Web Marketing Strategy Update

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has its work cut out for it, considering Google’s total domination of the market. Yet Bing is increasing in popularity, albeit slowly and a redesign this year could attract even more users. If, like most people, you’ve still not tried Bing out recently, come with me as I take a look at the new Bing.

Sleeker Design

While the Bing homepage stays the same, featuring a different striking photograph each day, there are some big changes when you search for an item. The upcoming Bing design will have three columns of results, with subcategories located for search items on the very first page of results. The idea is to have more relevant results, tailored to help you more easily find what you need.
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SEO specialists know that competitive analysis is one of the basic steps in SEO research. But while these days webmasters may be comfortable with words like PageRank, backlinks, Alexa Rank and so on, many of them are still making a fundamental mistake that almost ensures they don’t get the results they expected.

The problem is that most webmasters underestimate the importance of competition analysis, or simply find it too boring and time consuming. They have heard that all you need is thousands of backlinks, thousands of pages in Google index. Yes… some even do believe that some enterprising guy they found in a “SEO forum” can skyrocket their traffic in just one day!
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For an ultimate crusader against sponsored links, Google neglected its own piece of gospel this time.

Having programmed its algorithm against paid links and “thin” content for years now, a simple search query of posts sponsored by Google unfolds a whole set of results that belie Google’s assertion that it has refined its search program to flag down paid links.

In a sponsored post campaign for Google Chrome, it has surfaced that the search engine giant roped in a third party marketer (Unruly) to get bloggers to write content about its browser and its benefit to small businesses, based on their own personal discretional views that is. Not that there was anything wrong in promoting the product, but what pickled the idea was that these posts seemed to carry links to the Google Chrome download page, including a promotional video that redirected to the download page. Also, the posts were visibly scripted and low on quality information. There was inclusion of straight links to the Google Chrome page which ideally should have been blocked as per Google’s Webmaster Tools mandate for speculative paid links.
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Google has announced that it is collecting and storing data collected from searches users carry out on any search engine, and using it to better target ads to them on AdSense enabled sites they visit over the next few hours.

Google was already using the referral URL (the link a user followed to arrive at a site) as a factor in determining which ads to display on an AdSense enabled page.

Whenever a user arrives at a website after clicking a link in the search results of a search engine, the keyword terms they used in the search query are always appended to the referral URL (you can see this in your server logs).

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