One of the adverts showed a woman in a train station asking a man which tube she should take for Euston Station, where the man promptly offered every piece of information relating to Euston Station… save for what she asked.

The idea of the advert is that if you use Bing, instead of say, Google, you’ll cut out all of the useless information and get straight to the nub of the matter.

But will you?

We asked Google and Bing exactly that question, which tube is it for Euston Station?

You’d think, seeing as Microsoft are making such a fuss over how their search engine gives answers, rather than ‘information overload’, they’d have made sure that the answer to this question was succinct and accurate… you’d think.

Here is what Google offered:

Wikipedia is first and second, goes without saying. The third result is AllinLondon.co.uk – which offers loads of info, but not necessarily the answer to our question. Fourth up is metazone.co.uk – which has the answer in great detail, showing how we can plan our route. Nice one Google, third site, fourth result down had the answer.

Here is what Bing offered, despite being the question asked in a multi-million pound advertising campaign:

First two again are Wikipedia results, same as Google. Next is AllinLondon.co.uk again, same as Google. Not much difference so far, the same information overload. The fourth result is another page for AllinLondon.co.uk, showing restaurants near Euston – not really what we asked, but nice to know.

The fifth result is alwaystouchout.com, which shows us development projects in London. We’re getting a bit off track now. We’re then offered davros.org, which shows us a history of London Underground lines… after this we gave up.

So, which search engine answered the question in a succinct manner? Google. Which search engine offered reams of information that failed to answer our question? Bing.

Nice one Microsoft, may as well have just shot your own foot while you were at it. Here’s the advert anyway, in case you think we’ve made this up.

Quality content is becoming more important to the health of a site as time goes by. The search engines are placing an increasing reliance on pleasing Internet users when calculating a site’s rankings. Content plays a key role in pleasing your site’s users. It often makes the difference between retaining a user on the page or bouncing them right back to the search engine. You might well ask, if content’s so great, how on earth could it cause you any problems?

Dynamic content issues

One of the ways in which content presents a problem is if your architecture produces dynamic content. Any time content is presented as a response to a query from a site user, that’s dynamic content. It presents a problem because the search engines have had trouble dealing with dynamic pages in the past. Although Google claims to have a handle on dynamic content now, most SEO professionals still avoid dynamic pages where possible.

Dynamic content also presents a duplicate content issue. When any of your pages features the same content, such as product pages and category pages, Google might choose only one of them to index. You need to have control over which.

Duplicate content problems

Dynamic pages aren’t the only way duplicate content can creep onto your website. In fact, most duplicate content problems come from site owners trying to bulk out their site without enough quality content, simply copying and pasting from other sources. Every page must have fresh content, content that is unique and interesting.

Get your content strategy wrong and your SEO strategy will fail before it’s even begun.

The TV campaign is to be shown the UK and is funded by Microsoft, hoping to lure users away from Google. The campaign will run for three months, and will cost millions to the software giant.

The campaign launches tomorrow across every terrestrial channel in the UK, and some satellite channels too, including Sky One.

The tagline Microsoft has chosen to promote its search engine with is ‘Bing and Decide’ – which presumably a lot of people have done already, which is why Microsoft has chosen to ramp up the advertising. Bing is hoping the fact that its pretty design will carry some weight from users who are overloaded with the information they receive from Google… so less is more, with some pictures to add tinsel?

Microsoft UK’s managing director Ashley Highfield commented:

The ad campaign brings to life the concept of Bing as a decision engine, a tool that both cuts through the information overload and offers a new search experience. We’re confident that this will help grow our user base.

The initial aim for Bing is to surpass Yahoo!, which currently has 6.1% of the global search market, compared with Bing’s 3.4%. Google meanwhile has 86% – so some way to go for Microsoft.

A regular maintenance schedule is essential for the long-term health of your site. Most companies will already have a site maintenance routine before they approach SEO, which might involve checking code and backing up files regularly. Your optimisation maintenance schedule should be easily slotted into your regular computer routine. You don’t have to check up on your optimisation every day, every week, or even every couple of weeks. The important thing is that you maintain it.

Your SEO maintenance routine will depend a lot on what you’ve done to optimise your site. Usually it will involve checking up on your keywords, looking at what competitors are doing and analysing your traffic statistics for changes. It should also include posting a continuous supply of content to keep the search engine spiders checking your site. It’s important to note that SEO tactics change over time, so part of your maintenance routine should involve analysing internet trends to detect when those changes should be made.

If you’ve consulted an SEO company for your site’s optimisation, it can be a good idea to discuss a maintenance routine with them. Just as each site’s optimisation is individual, an optimisation maintenance routine needs to be individually tailored as well.

Many businesses overlook their internal linking structure for long periods of time. This is understandable. It can be hard to keep on top of your site’s structure, particularly if you’re adding constant fresh content as well. Maintenance of your internal links should make up part of your regular search engine optimisation maintenance routine. It’s important to make sure that your link structure is up to scratch to begin with.

Planning is vital

Planning out your internal structure is vital to your site’s relationship with the search engines. Clear paths need to be set out throughout your site so that search engines spiders can crawl through it easily. Without proper planning, however, your link structure can easily become tangled and messy.

It’s a good idea to sit down and plan out your links visually, using a piece of paper and a pen, or a whiteboard. Drawing up a site map in this way enables you to see where potential problems are. It also helps you to redesign your structure so that pages follow each other logically. When this physical map has been drawn up, you can use it as a base for your site map, providing another way to reinforce your link structure.

It’s important to remember that every page can be used to reinforce your internal link structure. Your navigation bar, footer navigation and content links should all be used to help SEO.

Good linkbait needs to have a certain something that will fascinate Internet users. This is getting harder and harder to discover as more businesses compete for attention. A knowledge of the five Ws will give you an advantage when creating the best limkbait content.

Who: Who is your target for this particular piece of linkbait? Linkbait tends to be more successful when it is specifically targeted. It’s much harder to entice a general audience with a piece of content, as individual people don’t have general interests. They have individual ones. Figure out what the specific interests are of your target user groups and aim your linkbait toward them.

What: What aspect of your proposed linkbait will make your target group pass it on? You need to know what makes your bait ‘tasty.’

Where: Where do your target groups communicate on the net? This is where you’ll need to post links to your linkbait.

When: When you post linkbait is becoming a more important concern over time. Internet users are more active during certain periods. Those periods will be even more specific for user groups.

Why: Why should users link to you? You need to make this clear within the linkbait itself. A strong message will point them in the right direction.

Herlihy stated that desktop computers, as we know them, have around three years left. Just enough time for Microsoft to put a stable release of Windows 7!

Herlihy commented:

In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.

Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible. Because there’s more information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that’s why search will become more and more important. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models – ubiquity first, revenue later.

Google of course has a vested interest in turning people towards mobile search, with the launch of the Nexus One and its Android operating system. Google’s Chrome browser, like its mobile operating system, allows the user to search the web and the computer itself from one location. Google will also be launching Chrome OS later in 2010, which will further incorporate the browser with the way the computer is searched and accessed.

Linkbait requires a fresh angle on something interesting to be successful. You can discuss your linking campaign with us at Stuck On. Sometimes it might be a new concept that no-one in your industry has thought of before. It might just involve filling a gap in user needs. The link bait most likely to net you links, however, needs to have a uniquely creative angle.

All it takes is a little creativity

Some of the best linkbait is something that comes from the side, from left field (so to speak). Most businesses concentrate on their industry when trying to attract attention, like a health product site creating an online ezine to attract customers. If you’re up against stiff competition, however, then a little creative thinking might be of more benefit. A creative concept could be what gets you attention, even when your site, product or service isn’t that different.

The latest Apple series of advertisements is a great example of this kind of creative thinking. Apple has always tried to manoeuvre around the issue of ‘PC versus Mac’, as confronting it head on would be of little benefit. Instead, the company transferred the argument to another plane, characterising the two versions of computers as a cheerful, hip friend and a dumpy little nerd. The company turned the issue into a sitcom.

The concept you come up with doesn’t have to be intricately related to the real issues. There are plenty of examples of companies approaching their competition or other issues from a side angle.