Check out your standings in Bing and Yahoo!.  Wait, you say.  Yahoo! has been around for a long time and Bing is brand new.  Why do I need to care about them?

To make a long story short, after a long and bumpy courtship, Bing and Yahoo! recently became Mr. & Mrs. Binghoo.  And, while that wouldn’t necessarily mean bad things for Google, it surely stacks the deck in the newlyweds’ direction.

The search world has been watching with fascination as Microsoft  launched Bing and quickly grabbed market share.  In fact, recent data tells us that Bing is now the fastest growing search engine out there.  It still has a way to go before it eclipses Google.  Yet, at the rate it is growing, Google is going to have to do something significant to stop that from happening.

Why?  Mashable.com has an article out today that suggests some of the reasons Bing is so popular.  Frankly, it has some cool tools built into it that feel seamless to the search experience, a lot like FaceBook and MySpace do to their fans.  Power that with the Yahoo! tool box and database, and remove Yahoo! as a competitor, and you’ve got a strong contender in the fight.

Don’t count Google down for the count, however.  Google’s new Caffeine algorithm promises to whip up a froth.  It’s faster, relies more on key words and, most exciting to the internet-saavy, search is moving into real time.  Caffeine also expanded the amount of data:  searching for “dog”, Google found just under 52 million references in .25 seconds.  Caffeine’d Google found 360 million in half that time.

What does this mean to small business owners? It depends.  Here is a video of Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google, talking about what you need to know about the caffeine update:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU5cKDryjy0[/youtube]

Bottom Line:  If your site has been optimized for a strong organic result in Google, you’re probably going to be okay.  It would be smart to do some clicking to be sure.  Start at comparegoogle.com or cartercole.com, where you can compare Google vs Google Caffeine.

We checked just a few of our key words for funbeach.com to show you the good, the bad and the ugly of this change:

If your site looks like it is going to lose rank in this change, all is not lost.  Now is a good time to consider getting your feet wet with Google AdWords and AdSense, as well as Bing and Yahoo! sponsored results advertising.  It’s also important to consider the relative benefit of search results in your overall marketing campaign.  The vast majority of our customers enjoy a stronger return on investment from non-search techniques such as smart link partnerships, targeted social networking and more traditional, offline, marketing strategies.  If search is your only strategy for marketing your site, you don’t have a strategy.

Of course, if you want help turning Google’s Caffeine, Yahoo!, Bing and the rest more to your favor, or if you want help in creating and implementing a more holistic plan for marketing your site and/or your business, give us a call at 360.642.4431 or zap us an email.

We pride ourselves in meeting you where you want to be met and helping you create a plan to best use your resources to get you where you want to go.

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