Looking across all our different clients' web analytics each month, we think Microsoft has set itself a hard job. Nevertheless, we hope 'Bing' will Google some competition :  despite their disparate industry sectors Google invariably brings our clients 80% - 90% of their search engine traffic.

According to industry reports the new search engine will take over from MSN/Live in June.  It promises a radically new interface with search results from a wide range of sources - and varies them according to the subject of the search.  We can imagine that a search for a restaurants will show more reviews, whilst for a holiday resort will show more images.  
This "universal search" is something that Google has been slowly developing for the past year or so - searchers are increasingly seeing video, images and webpages all mixed up (where previously you had to choose between webpages, images, video, maps etc).  Google has been so widely successful because of its invariable ability to return relevant search results - it will be interesting to see if "Bing" can match it.

All these changes make search engine optimisation (SEO) as challenging as it has always been.  Firstly because it makes the valued spot on the "first page of Google" even more competitive and secondly the content of the website (which has always been 'king') now becomes the 'emperor' as someone recently explained it.

As part of our website planning for our clients we draw up a 12 month marketing plan.  A key element of this is to frequently add rich, original and relevant content.  This includes text, video, images and testimonials / reviews.  This is what internet searchers are looking for, separates our clients' websites from their competitors and will become an increasing part of any successful SEO campaign.