PushON Ltd » Windows Live Search

How to get listed in Bing Local

Sam Rutley — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:14:03 +0000

Instructions for how to get listed in Bing Local Listings and therefore organic Local Listings seem to be rather hard to find (if anyone knows of an easier/more direct way please do let us know!). It appears that Bing Local is powered by MultiMap (which is owned by Microsoft after a £25m takeover in December 2007) which in turn pulls its Local Listings from Market Location and you can submit a request to be added to these listings using this form.

Here is an example of organic local listings for a Bing search in Manchester:

As you can see there is little competition for Bing Local Listings at the moment and the results are not great, one nightclub, a cafe and a strip club…

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Pay Per Click Marketing Management Exams

Katrina Gallagher — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:46:36 +0000

Fantastic day for the PushON team… OK, so it was a long and boring day, but the great news is that Mark qualified as a Google AdWords Professional, and I’ve qualified as a Microsoft adExcellence Member.

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Live Search gets desperate

Sam Rutley — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:27:47 +0000

The ideas-men at Microsoft have had another brainwave to help their fledgling search engine, Live Search gain some search traffic, bribe users. Live search has not enjoyed much success and has been failing to take any of Google or Yahoos traffic. The new scheme to coax users involves giving ‘SearchPerk’ loyalty points (up to 25 a day) for performing searches. These points can then be traded in for prizes. The plan is flawed- people wanting anything decent will have to wait a long time. For example an Xbox 360 controller will cost you 5500 points- you get 500 points for signing up to SearchPerks and then 25 points a day so it will take you 200 days of searching 25 times on Live Search. You will also have to use Internet Explorer, Windows and live in the US.

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Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) Microsoft Tool

Katrina Gallagher — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:16:10 +0000

Microsoft have got some great tools in their adCenter Labs which can help target potential customers and improve Pay Per Click (PPC) Adverts.

However, it’s comforting to see that their Ad Text Writer demonstrates that not everything in this shiny new digital world can be automated.

Here are some of the suggested PPC adverts their tool suggested for one of our clients; ContractStore, which is an E-Commerce site dedicated to Legal Documents and Contract Templates.

How’s this for a compelling advert:

“Important Notice – This notice applies to all materials and information available on this website”. It just begs to be clicked on!

Clearly human intervention is needed when creating adverts.

When copywriting for PPC Adverts you should keep the following in mind:

Use your main keywords within your advert text – and preferably in the heading
Keep to the guidelines specified by your publisher for punctuation, character limit & grammar (guidelines are similar but not exactly the same for Google PPC, MSN/Live Search, Yahoo Search Marketing, Miva, etc)
Deep link to the specific page covering the topic your bidding on keywords for; it’s usually something other than the homepage
Be clear about what you are offering – vague adverts will generate limited or irrelevant traffic – which is a waste of your money
Use a good call to action – an example for this client might be “Download Contract Templates Now!”
Test multiple advert variations using different calls to actions, positioning, and test how adding product pricing affects your results
See what your competitors are doing, and work out how to stand out from the crowd

I like some of the Microsoft tools, but I would only use then for inspiration – a starting point that can be edited and developed… or just to laugh at them a little bit!

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Sitemap Auto-discovery

Guest — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:11:01 +0000

Whilst there has been a nice interface for Google via Google Webmaster Central and more recently Yahoo via their Yahoo site explorer portal to submit xml sitemaps the other search engines of worth, ASK.com and Microsoft Live search have not provided such interfaces.

Although both ASK and Live announced they had adopted the sitemap protocol last year neither search engine provided an interface for webmasters to be able to submit sitemaps. All very annoying. It seems though they may have been holding out for sitemap auto-discovery which all 4 search engines this week have announced they will support going forward.

How Does Sitemap Auto-Discovery Work?

Well it’s all nice and simple, simply add,

Sitemap:

to your robots.txt file.

For example:

Sitemap:

For anyone still interested in submitting sitemaps manually I have found a method today for submitting to ASK. Enter, http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml into your bowser address bar, where http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml is the path to your sitemap.

For more information checkout the Ask Blog and the Yahoo Search Blog

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