Bing has definitely deserved the buzz that it has received. For the average user, the high quality photos used on the doorway page will be interesting to watch. The photos add a sense of anticipation before going to Bing. Today, Japan Bing has a shot looking across a lake in central park, while the Bing US has a picture of the heart melting tropical island Moorea with various caption boxes one of which says “There’s no such things as too many pictures of tropical islands with white beaches.” From the caption box, you can click to an image search result for tropical islands with white beaches. Other caption boxes give information on the island, each with a link to a search result for the topic. Text search I would like you to meet visual suggestion.

While Apple has wowed the world with many if its interfaces, Bing’s doorway page starts with memorable imagery that starts the search exploration process with the user in a positive state of mind. Doing a search for “car parts”, the results page has a three column layout with a suggestion box and related searches in the left column, main search results in the middle column and sponsored ads in the right column. The big difference in the search results is that the search results now come in categories, which means there is more scrolling to view all the categories and their first three results. Some search commentators don’t like scrolling, but I prefer scrolling to clicking to different search results pages.

Both Google and Yahoo! have the search results left justified with other search suggestions presented at the top and or the bottom of search results. By using the three column presentation with related suggestions in the left navigation, Bing made a simple change that helps the user scan what is available. Also, having the search results in the middle column subtly enhances the visibility of the actual search results. Now that I look at the left hand justification of the search results Google and Yahoo!, they feel too close to the left edge of the page. Kind of says that Google and Yahoo! have spent too much time thinking about things other than search results.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, said “Search is still an unsolved problem.” He meant that finding content to exactly match search intent is still an unsolved problem, but the problem is as much a usability problem as much as it is an algorithm problem. Bing started in the right place, making life easier on the eyes. It’s kind of like finding the newspaper at your door in a hotel. Such a small gesture that leaves an impression that you and your search is important.

You have built your SEO friendly site and launched in January. The following months, February and March were great, mid-April your SEO rankings started to deteriorate. You look around and find nothing within your tracking data that says you deserve lower rankings. You might even call, or e-mail the search engine support staff to ask why your rankings have deteriorated. They don’t say much because your competitors have done some things since your most recent SEO upgrades. In effect, they say “Hey man, your problem not ours.”

For those that don’t watch traffic stats on a regular basis, this ranking deterioration happens frequently for many sites particularly in industry segments with a lot of new developments and aggressive on-line marketers. SEO in these particular areas are most definitely a game of keeping balloons in the air. The deterioration is generally most pronounced with rifle type SEO, while shotgun SEO generally has fewer vulnerabilities thus the deterioration happens less abruptly.

Rifle type SEO is generally based on strategies that move a site up the ranks quickly using a limited number of components that are given high marks by the search algorithms such as a new site launches or significant content updates usually coordinated with other marketing methods that drive strong traffic to the target site. Shotgun SEO is a slower process involving either a more balanced step by step process to establish a presence that moves up more slowly but holds at a higher average rank over a longer period of time, or a broader set of strategies that coalesce further down the time line forming something akin to a life preserver bobbing at the waterline amid the waves.

When looking at the top 20 or so results for a particular keyword, those results should be viewed as competitors with various degrees of desire to get time at, or near, the top. Your SEO rank is the result of both your efforts and the efforts of your competitors. Recently, there was an article about a company that had held rank 1 in a major keyword for a couple of years, but recently lost the rank to a competitor. Just goes to show that no ship is unsinkable.

Losing rank and learning the lessons is part of the game in SEO, competitors will do their thing so you need to do yours. The real question is where to fight the battles, and the types of battles you want to fight. It’s a big SEO ocean out there with both developed and undeveloped potential.

How many keyword searches begin with  “Why” questions? How many searches that begin with the question “Why?” get a single result that completely answers the question? Let’s take a gander through a “Why?” question process using search. Our question: Why is there war? A very broad question, and before I put the magic words “war” into various search engines, I will bore the reader with a little game I like to play when doing searches. The “What am I going to get game?”

Search engines generally provide the most recent content first, probably news, or commentary on a war somewhere in the world. Search engines also reward its users with popular content meaning other users have visited particular sites and spent time on those sites or pages. Popular sites should be high in the ranks too. Wikipedia should definitely be there right near the top. What about war museum web sites? They probably have good quality incoming links. But generally, museum sites have technical or content issues that slow them down and make it tough for search engines to index the site to a level appropriate to the quality of their informational assets.

Okay, time for that magical moment…type, click and we have

#1: Wikipedia – on real war.
#1: A Wikipedia on the music band War.
#2: 10 day free offer for the WarHammer on-line war game
#3:  A movie titled “War”. (Interesting it is here, not a recent movie)

#4: Web site for the band War (a blast from the past, I loved that band when I was a kid.)

#5: Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning (the game again)
#6: War Made Éasy – a video on video google
#7: The famous book by Carl von Clausewitz On War written in 1832 showing up on Google Books
#8: BBS-History-World Wars
#9: “Grocery Store Wars” a video on YouTube.

No museums in the first 10 results. The second page of the search has a very good link from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. If you happen to be interested, it’s a good piece, here’s the link.

http://www.illc.uva.nl/~seop/entries/war/

This article does answer the question “why is there war” from the perspective of the author.

Lessons learned:
1. “big” terms are SEO competitive due to extensive usage by various industries. Energy will be required make a dent at this level.
2. Searchers interested in war (the real market) are probably not going to use this search more than once, they will use phrases.
3. This type of keyword probably has peaky traffic, when a war starts, searches peak, then it dies down. Not a good keyword for repeat traffic. I found my answer from Wikipedia and Stanford, so I probably won’t use this keyword again for a long time or ever.
4. Searchers coming from the question perspective “why” are probably a tough group to anticipate in terms of their search behavior. Question types What, Where, Who and When are much easier inquiry paths to anticipate.
5. More an implication than a lesson, search patterns are not linear, they are chaotic movements downward. Very much like the kids game where you put a ball on the top piece of downward tilted wood and it rolls down and drops to the next piece of wood, etc. Much easier to catch them lower in the game.

The keyword “war” represents an all-star keyword because it has a collection of top search results from different sources, ie. general information, gaming company, books/publishing, video/broadcasting. Like the make up of the NFL all-star game, best players brought together from different teams. Each “player” is in the top search results for their own reasons.

Back in the beginning of the Internet when each new book on a subject related to the Internet was bought out as soon as it hit the shelves, there was a saying that bounced around between webmasters; “The guy who reads the manual first will win.” Well, now that the Internet has become the manual for almost everything, we’re kind of chained to the thing. With the ability to search we can conceivably make our own manual as we plow through a particular subject as our mind assimilates new information, and new questions pop into mind. Search has become a process rather than a set of distinct actions represented by different search terms.