Posted By: Nicole Johnson, Account Manager

Don’t Discount Bing When Planning Your 2011 SEO Marketing Strategy

The buzz about Bing has saturated the online marketing industry over the past year, yet some marketers still are not paying much attention, and fewer still are taking action. We all know what Bing is, but not everyone knows how to change a marketing strategy to accommodate the growing search engine.

Despite marketing companies’ reluctance to evolve, a new partnership between Bing and seasoned search engine vet Yahoo (a.k.a YaBing), has positioned Bing for major growth in the coming year. We are already seeing changes, and Search Engine Land recently cited a study from comScore suggesting that Bing now controls 28 percent of all search traffic on the Web.

Bing can no longer be ignored. It simply isn’t enough to focus marketing efforts on search giants like Google anymore. According to a source with Search Engine Land, the search ad network Chikita has found that marketers who choose not to optimize their sites for Bing are losing out on as much as 9% of their potential search traffic—which could also translate into lost conversions!

ReviewerOfSites.com claims that Bing searchers are more likely than Google searchers to click on an ad or listing. They also claim that online marketers who fail to optimize their site for Bing are missing out on 13% of their potential click volume.

So what to do? There are a number of Bing optimization tips out there, but here are a few we thought were most helpful, courtesy of ReviewerOfSites.com:

• Check your robot.txt file to ensure that your site is allowing the Bing spider to crawl its content.
• The type of content on your site is also important according to the Daily Tech Post. Bing favors content that is between 300 and 500 words per page and gives more importance to the page title than to the page content.
• Check to make sure all site pages are actually being indexed by the search engine. Type ‘site:www.yoursite.com’ in the Bing search box, and hit Enter.
• Include Bing webmaster tools verification code on your site.
• Run your paid campaigns in Microsoft AdCenter to target Bing searchers.

Posted by: Nicole Johnson, Senior Account Coordinator

If you were asked to define what the term “nonprofit” means to you, you might think of some sort of cause or organization that is working to make the world a better place in one way or another. But what you might not think about is how these causes or organizations actually conduct business.

In his book Uncharitable, Dan Pallotta analyzes how the nonprofit industry works and raises a controversial point about the position of nonprofits within a society driven by capitalism. According to Pallotta, our society refuses to allow nonprofits to adhere to the competitive rules of business that for-profit organizations follow every day.

Pallota outlines what he believes to be five key restraints on nonprofits:

Posted by: Nicole Johnson, Marketing Coordinator

Most marketers are excited about leveraging social networks to connect with their audiences. Sometimes, in their enthusiasm, they forget to take a step back and ask themselves how they plan to measure the success of their new social media programs.

Your company may have 300 people who “like” your Facebook page or 500 Twitter followers, but what does that mean for your bottom line? Are those fans contributing something measurable to the success of your overall marketing objectives?  These are the questions that many marketers aren’t sure how to answer.

A recent study, the 2010 Omniture Online Analytics Benchmark Survey, evaluates ROI on social, mobile and video media, and shows that 55% of respondents cannot effectively measure marketing ROI from their online tactics. The study also found that 86% of respondents consider the ability to track conversions from their online marketing activities as important, but 25% of them are unable to do so.

When you develop a social media strategy, start by setting clearly-defined goals. Once you’ve decided what objectives you’d like your campaign to meet, you can start thinking about how to measure them. Having an effective strategy for evaluating social media marketing programs can give you a competitive edge, so be sure to measure, measure and measure some more.

For information on free tools that can help you measure your social media program, visit Mashable Social Media.

Posted by: Nicole Johnson, Marketing Coordinator

Ever heard of “location-sensitive mobile advertising?” It sounds fancy, but it’s just a term that encompasses a combination of two tactics that are becoming bigger and better every day – local search marketing and mobile advertising. The major players in the game (Yelp, Google and Facebook) are paving the way for new growth in this arena.

Yelp offers a smartphone application called “Nearby” for its mobile users. The app allows easy mobile access to any coupon or offer posted on a local business’s Yelp profile page. Users can also use the app to find businesses located in close proximity to their immediate locations.

Similarly, Google released “Near Me Now,” a feature that is automatically available to any user who accesses Google using an iPhone or Android phone user a 2.0.1 version or newer browser. The feature gives users easy navigation to restaurants, banks and other businesses in their areas. The mobile search engine results page serves up 10 local businesses and features three Google Adwords paid listings. Keep in mind that the Near Me Now link only appears if users give Google permission to access their locations with GPS tracking.

Posted by: Nikki Johnson, Marketing Coordinator

Yahoo and Microsoft recently received regulatory approval for a search and advertising partnership that may simplify the world of search engine optimization (SEO). Per the agreement, Yahoo will soon begin using Microsoft Bing’s search algorithm to return its search results. Some SEO gurus are speculating that this new union will streamline optimization so that marketers will only have to optimize for two search engines (Google and Bing) instead of three (Google, Yahoo and Bing).

That being said, Bing returns far fewer search results than Google, and it is more difficult to be deemed “relevant” within Bing listings than within Google listings. This could have a few implications for SEO marketers as they try to optimize for Bing’s slimmed-down version of the search results page.

Although Bing will be the driver behind the wheel of Yahoo searches, Yahoo claims it will still have a strong influence on the Yahoo.com user experience. Last year it revamped its homepage offering users a number of applications for page customization. The company has also incorporated a number of innovative features within its search interface. Yahoo is finding new ways to get in front of its users and is not expected to fade behind the spotlight that’s currently focused on Bing.

Learn more at WebProNews.