Here are the top three Web Marketing stories of the Summer of 2009:

3. Bing emerges as a major player in the search engine game (or do they?)

Earlier this year, if you mentioned a Microsoft search engine as having the potential to overtake Google or Yahoo! you’d likely have been laughed out of the room. However, ever since Microsoft unveiled their newly-branded search engine, Bing, in May of 2009, the new search engine has been taking the search engine market by storm.

However, the question remains: Does Bing have staying power? Does it really offer search engine results and features that will convince users to make the switch from Google, or is it all just hype generated by Microsoft?

Bing does offer Cashback, a service where they’ve partnered with some of the top online retailers to offer shoppers certain percentages of cash back in exchange for shopping and purchasing on their websites. This has become extremely popular in a less-than-thriving economy where everyone is looking to save a buck. But other than the Cashback feature and claims by independent researchers who claim that study proves that users prefer Bing’s results more than Google’s, it seems as if it’s too early to dub the search engine as a major threat to Google’s steadily-growing success.

However, a certain deal that was worked out of the summer may be enough to take them to the next level:

2. Bing and Yahoo Join Forces

On July 29th 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced a deal that would see Bing power Yahoo! search results.

In June 2009, according to Wikipedia and Complete.com, the search engine market-share was as follows:

Google- 74%

Yahoo!- 17%

Bing- 7%

Yahoo! and Bing’s decision to combine forces and allow Bing to take over Yahoo!’s search engine results may be big news to some, but again, it is still to early to say that Google should be looking in their rear-view mirrors.

Organically, from our research, over 85% of our clients’ traffic (200+ attorneys from all over the country) comes from Google organic search. Bing has been slowly rising the ranks of sources of traffic for our clients (right now it is top 10 for most clients), and is something to keep an eye on, but we still advise our clients that Google is still the top search engine for the foreseeable future.

On the Pay-per-click side, yes, Bing’s paid search has increased over the summer, but it would still be safe to say that Google’s Adwords is  the preferred pay-per-click advertising resource across the board.

So, the conclusion: Bing and Yahoo are trying to catch up and have made up some ground over the summer, but let’s wait and see what develops over the next few months.

So, you would think that Google is just sitting on their hands and waiting to see if the others catch up, right?

Wrong.

1. Google’s response to Bing and real-time search with Google Caffeine

Google seems to have responded to the hype surrounding Bing and the emergence of real-time search with the announcement of Google caffeine, Google’s new search engine.

The news shook up the search engine and web marketing world and has caused many webmasters and search engine marketing professionals to wonder if they’ll need to change their ways to optimize their websites for Google’s new algorithm.

Google’s announcement stated that the new search engine is “the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

But does this mean that they’ll start to value certain optimization factors more than others now? Should everyone freak out and start figuring out how to get ready for Google’s new search engine (which is still in Beta phases and has yet to be implemented into their main search engine)?

Probably not, but here’s what we can tell you:

If you don’t have a way to add content to your website, and if you’re not adding content on a regular (daily/bi-daily) basis, you’re going to have a hard time catching up when Google Caffeine becomes the norm.

Searchenginewatch.com conducted a case study comparing search engine results between the old Google algorithm and the new Google Caffeine algorithm.

The conclusion? Google was, indeed, correct in their announcement that pages will be indexed faster. No more waiting a few weeks to break out of the Google sandbox, and no more hoping that visitors use the Google Blogsearch to find your blog posts. Trusted and high-authority websites with fresh and relative content might even begin appearing in search engine results the same day as the content is published if Google Caffeine accomplishes what Google hopes it will.

This new Google search feature gives them a leg-up on Bing and Yahoo!, and also allows Google to battle Facebook and Twitter in the real-time search competition. Before, Twitter (and, later, Facebook) could convince users that those looking for real-time search results should sue their sites vs traditional search engines because of SE’s long indexing times.

Attorneys and law firms with content management systems that allow attorneys, bloggers and writers employed by the law firm, and other website/blog contributors to log in and post content within the matter of minutes will definitely have the upper hand with Google caffeine and other real-time search engines emerging as preferred search engines.

Our recommendation? If you have a good writer, keep them and give them a raise. If you don’t? Find one and hold on to them, you’ll need them.

Content is king, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.

There is our recap of the Top 5 Web Marketing News Stories of the Summer. Here are some questions that we hope will be answered by 2010:

• Will Bing actually continue to grow, or fade away after the hype settles?
• Will Twitter users continue to maintain their profiles, or will spammers scare everyone away?
• Who will emerge as the next big thing in social media/social networking?
• How will Google decide what sites are displayed in real-time search engine results?

We welcome your predictions, feel free to post a comment with what you think the answers to any of these questions will be.

Twitter launched a new version of their web page today, and the new design is eerily similar to that of a search engine. They announced the new design on their blog this morning, and the reason that they gave for the redesign:

Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved.

We’ve envisioned Twitter as a major player in the search engine world for a while now, and it looks like this may be the first step.

Twitter has one thing that Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines don’t: Real-time search capabilities.

How long does it take traditional search engines to index a page of a website? Days, weeks, and sometimes months. Sure, you could use Google Blog Search, Google Trends, or Google News search for certain up-to-date information, but how about a Twitter search for what everyone thinks about the newest Harry Potter movie as opposed to going through 20 different review sites and blogs?

Just today I was looking for the score to a pre-season soccer game that was overseas, but no major news site had the score until an hour after it ended. How did I find the score before them? A Twitter search.

Ticketmaster codes for special concerts?

Low-carb Recipes?

WordPress plugins?

Tweeting is easier than blogging (logging in to your Twitter account and typing 140 words or less vs. logging into WordPress or blogger, typing content, adding pictures, links, and tags, spellchecking, etc…. ), and the fact that you can Tweet on most smart phones means that Twitter will continue to grow in contributors and content that a Twitter search can “crawl”.

Yes, Twitter is also good for promoting blog and website content if you have enough followers, but for those who don’t have the time or resources to manage a blog full-time, Twitter is a great alternative (hence why it’s called a “Microblogging” service).

When you’re Tweeting, be sure to include keywords that people may be searching for from time to time, similar to how you optimize your website and content for SEO purposes. Include generic keywords relative to your practice areas, as well as location-based keywords, and utilize the “hashtags” (#) for any keywords that are commonly used in the Twitterverse.

Twitter is at an all-time high in popularity, with every celebrity and news outlet signing up as each day passes. Whether or not it will stick around and continue to rise in popularity will remain to be seen, but seeing as creating a Twitter profile is free and it doesn’t take much time to manage, what do you have to lose?

Twitter currently serves as a social networking tool, a content marketing tool, and an rss reader to some extent. Twitter as a major search engine? It might be sooner than we think.

So what are some smarter decisions?

The second part of the advice is to focus on the lesser expensive methods that yield a high return and really focus on directing a target audience to explore your site and service. One way that is continuing to prove its effectiveness is using SEO.

During these times, the Internet is growing in popularity by consumers who want to save time and effort when searching for a service. Having an optimized site with the most effective keywords will drive quality targeted traffic to your site, get your message in front of the right people and help create visibility in the market. When placing an expensive ad on a high traffic site, you are not guaranteed who will see your ad, who will click and if people are truly interested in your service. Instead, use targeted keywords to optimize your site. When deciding keywords and effectively using them for optimization, a person who is searching and uses your keywords will see your service and you are then providing a solution to an existing need and therefore, your traffic is of higher quality and has a proven interest.

SEO can also be tracked using Google Analytics, which shows where visitors are coming from, which pages are most visited and the effectiveness of keywords. Using these analytics, you can decide which keywords are proving most effective and focus on using them to keep the quality traffic flowing. This can also help organize your marketing budget.

SEO is cost effective and can take the place of other expensive, lengthy marketing and advertising campaigns that will yield similar results in increased traffic—such as e-mail marketing blasts and paying for ad impressions. One challenge to keep in mind is that a site must be optimized and continually offering updated content to be effective.

You can work on SEO in-house, or hire an agency that will most likely provide more than just an SEO service at a reasonable cost. Because SEO is an art and science and constantly evolving, it might be most effective to hire a professional to assist and implement the services.

We can show you a number of Foster Web Marketing clients whose traffic and leads have dramatically increased over the past few months because of these standard practices: proper web development (adding content on a DAILY basis) and basic search engine optimization techniques.

But when it comes to the point where your site and every site competing with yours have been optimized online, when they all have thousands of pages of content and features such as blogs and library articles included on their site, how do search engines decide whose site has the more authority and should rank better?

That’s easy, the amount of inbound links it has. The blog post I made a few weeks ago about a FWM client trying to figure out why he or she was being outranked for a specific keyword search is a pretty good case study to prove that building links is VERY IMPORTANT.

So, back to basics. It’s not enough to just write content. You, as an attorney or webmaster, always have to keep that thought in the back of your head: is this a link opportunity?

Google ranks sites and pages with more inbound links to them based on the fact that, if this is useful and informative content, than more people will be linking to it and sharing it.

But does this always come into play as attorneys? You have to remember that the area where you practice is geographically limited (or it SHOULD be! I can’t stress the importance of marketing yourself to one niche market as opposed to trying to conquer the world and rank for the entire east coast with only one website) so the chances of sites and blogs linking to you are as small as the size of your target audience.

You could always take the “link baiting” approach and come up with a story that will bring in readers from around the country or world. But, even though we always stress the importance of increasing your exposure online and that everyone, no matter where or who they are, is a potential client because of referrals and social networking, this usually results in a high bounce rate and a very low ROI.

Sometimes you have to take a more pro-active approach to link building. Some of these were mentioned in our ways to build links as attorneys and should be used regularly, but when it really comes down to it: link building is like everything else, the more personal and grassroots ways you use, the better.

Here are 10 basic and usually overlooked linkbuilding techniques you can use:

1. Posting on Craigslist. Sometimes it’s good for leads, but it also counts as a link. Don’t stress over the fact that the link is “nofollow”, look at your Google Analytics traffic report and see how many visits Craigslist resulted in next time you post. TIP: sometimes the services section postings get flagged or get lost in spam postings, so be creative with it.
2. Register with your local Better Business Bureau and Chamber of Commerce if you’re not already. This almost always leads to a link or two.
3. We’ve mentioned this before, but take a few minutes out of your day to answer questions on Yahoo! Answers , Fluther,  and any law-related message boards you can think of like Injuryboard. Dropping a link back to your site on these kinds of sites, as long as you ADD VALUE TO THE CONVERSATION and answer the question can result in pretty good traffic.
4. Build relationships with local bloggers.
5. You SHOULD, by now, realize that you need to be active on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But do you have a link to your website or blog on there? No? (smack forehead)
6. You have a blog… is it linking to your website? Is your website linking to your blog? TIP: utilize site-wide footers as well.
7. Sometimes you have to look in the mirror. Is your own site or blog linking internally to other pages? Are you taking the time, when writing a blog post, to link to other blog posts and web pages? These count as links as well. ALWAYS think about how you can link internally, it’s very important.
8. Google local searches. Know those maps and local business results you see for certain searches in your area? You should be concerned about not being ranked number one. Obtaining a number one rank for these isn’t something I’m going to share quite yet.
9. Look for linking opportunities from local government and law-related websites.
10. Create a Squidoo page.
11. Okay I lied, there are 11. ALWAYS DEEP-LINK AND USE DIFFERENT ANCHOR TEXT. You don’t want everything going back to the homepages and you don’t want search engine spiders seeing the same anchor text when crawling for inbound links. Switch it up, you’re constantly adding content to your site for a reason, use those other pages!