What is Bing and What Should I Do About It?

Bing is the new search engine launched by Microsoft. It has a different look and feel than the dominant players such as Google or Yahoo, and the question that many search marketers have is does it work differently?

Julie Batten of ClickZ recently published a column in which she explores some of the functionality of Bing, and how one can optimize for it. Her comments are based on her own research, aggregated comment from other search professionals, and information from Microsoft itself.

Most of what she mentions falls squarely within established SEO practices; in fact, she herself writes "None of these suggestions are really new per se, but it does give us a sense of Bing's key areas of interest."

Probably the most important thing to mention is that content is king, as always. If you produce good copy that contains your key phrases, but has value to the user, you will get traffic and generate decent rankings.

You can read her column in its entirety at http://www.clickz.com/3634202

Tri-Cities Mayors List Top Tourist Attractions

The Chronicle has a story in which the mayors of St. Charles, Geneva, and Batavia list the top visitor draws in their respective towns.

http://www.kcchronicle.com/articles/2009/07/01/70692706/index.xml

Twitter and Local Business

In a recent article in Search Engine Land, Stephanie Hobbs touched on how local businesses can use the social media phenomenon Twitter to thei advantage.

"We can tap Twitter to engage with our potential customers, our advertisers. Timely tweets can inform our advertisers of product enhancements, special pricing, and other news."

Twitter is essentially another tool in building that important communication connection with your customers. Micro-blogging, similar to regular blogging but on a shorter scale, is meant to convey timely and succinct information to an established body of customers or prospective customers who are receptive to what you have to say. Twitter can't really generate NEW customers, but it can help engender repeat customers.

And for most local businesses, repeat customers are the life blood.

So use Twitter if your customer base is likely to use it. "Tweet" about the usual sorts of things: sales, special deals, important information, expert advice. Just do it on a judicious and brief (140 character) scale.

Pay-for-Call and Local Businesses

Jeff Braislin at Search Engine Land has a good article describing Pay-for-Call (PFC).

Pay-For-Call is a performance-based advertising medium that delivers qualified customer inquiries to advertisers via the telephone. PFC utilizes a variety of advertising distribution channels, such as search engines, Internet yellow pages, directories, vertical web sites or increasingly, mobile sources, to reach an advertiser's target audience with call-focused advertisements.

Especially for local business, and especially in the era of the iPhone, the telephone remains the primary tool to connect with a product or service provider to receive instant attention. Thus web-based outreach that channels customers to a phone call is surmised to be more likely to succeed than other options; however, PFC adds the extra value of trackability. Different phone numbers are attached to the different outreach methods so success can be identified and relative value established among the various media. The advertiser can make decisions on future budget choices based on hard data rather than indistinct or ephemeral feelings, which is good business.

Read the full article at:

http://searchengineland.com/pay-for-call-moving-clicks-to-live-sales-leads-19387

Not just search anymore.

The term "local search" generally means when people use the big search engines, like Google or Yahoo, to search for goods and services in a specific local geographic area. The scenario typically involves searching with terms like "pizza in Naperville" or "plumbers in Batavia" in the hopes of finding a result that matches what the searcher needs. In earlier times, this was typically a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) containing a list of links, many of which were useless.

In the world of Web 2.0  this is no longer true. Today a Google SERP might, in addition to web page URL links, return a map image of the community mentioned, along with icons representing relevant businesses (including their addresses and links to web sites) along with relevant paid search ads, links to YouTube videos, blog posts, and images.

Local businesses need to take charge of this mass of information and make sure they are coming up when appropriate search terms are being used, and not just name and address: video clips on YouTube; photos on flickr; recommendations and reviews on user comment sites; blog posts; news items; and of course representation on all local guides, directories, and civic organization sites.