All posts in microsoft

So you’re advertising on Google, but you want to branch out to Bing? There’s a new audience for you there, with less competition and less cost!

Microsoft adCenter is in many ways similar to AdWords. Your ads appear on searches that match your positive keywords but not your negative keywords. Your account contains campaigns, which contain ad groups, which contain keywords and ads. Your ad’s position and the price of a click are determined by your bid and previous performance. But there are many differences – here are some of the most important ones for when you’re starting out.

Markets and Locations

In adCenter, there are separate options for Market and for Location. The Market determines what language you can use and which websites your ads appear on. Location determines where the users are.

So if your Market is ‘UK – English’, and you target all Locations, then your ads will appear on English websites like uk.msn.com to visitors from anywhere in the world. If the Market is ‘UK – English’ and the Location is United Kingdom, the ads will be on the same websites, but only visitors from the UK will see your ads.

The current Markets are USA (in English or Spanish), Canada (French or English), UK (English), France (English) and Singapore (English). You choose a campaign’s Market when you create the campaign, and it can’t be changed afterwards. Location can be set at campaign or ad group level, and can be changed at any time.

We don’t always cover search industry news as we’d rather not just repeat what the other blogs are saying. Today’s a bit different though, the story of Microsoft and Yahoo!’s new 10-year search agreement deal is massive news!


Image credit: gnal

In case you’ve managed to miss it, here’s the latest news from around the blogosphere:

Microsoft has proudly announced the addition of something that looks very similar to Google sitelinks to their search results.

In fact if I was Google I would be digging out the patent they have that shows how these results are generated and thinking hard about whether to challenge how Microsoft is doing this.

sitelinks

One commenter put it quite well after the announcement:

Wasn’t the process you went through more like this?

1/ We looked at what Google were doing

2/ We copied it

This question may seem like a no-brainer, but actually, the answer is not necessarily yes in all circumstances. If any of the following examples apply to you’re website, you may not be in need of an search engine optimization campaign right now:

  • You have a website that you really don’t want strangers to find, such as a training tool for your employees, a classroom tool for your students or some sort of communications platform/blog which is intended for employee’s or family members only.
  • You already have a website which is ranking well, and you’re fully satisfied with your sales, website conversions, and incoming inquiries, and you don’t want to rock the boat.
  • You’re in a big hurry—say, you’ll go out of business without a major upswing in revenue in the next couple of months. This is not to say that SEO can’t help you, but good SEO takes time. You may need to focus your energies elsewhere right now.
  • Your site is going to be completely rebuilt or redesigned in the next couple of months. If that’s the case, be sure to incorporate SEO tactics from the outset. Anybody can have a go at SEO, and i would always encourage you to do some research and try the SEO for your site yourself, but if you really don’t have the time, and want your new website in expert hands, consider hiring an SEO agency to work with your web designer from the outset.

If you now perform a link: command search on Windows Live/MSN/Live.com, or whatever it’s called, you now get a list of regular search results instead.

I’ve just noticed a search for link:http://www.live.com appearing in the website stats as my original post about the Live.com link command being broken is currently ranking at number one for this, maybe it’s worth optimising for link searches too now to get some extra traffic!

Live.com link: command search broken?


By On March 25, 2007 In microsoft, seo With Comments Off

The live.com backlink search seems to be broken at the moment, any link: command query, for example link:http://www.msn.com is bringing up the following error:

“XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2F
www.msn.com&mkt=en-gb&FORM=LVCP&go.x=23&go.y=12&go=Search
Line Number 1, Column 1:”

Google, Yahoo and MSN yesterday officially agreed to all support the sitemap 0.90 protocol, for more information please read the search engines united story at the official Google blog.