“SEO” stands for search engine optimisation, which is “a structured approach used to increase the position of a company or its products in search engine natural or organic results listings for selected keywords or phrases” (Chaffey et al, 2012).

Google, Yahoo and Bing are the three most competitive search engines in the world, constantly competing for more users in the search market. Carrying out 1.2 trillion searches per year.

So, what’s their successful SEO marketing strategy?

Google

• Google is recognised for its regular updates, innovative search algorithms.
• Google considered click-through rate (CTR) and external links as major factors.
• Google admires user experience above all other factors, thus if your page is user-friendly it will do well in Google search results. For example, Google launched the mobile-friendly label on mobile search engines results. Underneath the link is a grey label that tells the user whether the website is going to work correctly on their mobile device or not.
• Google favours websites that have videos, images and other content which is more engaging.
• Google’s crawlers index frequently-updated sites more often, this involves adding updated web pages into Google search.

Bing

• Bing uses targeted keywords as a ranking parameter.
• Bing is more likely to index and show your content in search engines if the content is clear, deep and easy to find on your website.
• Bing rewards sites that have grown organically, that is, that have been added overtime by content creators on other trusted, relevant websites made to drive real users from their site to your site.
• The more influential you are on social media, the more reward you will receive from Bing.
• According to searchmetrics, “on average, 52-53 per cent of backlinks of websites ranked among the top 30 results on Bing contain keywords in the anchor text (which is about 10% more than Google”. E.g. an image.

Yahoo!

• Yahoo does not rank websites based on age, it prefers a website with a sizeable domain age because they associate it with authenticity.
• Yahoo rewards websites with targeted keywords.
• In order to have a better ranking, Yahoo place great importance on metadata and meta keywords.
• Readable URLs which represent the content pages, as opposed to numeric or cryptic URLs.
• Meaningful cross-links between your links, other related websites and providers of relevant content add value for visitors and can boost your ranking.

In your opinion what search engines are eye-catching and have you noticed anything specific the brand has done to achieve such success?