Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, discusses how he sees the future of the web. The clip below is a 6 minute excerpt TechCrunch cut as the meat in the sandwich.

I’ve been ignoring Bing as a search engine, mostly because it’s made by the evil Microsoft. However, it’s now overtaken Yahoo for most of our clients sites as the second largest search engine referrer. That is no threat to Google as the Big G still takes about 90% of the search engine credit, but I’m surprised it’s overtaken Yahoo so rapidly. It could still be the novelty factor, but it could also indicate real competition.

So, not to be left out in the cold, the key factors for number one websites in Bing seem to be:

• having an old domain name
• having quality inbound links, specifically from pages that have the same keywords in the title
• then the usual good amount of quality content (I’ve read Bing likes more than 300 words on a page), clean code and a sitemap

If you’ve done a good job of optimising your site for Google then your rankings shouldn’t be too different for Bing. If you’ve got loads of spammy links holding your website up in Google then these won’t help you in Bing. Bing seems to like better qualified links than Google – it’s about time!

Read more over at Bing

I’m still sitting on the fence regarding the use of social media for B2B online marketing. However, Twitter have created Twitter 101, a guide to encourage you to use it for your business.

They provide some novel examples of how Twitter can help your business. Well worth a read to see if there could be something in it for you.

I think if you have a retail shop, either online or offline, it would be worth tweeting about any sale or special offers you have – especially if the sale is only for a day, but again, that is B2C, not B2B – so I move back to the fence…

Read Twitter 101 for Business

BTW – sorry for delay in posts. We’ve been busy – BlackMax Media has merged with CodeSense to create a new company called Digital Finery! So now we provide SEO, online marketing, web design and development with the added touch of software and application development.

–Update–

Smart Company also have an inspiring list of 55 things your business can tweet about.

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/internet/20091006-twitter-ideas.html

If you have a Google account, you’ve probably noticed the new buttons on your search results:

What do these mean for the future of search engine optimisers? Well, it seems Google is finally yielding to the fact they can’t create the perfect algorithm, they still need human input. Whilst there is no official line the promote or remove buttons will have any effect on a website, it’s only a matter of time before Google use the data and the SERPs will start to produce results based on promote and remove.

And why not. It will encourage businesses and website owners to create useful content, and hopefully banish spammy sites to the black hole. Just think about all the crap websites you currently have to sift through that just happen to be good at SEO, but provide no real value, this is a way to reduce them.

Will the system be gamed? Of course we’ve already heard the urban myth of SEO agencies outsourcing to China and having lots of people search for and click on their websites across internet cafes, so you’d assume this would be the next step. Except they’ll each have to have their own Google account, no big drama, but the different accounts would need to register a different promote and remove vote from different IP addresses, meaning one person would need to login to one account, promote or remove, then go to another internet cafe, login to another Google account, perform another promote or remove and so forth – not time effective at all. I’m sure if a heap of different accounts were promoting and removing the same websites from the same IP address Google would notice (at least I hope they would!). Or I guess you could have a range of IP addresses and move around from computer to computer for different accounts – not an easy setup and I’m actually imagining it would seem a bit futuristic sci-fi. It would be cheaper to just create some decent content…I can’t imagine it would be worth the investment for the outcome.

So, fingers crossed for Google working the promote and remove feature in their search engine results.