Since it is New Year, predictions are popping out like mushrooms everywhere. The following are things that should happen in 2012, although there’s a greater chance that it won’t.

Bing Increases Its Search Market Share By 15%

Bing ideally should increase its search market share that will help big companies to be more honest. Apparently, Google is the strongest search engine and will remain without a strong competitor in the years to come.

Social-Assisted Search Crack by Bing and Facebook

The effectiveness of search engines in marketing and advertising has been proven many years ago. Though word of mouth is still the best, a combination of the two can be the most effective means of marketing ever. Facebook and Bing have the potential of cracking this and they would make a good competition over Google.

Yahoo Bounces Back

Yahoo once the Internet pioneer is lacking a CEO and obviously way behind Google. Though it is subject of speculations time after time, a bouncing back Yahoo in 2012 would be great news. After all Yahoo still has amazing services in store for the market.

Specialists Should Deliver Worth Paying and Better Campaigns

Recession along with the cut-throat competition in the business industry has led some clients to settle for a single all-service agency. Even if it means lower quality services in ad exchanges, digital areas like search engine optimization and conversion optimization. Because of cost cutting reasons, many are choosing cheaper deal only to be caught in an unfavorable situation – they are spending less but getting less as well. As Steve Center, Honda CMO once said “If you grind the margin out of your agency you will get a marginal agency.”
Lack of funds to hire the best people or enough people in a certain department becomes the situation most of the time.

Clients tend to spend more by hiring other specialist agencies. And more often than not, they are the ones caught in a situation where they have to start from scratch or to achieve great results in a short span of time.

The Digital Age For CEOs and CMOs

Senior Executives are kind of hard to persuade when it comes to digital changes. They’d rather spend millions of dollars on marketing campaigns than spend for page optimization – although there are concrete benefits for sales improvements. Apparently, there’s a lot more persuasions to take place before top executives get digital and budgets get properly allocated.

Evidently, there are a myriad of SEO tools available that you can instantly find online. In fact, typing the key phrase “SEO tools” on Google will give you over a million search results. This could be a good thing because your options are not limited. All you have to do is to choose which can effectively boost website traffic and revenue. But on the other hand, you’re also bound to get overwhelmed by never ending list of SEO tools. Let’s face the harsh reality that not all SEO tools are a good choice, and this might get you confused.

Want to know the trick here? Simple! Do not use all the SEO tools you can find randomly. It’s best to select only a few tools to be used and leverage them. To help you get started, we have listed 4 basic types of SEO tools that will help you optimize your website. Let’s begin.

Keyword Research Tools – You might have heard that keyword research and analysis is the initial step of search engine optimization. It’s true. Selecting targeted keywords that will keep a fine balance between status or popularity and competitiveness is imperative. As of today, Google is winning the battle in terms of search market share. However, this does not mean you should disregard other search engines. In order to stay in the game, select keyword tools that will provide you with comprehensive data for the 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Mega Tags Analyzer Tools – This tool inspects the Meta tags of your web page to ensure search engine compatibility. Does your web page adhere to the basic search engine guidelines? Meta Tags Analyzer Tool will examine this for you. Take for example if the title tag of a web page is more than 65 characters, then the tool will issue a warning. How does it work? Enter your website link in the URL box and this tool will give you results in just a few seconds.

Backlinks Checker Tools – This is often called, link popularity tools. Apparently, SEO is not just about having strategically placed Meta tags and a good content, but also about utilizing high quality backlinks. The idea here is simple. If there are numerous websites that are pointing back to your website or articles, then your site will receive more traffic. This will eventually make your website popular and rank high on major search engines. Backlink Checker tools will help you get detailed information about the backlinks including link authority, PR, follow, no follow, and more.

Web Analytics Tools – This tool will greatly help you power up all the SEO activities of your website. If you want to enhance the page optimization of your web page, then a Web Analytics Tool can help you accomplish this. You can make use of either free or paid analytics tool offered online. Just a heads up, deploy two to three Web Analytics Tool in order to acquire accurate metrics.

To obtain additional functionality and to help your website get high ranking in major search engines, you may also use different SEO toolbars and browser add-ons.

Yearly, people are excited to see what has been included in the Yahoo’s Annual Top Searches. If you are one of those who are excited to know the top trends, stories and gossips for the whole year, this is certainly the place to be as Yahoo has recently released their Year in review. Before going to the juiciest part which is seeing which and what is on the list, you might want to know first the importance of this Annual Top Searches?

Here is a list of reasons why people are so eager to get to see the Yahoo’s Annual Top Searches:

• This list will furnish you with the most popular searches of the year. For most people especially those in the online marketing field, knowing what and who has been the trend throughout the year is very important. This will give them the opportunity to get further income in next year as they will be able to determine the most ideal niches for SEO campaigns.
• This list will give you the opportunity to be updated. Being updated to all the latest happenings worldwide is one main reason why people are so much into Yahoo’s Year in Review. For most people it is important to get the latest news, buzz and trends so they will never be left out. Moreover, being updated will give them the opportunity to mingle and catch up to the usual conversations and hot topics today.

According to Yahoo’s Year in Review, the most popular searches are often about niches like gadgets, games, celebrities, sports and news stories. For four years, Britney Spears has topped the Yahoo’s Annual Searches this was from 2005 to 2008. Last year the news about oil spill has topped the searches.

The ever popular iPhone has snatched the crown from Britney Spears as it has topped both online and mobile searches of Yahoo’s Annual Top Searches. Included in the top searches are the famous celebrity actresses like Kim Kardashian, Lindsay Lohan, Katy Perry, Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Lopez. It is unlikely that only one natural disaster has made it to the list of top searches and this was the Japan earthquake.

When it comes to the top athletes’ searches, Danica Patrick has outranked everybody while Sarah Palin has trampled President Obama in the Top Politician Searches of 2011. Moving on, Casey Anthony trial has topped the Top News Searches and Stories of 2011 category.

You can visit Yahoo Year in Review if you want to see more top 10 lists on the world’s most popular searches in niches like music, movies, economy, etc. If you are too eager to stay updated and equipped with all the latest trends and happening worldwide it is only ideal that you go to check on the Yahoo’s Annual Top Searches. See what have been the most popular searches, topics and talks of the town in the year 2011.

Be updated and ready to converse anytime by furnishing yourself with the most talked about issues, gossips and trends!

Yahoo is now evolving tremendously as it gets rid of the aged Associated Content and launches the newest Yahoo voices. As far as the contents are concerned, there would be many changes to it. Though most people are seeing Associated Content and Yahoo Voice as the same thing only improved and rebranded, for publishers and writers, Yahoo Voices would definitely make a huge difference. Many analysts are seeing this move from Yahoo as answer to Google’s Panda update. Though it may seem a little late, they still consider it the right and most brilliant move from Yahoo since the Google changes.

Yahoo has deleted more than 75,000 contents which are all outdated and inactive according to Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog. Furthermore, Yahoo has also stated that only those contents that could meet up their revised Submission Guidelines will be acknowledged or published. In line with this, Yahoo will continually delete older contents which can not correspond to their standards. Yahoo has then released their official revised Submission Guidelines for their writers’ reference.

The guidelines include obliging the writers to submit only original content. Yahoo has reiterated the importance of submitting original, fresh and proofread pieces to them. Yahoo also stated in their guidelines that the articles or contents must definitely be informative, useful and engaging. It is also a must for writers to keep their articles shorter but juicier as much as possible. The ideal length of pieces to submit should be from 350-500 words. The structure of the article is also important. Yahoo prefers articles that uses subheadings as such kind of articles can be easily scanned.

On the other hand, Yahoo is prohibiting content that includes pornographic, threatening, defamatory, and anything that encourages or supports illegal and discriminatory conduct. These are the types of contents that according to their revised Submission Guidelines would not be published in any way. Yahoo is also discouraging pieces that are written with awfully negative tone but Yahoo is not prohibiting personal perspective of their writers.

The good news is that you can still see most of the articles that were previously produced for Associated Content. Yahoo is also giving writers a chance and the opportunity to revise their previous articles and be published if it meets their standards. Yahoo did not change the way authors or writers are being paid. The amount that authors will get will still depend on the quantity of traffic it will receive.

In addition to this, Yahoo is giving opportunities to those who want to publish articles to them who are not yet an expert on writing contents by making use of Yahoo Style Guide and Yahoo Contributor Academy. These two programs will definitely help you make the best article you can do with your knowledge.

Base on the current changes being made by Yahoo, it is evident that they are reacting to their competitors move way back. Though it seemed a little late for Yahoo to react to it, you can still consider it as the right move to take!

When Bing was launched, it was considered a threat to Google. Though Bing is yet to compete with Google in terms of user loyalty and trust; it seems it has a long way to go before it even challenges Google.

The mere fact that it disobeys the webmaster’s instructions is enough for webmasters to dump Bing. And once webmasters overlook a search engine, the users too, don’t stick with that search engine. Currently, Bing is disappointing webmasters because of its loophole in treating the content within

noindex and nofollow tags.

Ideally, any content that is marked noindex or nofollow, either through robots.txt file or via meta robots tag should not be indexed by the search engines. Major search engines are following this practice and allow the webmasters to hide certain pages from the public. But Bing is out rightly disobeying this practice.

Recently, a conversation on Bing Forum highlighted this issue. Here’s how the conversation went:

Webmaster:

I have a site containing pages that I don’t want their content being indexed by search engines so all of those pages have
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” />
in their header and it has been like this for a while now.

Both Google and Yahoo respected the tag and those pages are not being indexed by them but today I checked and found all those pages even recent ones are indexed and cached on Bing.

Program Manager, Bing Webmaster Center:

This is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve.  If you have pages you would like permanently removed from our index, please send me a mail to bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line. Please also include the URLs in the body of the message. You may use an * wildcard for any directories such as:

http:example.com/ wrongdirectory/*

Normally, I would request that you fill out a content removal request, however, since this is a problem on our side, I’ll do the leg work for you.

So why does Bing disobey noindex / nofollow?

As evident from what the Bing representative said, “it’s a known issue in Bing.” Microsoft does say that it’s working to fix this problem but when? Having signed a search deal with Yahoo, is Microsoft waiting for Yahoo to fix their search engine bugs? Common MS, that way you will never be able to challenge Google’s search monopoly.

Has anybody experienced similar problems, with Bing indexing your noindex / nofollow content?