Bing Images vs Google Images - Which Is Better?

Google is acknowledged as the leading search engine that has outranked its main competitors Yahoo and Bing. To maintain its lead, Google always tries to revamp its search results with the aim of simplifying search to its users and the search engine giant has been successful at every step. However, now Bing which is a product of Microsoft, has recently posted a blog on its official site claiming that its revamped image search is better than Google. According to Microsoft's Meenaz Merchant, Senior Program Manager at Bing, "every day Bing receives millions of searches from across the Web, and nearly 10 percent of those searches are for images. With 40 percent of search results including some kind of visual component, we know that people are more likely to click on a web page that includes images or videos".

Professionals in the search engine optimization industry have long known the benefits of using image search engines such as Google and Bing image search to attract traffic to target websites. Many SEO experts recommend that marketers and advertisers can use Bing's revamped image search for implementing online marketing campaigns. In that blog post, Merchant explained in detail about the various techniques involved in revamping Bing's image search to beat Google.

• Entity Understanding - According to Merchant, Bing focuses on delivering results based on a user's real intention of what he is looking for. For example, when you search for the image of Brad Pitt in Google, you will get images of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie together as a couple mostly. But in Bing you will get mostly Brad Pitt's images thus interpreting the entity in a different way.


• Computer Vision Technologies - Bing utilizes computer vision technologies such as deep learning. Bing can interpret high dimensional data from the real scenario to understand the image better so that the user is provided with more accurate results.


• Image Quality - Bing says that its algorithm chooses high quality images so that users don't have to click through multiple web pages to get top quality images. 


• Identifying Copy Cats - Bing says that its revamped image search can identify exact duplicate and near duplicate images, which are filtered out of their search results.

You can go through Bing's official blog post for more information about this search engine's revamped image search. If you want to utilize image search to attract targeted traffic to your site, professional assistance is available from a reliable SEO company that is up to date with recent SEO developments and can offer customized solutions according to your specific needs.

Article Source:  Bing Claims its Image Search is Superior to that of Google

Social Media Marketing to Improve your Sales

The online business arena is one that has to withstand tough competition. The extent of the success of your business largely depends on the kind of website you have. Your website is the threshold to your business and showcases the services or products you offer. So it is important to make your website visible to targeted customers that are searching for your products or services using online search engines. Search engine optimization services are designed to enhance the visibility of your website. These professional SEO services help place your website in the initial ranking position in all major search engines, help promote your products and services to a wider audience and can make your online business a big success.

For medium and small scale enterprises, social media marketing is one of the best Internet marketing tools for gaining good exposure. It benefits businesses by boosting their sales and revenue.

In the current scenario, more and more people are making use of the Internet to find product details or purchase the ones they want. The World Wide Web helps businesses to reach the maximum number of customers.

Various platforms are being used by companies for interacting with customers and improving brand awareness. Social media marketing via social media platforms is a successful online marketing technique that can ensure excellent business exposure, constructive interaction with customers and building of a strong bond between clients and businesses. Social media websites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn help businesses market their products and enhance their brand. These websites help in creating business related fan pages, building communities and groups irrespective of the company's products and services. This helps in improving the company’s sales and revenue considerably.

Benefits Offered by Social Media for Your Business

• Worldwide sharing of your company's products
• Helps in knowing public opinion about your business
• Best platform to communicate with your patrons and clients
• Helps in increasing brand awareness
• Useful for receiving feedback about your services and products
• Useful for connecting with various business clients
• Best platform for sharing your company's information such as new product launches, promos and other events
• Direct connectivity with customers
• Provides opportunities for new business exposure

Outsourced Social Media Marketing Services - Points in Favor

Saves Time

Surveys show that 43 percent of the small business houses spend around six hours a week surfing the social media websites. You need to devote more time to your website and enhance its presence on social platforms. It may be a bit difficult with your busy schedules and lack of personnel handling the task. In such cases, outsourcing your social media marketing needs will enable you to reap rich dividends via social media marketing without having to lose focus on other business aspects.

Access to Specialized Expertise

Implementation of the right strategies for promoting your business on social media can be done with the assistance of SEO companies specializing in social media optimization. The professionals in such firms are knowledgeable about the type of social media platforms suiting your business profile, type of content you should be sharing and how often you should post the content. Outsourcing your social media activities can prove to be an effective way for achieving business success via social media.

Gain Fresh Perspective

Social media optimization experts stay constantly updated on the latest social media trends. They also interact with people having different perspectives on social media marketing.  This helps them in coming up with creative ways for promoting your business and making your company stand apart from your competitors.

When provided by a reliable SEO company, social media marketing services can surely improve your sales and add value to your brand.

How to Increase Blog Traffic - 8 Ways

The main reason why people visit a blog is to locate the information they lack. Self-serving posts are not going to benefit you in the long run. As long as the content is not genuine, no one is going to get benefited from your post. Here are eight ways in which you can create appealing blog content and get more people to read it.

1. Create Attractive and Compelling Posts
   
   When you write a blog post, ensure that the information provided is genuine and that you have presented it in a unique way. Embed interesting videos into your posts, which will enhance the integrity of your content as people get to see what is mentioned on the post. Also, create infographics and add them into your blog. As images attract people more than plain text, you can get more readers by including infographics. Moreover, it can easily convey the concepts and ideas explained in the posts to the reader so that they can imbibe them quickly. If you add the infographics in a blog post, readers can easily understand the update.


2. Give More Focus to Blog Tutorials
   
   Of course, fresh content can drive traffic to your blog. But if you post boring subjects every week, they are not going to attract the readers. People always need solid information that can help them in their daily life. The best option is to create a series of unique and relevant blog tutorials. Suppose you own a technical blog. Even though people would be eager to know about the latest technological developments, they would be more interested to know how they can use them in their life. Posts like how to root a Smartphone, how to install some software in a laptop, and such other useful content can drive the attention of more tech savvy people. 
     
3. Use Social Media Accounts for Blog Promotion
   
   Like any other product, your blog posts also need promotion. The best way to promote your blog posts is through social media accounts as it connects to a large circle of people. To promote your content, just sign into your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social media account and post the link to your blog posts there. You can post the link to the blog post on your Facebook account.
   
   Your friends and followers will see this link and are likely to share it. If they share the links, their friends and followers can view this link. In this way, the link will be circulated among a large number of people and drive more traffic to your blog post. 


4. Prompt Readers to Share Blog Posts
   
   You can encourage your readers to share your blog posts and thereby attract their acquaintances to your content. Set up call to actions at the end of the blog posts to prompt the readers to share the links to your post. For example, you can leave a comment section at the end of the post.
   
   Once your readers post the comments, their friends and followers can view the comment along with the link to your blog post.
   
   You can place social share buttons with the blog posts. When the readers click on any of these buttons, they can share the link to the blog posts on corresponding social media accounts.


5. Place Useful Resources in Your Blog
   
   By providing useful resources into your blog, you can convert your blog visitors into readers. You can share free downloadable eBook, podcast, whitepaper, market report and more.
   
   Another good option is to share links to resources in other sites. When you share resources with readers, they will join your mailing list so that they can share the link to your posts with others.


6. Maintain a Positive Attitude towards Readers
   
   You should remain pleasant and approachable to your readers so that you can easily connect with them and establish long-term relationships. Better interaction with readers can help to make your blogs interesting. If you maintain a positive attitude, readers will associate with you and recommend your blog to their acquaintances.


7. Optimize Blog Posts for Search Engines
   
   Majority of people find links to the blogs that interest them through popular search engines including Google, Bing and Yahoo. So you need to also optimize the blog posts for search engines to increase the blog traffic. Learn how the latest search engine algorithms rank blogs and optimize your content accordingly. For example, in the case of Google's latest Penguin update, you need to avoid irrelevant inbound links, link spamming and article spinning to gain better ranking for your blog.


8. Write Outstanding Guest Posts for Other Blogs
   
   You can build a relationship with a new group of readers by writing outstanding guest posts in other blogs. When you write more and more posts, you will have more influence among those readers. Once you gain large readerships there, you can easily encourage them to read the posts in your blog. In this way, you can drive more traffic to your blog.

You can get the required support from a professional SEO company if you want to implement these strategies. They can provide you with reliable blog marketing and SEO services according to your requirements and budget.

Optimizing Your Long Tail Content Strategy

The old trend of long tail SEO is no longer a popular strategy. This earlier technique that focused mainly on traffic had little, if no consideration of user experience. The steps followed were: searching for as many long-tail keywords as possible, generating a landing page for each one of them, placing keywords in title and header tag, writing content stuffed with keywords and focusing only on conversions. For example, preparing a list covering every possible long-tail keyword related to a search phrase 'SEO company' such as 'Best SEO companies', 'Great SEO companies', 'Top 10 SEO' companies and more and using them here and there in your content is an outdated strategy for long tail SEO, though many are still following this.

The focus in 2013 and beyond is primarily on authoritative information. The simple reason is that search engines, particularly Google, now offer users sites that provide authoritative information rather than the sites that facilitate only easy conversion and with practically no informative value.

If you have a growing business, and want to optimize your content for long tail keywords, then here are some innovative strategies you could follow.

Getting the Most Out of Your Team

The first step would be to call your team together and talk about the pages or content that you want to create. Discuss various aspects of the content based on your experience and get suggestions from your team. Your in-house team will have excellent domain expertise and can easily come up with the right and most effective ideas.

For example, if your business targets local market, then you should make your content attractive to local customers. You can discuss with your team about the latest trends in local search, how to implement them in your content and other related things.

Understand Your User Requirements

Once you have formed a clear idea about the content requirements, find out the actual needs of users. Think about what users expect to find when arriving at your page or content. You can interview past users, conduct a poll for prospective customers or do online research to get the desired information. While mapping out content that addresses more number of users, you can find out which long-tail keywords will work best for you. For example, if you own a juice business, you can find out the products that are most popular among users by means of interviews and polls. If most of them prefer grapes juice, you can make use of the long-tail keyword 'best grapes juice company'.

You should not only search for what people expect from your product or service, but also check for the things that people want and you do not offer. Based on this information, you can create a more comprehensive solutions guide for users rather than highlight only those you offer directly. This will help to find out long-tail keywords that may not relate to your business.

Conduct Competitive Research

Checking the strategies of competitor sites will help you to set up a baseline, if you are new to the business. For example, if you have created a page for your jewelry business for the first time, you can search other sites to find how they have placed the content which describes the qualities of their products and used the long-tail keywords. However, it is not a good strategy to copy their approach. Use their approach as a baseline and develop your own ideas. Look at the sites of authoritative competitors. Those sites will help you for more than a baseline. By checking what they do differently, you can develop fresh, creative ideas easily.

Quantitative Research Based on Informative Value

It is a good idea to research into keyword volumes so that you can prioritize the most important ones. But, it does not mean that you should consider the volume before user experience. If a keyword is searched for around 500 times and it does not add any value to your visitor, then you can't reap any benefits by exploiting that keyword. Hence, give prime importance to the informative value of the content and then consider keyword volume.

Generate Sample Design and Get Feedback

Create sample designs and get feedbacks through different mockup services including UserTesting.com, Mechanical Turk and others. Revive the pages/content according to the feedbacks.

Check for Page Relevancy

You should check whether the page or content that you created is relevant to your website or to the Web. The page or content should be of real value if it is to be relevant. This can be checked at any stage of the page creation process.

Each of these strategies will work best only if there is a dedicated team to implement them. The best approach would be to get support from a professional search engine optimization services company that provides reliable keyword research services.

Importance of HTTP Status Codes in SEO

HTTP status code refers to three-digit numbers which are returned by the servers and tell us the status of the sites. A professional SEO company will know when to use the right code for its clients.

Numbers and Their Meanings

The first digit of every three-digit code starts with one of the numbers from 1 to 5. There are the following status codes from 100 through 500:

Codes in the 100s are informational and indicate that the request was received and the process continues. Codes in the 200s indicate the reception of the request and its successful processing. The 300s indicate the reception of a request but the need to carry out another step for the request to be completed. The 400s symbolize client error in that the request was made but the page has lost its validity.  The 500s indicate server error - there was a valid request from the client but server could not complete it. 

 
Codes 200 and 301

Code 200 symbolizes successful request and is correct for most of the scenarios. The 301 code indicates "moved permanently". The resource has been given a new URL that is permanent. Future references must utilize one of the URLs that were returned. The 301 redirect must be used any time a URL must be redirected to a different URL. 

Code 302

The 302 code indicates that the server is responding to request with a different location page. However the requestor keeps using the original address for future requests. Code 302 is not favorable since the search engine crawlers will consider the redirect as a temporary arrangement and not provide the page with the link juice power of 301 redirects.  

Codes 404 and 200

The code 404 indicates "file not found". The server could not match the request URL. There isn't any indication of the status of the condition, whether it is permanent or temporary. This occurs when the server is unable to find a page request that is matching. Webmasters often display Text 404 Error when the response code is 200. This gives search engine crawlers the indication that the page has correctly rendered. Sometimes the webpage is indexed wrongly. 

Codes 410 and 404

The 410 code indicates that the page is gone and is not available any longer at the server and also that there is no known forwarding address. This is roughly a permanent situation. Clients who are able to edit the link need to delete any reference to the request URL following the approval of the user. If the server cannot determine the resource, the 404 status code must be used.

Code 503

The status code 503 indicates the failure of the server to grant the requested URL due to the maintenance or temporary overloading of the server. 503 must be used in the event of a temporary outage. It gives the warning to the search engines that the site is only temporary down.  

Tips for Remembering

Basically here are a few tips that you absolutely need to remember - 301 redirects must be used instead of 302 redirects when redirecting URLs. Web pages returning 404 for long periods of time and having valuable links should be redirected to other pages with the 301 code.   When visitors request pages returning a 404 response code you must have customized 404 pages with navigational options. 

An established search engine optimization company offering professional SEO services will have a clear idea about the relevant codes to help its clients attain the maximum benefit without suffering any downtime in traffic and rankings.