And surprisingly Yahoo’s gains were largely at the expense of Google sites, which lost 1% of search market share month-over-month. Google is still the front-runner with 61.6% of the search market. But for how long?

As you already know, Bing and Yahoo don’t supply the majority of the traffic to your site, but they do drive highly targeted traffic. And that’s pretty significant.

In fact, over all Yahoo! and Bing users will stay on your site an average of 23% longer then someone who came to you from Google.

At a recent SEO Conference (SES SF) it was said “Yahoo and Bing are merging. They’ll be 100% merged by the end of August or the beginning of September.

This is actually a pretty big deal and something that web masters and business online can no longer ignore. not something to ignore anymore. If you do, you’ll be missing out on 10 to 12 percent of traffic.”

How To Take Advantage of the Yahoo! / Bing Marriage:

1. Bing favors domain names that have some age on them. Don’t make the mistake of  giving up a domain name with good history and start again. Instead, use the aged domain as your “money site” and then use newer “keyword rich domain names” as feeder sites in your own link network.

2. Titles are of first importance when it comes to on-page optimization. Bing clearly places a lot of importance on Title tags and what they say about your site.

To leverage this make sure you use your best keywords in the title tags of every page on your site. But don’t just stuff the keywords in in the title tag, just to have them there.

Remember, your title tag isn’t just for the search engines. Use it to “Sell the click” as our friend Jerry West from WebMarketingNow.com says.

Making your title tag stand out from the rest of the serp results will increase traffic and conversion over keyword stuffing the title tag alone.

3. Bing seems it also places a higher value on pages that have at least 300 words. We’ve spoke with a number of trusted SEO guru’s who have confirmed this and in fact report that 1,200 words  is actually the magic number to shoot for.

4. Link popularity is your #1 off page SEO strategy bar none. Conventional SEO advice says that your backlinks need to be from relevant sites and or related sites. But the fact is, it’s just not true with Google (at all) and not true with Yahoo! Bing on the other hand does want to see this sort of relevancy, but if they join with and use the Yahoo! database, all bets are off.

When it comes to link building, get links where you can get them and try to get a mix of links. Relevant links offer the added advantage of long term “future proofing”your SEO efforts, but don’t over look any non relevant link because they work too.

For example we look up your site in the format:

“http://www.yourdomain.com”

Remember, you want to compare apples to apples here, so it’s very important to put both the “http://” AND the “www”  in your domain so that you are looking up your site the same way we do.

If you play around with it and do your searches in Yahoo for example, you’ll see the effects using the “http” and the “www” when searching vs., not using them. The differences are really quite dramatic.

We’ve done a lot of testing and found this format to be the most accurate.

But What If Your SEO Results Still Don’t Match Ours?

There are few other things that could be contributing to this.

Sometimes the results you’ll see are different based on geography and from what data center your ISP is getting its results from especially if you’re located outside of the United States (all of our look up servers are currently located in the U.S.)

Other times it might be that we looked up the results a few days ago and they’ve changed.

An easy thing to do is just press the “Update Stats” button in your control panel. Then see if this doesn’t fix the problem. 9 times out of 10 it will.

If your results are still not matching up, use the support contact form and let us know about it.

It’s something we can take a look and get fixed for you.

Some search engines remove the trailing slash from urls that look like directories – e.g. Yahoo does it for example.

However, you might find that this could result into duplicated content problems when the same page content is accessible under different urls.

And clearly you don’t want that.

But if you’re using Apache on your web server, there’s a simple solution.

Let’s have a look at an example: enarion.net/google/ is indexed in Yahoo as enarion.net/google – which would result in two urls with the same content.

Solution:

The solution is to create a .htaccess rewrite rule that adds the trailing slashes to these urls. Example – redirect all urls that do not have a trailing slash to urls with a trailing slash:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !example.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

Explanation of the add trailing slash .htaccess rewrite rule:

The first line tells Apache that this is code for the rewrite engine of the mod_rewrite module of Apache. The 2nd line sets the current directory as page root. But the interesting part is:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

makes sure that existing files will not get a slash added. You shouldn’t do the same with directories since this would exlude the rewrite behaviour for existing directories. The line

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !example.php

exludes a sample url that should not be rewritten. This is just an example. If you do not have a file or url that should not be rewritten, remove this line. The condition:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$

and finally fires when a url does not contain a trailing slash.

Now we need to redirect the urls without the trailing slash: pre> RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301] does the 301 redirect to the url, with the trailing slash appended.

You should replace domain.com with your url. Make sure that you stick with the right domain name; if unsure, have a look at this article.

Pretty cool, eh?

This article was referenced with gratitude from enarion.net.

In essence, it will show you how effective your current SEO strategy really is, where your doing well and where you need to improve.

With this page you will be able to see “at a glance” the most important overview data for each one of the websites you are monitoring immediately.

We track PR, Back links from Google and Yahoo, how many of your sites pages are actually indexed in Google, Yahoo, Bing and Alexa too.

And though it carries less weight than it used to, we even track the Alexa ranking as well automatically.

As with other tabs in the system that offer monitoring functions, you are able to sort each column a number of different ways to suit your liking and to reduce the time that you need to spend searching for information.

Now, in the SEO STATS overview grid, Green numbers mean an increase in something, Red numbers mean a decrease, and black indicates no change.

By using this color code system and presenting all of the major monitoring indicators on the same screen, you’re able to immediately get a sense of what’s working and what’s not.

You’ll quickly be able to tell where your SEO efforts are paying off and where you need to get to work

But let’s say you want to drill down a little bit further.

For example, let’s say that you see an GREEN number in Yahoo back links column. This indicates that the number of back links that Yahoo is counting toward your site has increased. (Bo0 Yah!)

Simply click on any number you see in the grid and the system will launch a chart that displays that particular stat over time.

Now the real beauty of this is that now able to see in real time the effectiveness of any linking campaign over time. And the longer your site is in the system, the greater trend history you’ll develop.

Now to check other stats, simply click the “JUMP BACK to STATS” link at the top of the page, and the system will drop you back into the overview grid so you can check other ranking indicators or review other indicator trends.

Lastly, on the far right hand side you’ll see the KEYWORDS column.

Here you’ll see the number of keywords you’re tracking for that particular domain.

To view those keywords and their statistics simply hover your mouse over the word “VIEW” and click the link.

A new page will pop up that lists every keyword you’re currently tracking and your position for that Keyword in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Once again you be able to click on any number in the keyword listings and have the system draws a trending chart that shows your position for a particular search engine for that keyword over time.

The bottom line is that you no longer have to spend an average of 15 to 20 minutes per URL several times a week trying to compile all of the SEO stats needed to be able to see the big picture of how well your websites are doing because we’ll do it for you automatically and have it ready every time you login.

If you’ve got multiple websites or you’re managing sites for clients, you just saved you a whole lot of time.

Watch the video here