The mobile communications market continues to experience explosive growth during this slow economy. As more people use mobile phones to explore websites, an industry of mobile search engines has emerged. They are still in their infancy, similar to the web search market a decade ago. Being ahead of the curve by having a website optimized for mobile search today will pay dividends in the future. Just as important, is optimizing your mobile site for such search engines.
Here is an overview of the most important search engines in the Mobile Search Engine Landscape to keep an eye on:
XML sitemaps inform search engines about the pages available to crawl on your website. Search engines find new pages by navigating links on websites. Sitemaps enhance search engine crawling by providing explicit information about the specific urls on your website. Sitemaps don’t ensure that your webpages will be indexed, but they typically increase both the chance and speed of indexing.
If you have fresh content on your blog or website, it is prudent to make sure the search engines know about this to get the content indexed as soon as possible. One way this is done is by pinging your xml sitemap. Although there are many search engines and services you can ping your sitemap to, make sure you concentrate on the big 3: Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
So, how do you automatically ping your updated sitemap each time your website updates? Read How to Ping Your Sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing to find out:
Microsoft launched its new search engine called Bing on May 28, 2009. It is a rebranded and far superior search engine than their previous one, Live Search. I think the marketing ($80 million worth) and functionality of Bing will help it gain significant market share. Let’s face it, not many people used Live Search because of the unsexy brand name and lack of differentiators against competing search engines.
With the introduction of Bing, I think Microsoft will make significant headway in the market. Increased and innovative competition in this space can only help us, the consumers. The worst thing that could happen is for Google to actually completely monopolize the search market, and this makes that less of a possibility.
So how does Bing compare to Google? Surprisingly well. The gap between Google and Live Search has closed with the launch of Bing. Here is a head to head comparison of Bing VS Google in terms of speed, brand, functionality, and quality of results.
