On December 15, 2010 Bing announced major updates to Bing search, centered around richer Facebook integration and visually organized experience. For an SEO company, the feature of most interest is how your company’s Facebook presence influences SERP.

When the partnership with Facebook  was launched in October, your ranking in organic search results was not impacted. The only new feature was that  if you search for a keyword  and one of your friends on Facebook has liked one of the articles that shows up in the search results, you will see their picture next to that result.

Now Bing has tweaked its algorithm. When you search a keyword, Bing finds out  what your Facebook  friends are interested in, finds stories they have liked via little “Like” buttons all over the net, and then inserts that into the top results — even if that link would not have appeared in SERP. This feature is currently only available in the US.

SEO is changing rapidly, and one of the biggest forces driving those changes is the increasing importance of  social media. Search engines  change to deliver increased user satisfaction.

In Google’s case, this is measured by click-through rates, low bounce rates, and a variety of other metrics. Google’s sources for this data include: Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar, Custom Search Engines, and user behavior within the search engine itself.

With Bing and Facebook pushing new and innovative ideas, such as such as Bing Social Layer : Facebook “Liked By Your Friends” feature integrated into Bing organic search results  the pressure on Google is enormous.

In April 2010, Facook announced three social plugins: Like, Activity and Recommendations plug ins, Open Graph Protocol, and Graph API.

Facebook “Liked By Your Friends” feature is now integrated into Bing organic search results. To see the integration at work, you have to be logged into your facebook account.  When you search in Bing, depending on the search terms, you could see a new Liked By Your Friends section within your search results. In this, you will see links which have been “Liked” by your connections or friends on Facebook.

One of the key SEO factors to rank high in SERP is content.  The page should have compelling, high quality content  that not only attracts interest, but motivates visitors to link to the page and share the link through social media plug-ins like digg, facebook, Delicious.

One of the ways to create great content for search engines is optimized ‘Keyword Targeting’, which  helps a search engine understand what a page is about.

Keyword Targeting’ is not about more usage of a keyword term/phrase or keyword density.   The Number of Keyword Repetitions on short pages is 2 to 3 and on longer ones, it is 4 to 6.  Do not use more or stuff content with keywords than makes sense in the context of the copy.

Watch Matt Cutts on balancing great content with Link popularity

New Integrated Google Search : Local  + Organic Results

Google has started rolling out its new SERP which has Google place search  integrated with organic results. It has started with Google Chrome browser, and has now rolled out to other browsers including Firefox and in several countries.

Up to now, if you did a search involving location, either with our without including location, such as ‘book stores new york’, you would be shown results like the following, with Google map and local business results at the top, Adwords Ad listings to the right and organic/universal results below:

Now, when perform the same search in Google, you will see a floating map at the top of the Adwords column with markers for Google Local Listings, you will not see any local business listings, and pages  from Google Places integrated into the organic results.