RealTown's RealTalk

Well it looks as though Yahoo and MSN (Bing) are proposing to marry. Bing will be the new engine for all of Yahoo's traffic and Yahoo will get all of the advertising rights to the traffic. It's all at the DOJ's office right now. U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee on antitrust, said in a statement Wednesday that the Microsoft-Yahoo agreement will be carefully scrutinized.

With a market share of 65%, Google will find it hard to argue that this impinges on their turf. Yahoo and Bing combine for only about 28% so it looks like this is going to be a slam dunk.

But what say you? Is this going to be a good thing for the industry or a bad thing? I'd love to hear your opinions.

Randy Eagar, CRS
President, WebsTarget SEO
www.WebsTarget.com
Randy@WebsTarget.com

Randy Eagar said:
"But what say you? Is this going to be a good thing for the industry
or a bad thing? I'd love to hear your opinions."

Hi Randy,

While having just two engines that matter is not really a good thing
for the market, at least this makes the second engine worth more
consideration from an SEO perspective. For too long, it has been all
about G.

One thing is for sure, regardless of the percentages, web surfers who
put "Yourtown ST real estate" or "Yourtown ST homes for sale" or
"Yourtown ST Realtor" into an search engine box is where the most
viable traffic will be in real estate, for a very long time, as it
has been for years.

Agents who address that fact and get their SEO in order are getting
genuine leads on a regular basis, with little ongoing effort. The
leads come to their website. Agents who have not addressed their SEO
tasks are often trying to "manufacture" leads within social networks,
and spending countless hours at it, on a regular basis. 'cause
they've been told that it works by some soc net guru.

Similarly, you can fish with a net from a trawler, or you can stand
on the shore with a fishing rod. The fisherman on shore who catches a
big fish will hoot an holler, post his fish picture online, and
declares to all who will listen that the fishing is great here. They
guy with the trawler makes a living catching fish, quietly goes home
at night, and he really doesn't tell anyone else about his best
fishing holes.

The parallels with real estate marketing today are substantial.

Best regards,

Dirk Johnson
Partner - Operations
DomainDrivers LLC
djohnson@domaindrivers.com
703-406-4698
www.domaindrivers.com

Randy Eagar said:
"But what say you? Is this going to be a good thing for the industry
or a bad thing? I'd love to hear your opinions."
I'm not yet convinced that Yahoo/Bing will have a major impact. My
clients' stats still show Google as the top referrer, by far, and search
results for various important keyphrases send to yield similar results
in Bing and Google.

My hunch is that TV advertising for Bing is prompting people to try it
once, when they realize that it's not that much different than Google.
What will happen will Microsoft slacks off on TV advertising?

Regardless of which search engine comes out on top, the relatively small
percentage of real estate agents who've optimized their sites themselves
or who have had them professionally optimized will still dominate search
results.

Suzanne
--
Suzanne Hathcock Stephens
Point2Agent Qualified Web Site Designer
http://www.SuzStephens.com
360-666-0881

Bing is fine, it is like a META search, it calls up Google and other results.

If you rank on Google, you will probably rank to some extent on Bing.

Bing searches alot of good places, (Like Yelp.com) where Google does not: value added places with reviews.

If your rankings are better on Google than on Bing, you need to spread the word around more ;-)

Learn more at http://socialmediasystems.com - why do we know so much about social media? Type social media website design into Google search, (or just click this link) and you will see!