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!

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 enigine.

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.

For those just starting out in the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the topic can be a bit intimidating. After all, the Google algorithm is comprised of about 200 different ranking factors with some carrying more weight than others. Also, we have all heard the horror stories of:

1. Google de-indexing sites
2. Nasty Google updates that can put you out of business in a day
3. Google slaps that leave you dizzy
4. Google site wide penalties that drop your site in incremented values.
5. And lastly, the dreaded Google sandbox

Now you will notice up until now, all the talk is about Google and that is for a very good reason. Google is the 2 ton elephant, or gorilla if you prefer, in the Search Engine game. Depending on what reports that you read, Google handles anywhere to 75% to 80% of all search queries online.

Google and Microsoft’s Bing have recently joined forces. They each had glaring weaknesses. Hopefully together, they can build a better mouse trap or better yet, a better search engine.

The good thing about SEO is that if you grasp the basics, they will serve you very well no matter how the search engines tweek their algorithms. The days of spamming the esearch engines and creating low quality sites are coming to an end thankfully. To put it simply, a whole team of Google engineers is a whole lot smarter than most of us. On the brighter side of things, the search engines do tell you what is important to them and their customers, the searchers.

With the the internet and social media in particular, companies need to be more transparent and own up to their mistakes. They also must take the time to fix them quickly before things get out of hand, and that can happen quickly. One of the best ways to monitor your brand and its reputation is to set up Google Alerts for your company name and monitor what is being said about your business on the web. Google will send you emails or RSS feeds for anything that they index in their search engine that pertains to your business name. You can also monitor products and services that you offer and you can even keep a good eye on your competition too. These Alerts can be read in Google Reader. Both Google Reader and Google Alerts are free services from Google.

If you try to hide your mistakes online, you will get eaten alive with social media sites like Twitter. Everybody knows everybody’s business now. You will want to respond very quickly to any negative feedback left about your company because if you don’t, serious damage can be done because it is easy for an angry mob to form. Just a little helpful information can quickly diffuse the situation and help keep your brand image in a positive light.