The natural results are the ones which have ranked highly because their sites are seen by the search engine to be the most useful, while the sponsored results have paid to be at the top. The studies of user habits would suggest that people realise that sponsored results have paid for their position but do the results transfer to real life?

Do you really choose the natural results which a search engine presents or do you go with the first site you see? Or maybe you try to choose the natural results but sometimes you just see a listing in the sponsored links which seems more relevant to what you were looking for, because let’s face it, there are times when Google can let you down too.

BING is designed to take over from Microsoft’s current search engine Live Search, and its already being tipped as a dangerous contender for the mighty Google. Early reviews of the site have been extremely encouraging. Bing differs from other search engines in as much it aims to give you less choice as opposed to more. It offers a more targeted results list, with the option of displaying further results. Instead of bombarding the user with a blanket response to questions BING provides a narrower but more select response to questions.

Another key feature of Bing is that instead of directing the user to an external site to view, for example, videos, listen to music, read articles, or shop online, it allows you to do all this without ever leaving Bing. It also offers an exclusive video search service as part of the package. In theory this should lead to greater ease of use and accessibility.

Whether or not Bing can rival the other major search engines such as Google and Yahoo remains to be seen. What is certain however is that the search engine as we know it is evolving, and that can only be good news for internet users the world over.

In fact Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an entire, very important and ever growing industry which your business, and your new website, needs to become a part of. The premise of SEO is to increase the traffic to your website by using the most appropriate keywords to describe the content of your site and your business, and match it to what a potential customer has typed into their search engine of choice.

Search Engine Optimisation will require you to add META tags to describe the content of your site, and make submissions to all of the major search engines, asking them to include your site in their search results. But with the end goal being to rank high on the first page of search results in your keyword categories, you site and your keyword focus simply needs to rank you above the competitors in your industry with sites structured better than your own.

Therefore the first step in SEO is not submit your site to search engines, but instead you should focus on creating a relevant and informative website and then submit this complete and polished site to the search engines which will then snap it up. In business, and in life, you have probably learned that it is always best to learn from others’ mistakes where you can.

Well in learning from your competitors’ mistakes, you can also identify what they are doing which is working well for them too. Look at the content, the design and the keywords which are being targeted on the sites which are ranking at the top of the searches you want to dominate. This can also form part of your market research as you will find the marketing tools and techniques which have worked to target the same type of customers you are trying to appeal to too.

Well yes, by their nature you can trust them. The very fact that they exist and that you have found them means you can trust them because if they were crap, you wouldn’t have found them because the search engine wouldn’t have directed you to them because the search engine is there to protect you from crap.

During the late 1990s search engines were severely manipulated by crap which people thought would help their sites rank better. Well the search engines have learnt their lessons from those ‘dark ages’ and makes a point to ignore crap, ensuring that the sites, the SEO articles and the information which ranks where you can find it, is useful, correct and pertinent to your search.