an instant. That is why Google has tweeked this part of their search engine. It’s just one more way for them to stay ahead in the search engine marketing game.