Bing

Bing Search Engine for Attorneys

Bing, Lawyer Marketing Tips, Legal SEO Marketing /

Bing Search For Lawyers Bing is never going to beat Google and it’s never going to be as popular, yet it’s still important because it does get a lot of searches and you never know where your next potential client is going to search for you. Also Bing has certain webmaster tools including a solid keyword research tool that can provide great value. So it makes sense that you setup a to make sure your site is submitted to Bing.  I personally like Bing better then Google and have been using it more and more. BING HISTORY Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is a web search engine from Microsoft. Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego for release on June 1. Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions while queries are entered and a list of related searches (called “Explore pane”) based on semantic technology from Powerset which Microsoft purchased in 2008. On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners are expected to have made the transition by early 2012. Market Share Before the launch of Bing, the marketshare of Microsoft web search pages (MSN and Live search) had been small but steady. By January 2011, Experian Hitwise show that Bing’s market share had increased to 12.8% at the expense of Yahoo and Google. Bing powered searches also continued to have a higher “success rate” compared to Google, with more users clicking on the resulting links. In the same period, comScore’s “2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review” report showed that “Bing was the big gainer in year-over-year search activity, picking up 29% more searches in 2010 than it did in 2009.” The Wall Street Journal notes the 1% jump in share “appeared to come at the expense of rival Google Inc”.  In February 2011, Bing beat Yahoo! for the first time with 4.37% search share while Yahoo! received 3.93% SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO BING Submitting a URL from your website can be an important first step to being indexed.  There are two ways to accomplish this with Bing: Submission through the Submit your Site to Bing web form: this method is designed to allows web publishers to quickly alert Bing that there new site exist. Bing will crawl the URL you submitted and — provided it meets certain criteria — your page will get indexed over time. The Submit URLs feature in the Configure My Site section in Bing Webmaster Tools: this feature is much faster and allows you to submit 10 URLs per day and a maximum of 50 URLs per month for immediate crawl and indexation. To submit URLs using the Submit URL feature, simply add 1 URL per line and click Submit. The URLs are immediately evaluated for search indexation and when quality criteria are met we will begin to surfacing to searchers. Very useful in helping get important content indexed quickly, but there is a limit of 10 submissions per day, up to 50 (total) per month. Note: the Submit URLs feature in Webmaster Tools is currently restricted to root domains only. ********************* You should not only submit your site but also make sure to have a XML sitemap created and submit that to Bing as well.  Then within the Bing webmaster tools, there are a lot of tools to see how your site is performing within Bing.

Bing Search Engine for Attorneys Read More »

Bing Pay Per Click Marketing for Lawyers

Bing, General Search Engine News, Pay Per Click Marketing /

Pay per click (PPC) marketing is pretty key in todays competitive Internet marketing market.  Getting people to your website is done in a variety of ways.  Obviously you would prefer if you could just depend on your organic traffic but usually you will need to do many forms of online advertising, including Pay per click marketing. Many lawyers seem turned off by the concept but its a good way to get people to visit your site that potentially may turn into new clients.   Google Adwords is the main PPC player but Bing / MSN Ad Center is another good option.  In many cases you might find the keywords are much cheaper then at Google, and its another avenue of traffic to your site. WHAT IS PAY PER CLICK MARKETING? Pay per click (PPC) (also called Cost per click) is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system. PPC “display” advertisements are shown on web sites or search engine results with related content that have agreed to show ads. This approach differs from the “pay per impression” methods used in television and newspaper advertising. BING PAY PER CLICK MARKETING Microsoft was the last of the “Big Three” search engines (Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!) to develop its own system for delivering pay per click (PPC) ads. Until the beginning of 2006, all of the ads displayed on the Bing (formerly MSN Search) search engine were supplied by Overture (and later Yahoo!). MSN collected a portion of the ad revenue in return for displaying Yahoo!’s ads on its search engine. As search marketing grew, Microsoft began developing its own system, Microsoft adCenter, for selling PPC advertisements directly to advertisers. As the system was phased in, MSN search showed Yahoo! and Microsoft adCenter advertising in its search results. Microsoft effort to create AdCenter was led by Tarek Najm, then general manager in MSN division of Microsoft. In June 2006, the contract between Yahoo! and Microsoft had expired and Microsoft was displaying only ads from adCenter until 2010. In January 2010 Microsoft announced a take over of Yahoo! and the combination of Bing, formerly MSN Search, to form the Microsoft Search Alliance. A complete transition of all Yahoo! sponsored ad clients to Microsoft adCenter occurred in October 2010. BING PPC FOR ATTORNEYS If your law practice is considering doing a PPC campaign, contact us for assistance. We will help you with all PPC including BING PPC.  We can help you find just the right keywords to focus on and increase your traffic with potential clients searching for your legal services.  You can set a budget and a cap on your per bid amount, as well as your daily or monthly amounts.  FREE PPC MARKETING PROPOSAL Visit our pay per click marketing for lawyers page and fill out the online contact form.

Bing Pay Per Click Marketing for Lawyers Read More »

Bing Webmaster Tools Fall Updates

Bing /

Duane Forrester announced on the Bing Search blog a major upgrade to Bing Webmaster Tools. He said this is their biggest update since the Honey Badger update from June. The key updates and changes include: Expanded Crawl Details: This includes showing inbound links for any URL including 300, 400 & 500 codes. Plus URLs listed in Robots.txt and Malware headings. Improving Email Alerts: This include malware alerts, crawl increase requests, and more. URL Normalization Suggestions: Bing will offer URL normalization tips but turn them off by default. Also they have increased the number of query string parameters from 25 items to 50 items per site. Deeper Data In Index Explorer: So with this, please expect Traffic Data appearing within the Index Explorer tool. DNS verification: You can now verify your website via DNS for domains in your account. adCenter Data Integration: Avg CPC column will now show up in the Traffic data. Bing Webmaster Tools Fall Updates

Bing Webmaster Tools Fall Updates Read More »

Keyword and Ad Strategy Tips for Yahoo! Search and Bing

Bing, Yahoo Search Marketing /

Here are some tips from the Yahoo blog about steps to take before the adcenter transition. 3 key steps to take before all traffic transitions to adCenter In just a few weeks, Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers will be using Microsoft Advertising adCenter to manage search marketing campaigns on both Yahoo! Search and Bing. To help ensure that you’re ready, it’s time to take a fresh look at your keyword and ad strategies. Here are three tips to help you prepare: 1) Expand your keyword list adCenter allows you to bid separately for singular/plural variations and common misspellings of your keywords, which gives you more control in fine-tuning your ROI. Because there is typically less advertiser competition on keyword variations, you’ll have an opportunity to get greater value on your ad spend by bidding on these terms. Try the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool—a keyword research and optimization tool offered as a Microsoft Office Excel add-in—to develop keyword lists and gain insight into current bids, as well as historical and forecasted search volume. For help on using this tool, check out these step-by-step video tutorials. 2) Set keyword match types While Yahoo! Search Marketing offers the Standard and Advanced match types, adCenter uses three match types: exact, phrase and broad. If you transition your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns to adCenter, your Advanced match keywords will be set to broad match, and your Standard match type keywords will be set to exact match. In adCenter, you can specify unique bids for each match type, which allows you to align your bids to individual performance. For example, you can bid more for exact match keywords that represent your core products and services, to help you reach highly qualified potential customers. Learn more about strategies for match type success. 3) Monitor your ads’ positions as you begin to use adCenter As more and more Yahoo! advertisers begin using adCenter, you may see an increase in the number of advertisers bidding on your keywords, which could affect your ads’ positions. If your ads’ positions have gone down due to increased competition, consider adjusting your bids and setting incremental bids as needed to help meet your objectives. Remember, you still need to manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing account until ad serving fully transitions to adCenter in late October. You’ll receive an email notification once this final stage of the transition is complete; then you’ll be able to use your adCenter account exclusively to reach customers on Yahoo! Search and Bing. Source

Keyword and Ad Strategy Tips for Yahoo! Search and Bing Read More »

Getting Your Legal Site Ready for the Bing/Yahoo Merger

Bing, Yahoo Search Engine /

Yahoo announced that the organic search results on Yahoo will be powered by Bing beginning in August/September. Yahoo is already testing Bing results on some result pages and its only a matter of time before the current Yahoo organic results are replaced by the Bing results. Is the Yahoo-Bing change relevant to your legal website? YES because the bottom line is that both Yahoo and Bing produce a good amount of traffic and according to the latest comScore data, Yahoo and Microsoft sites had a combined search market share of 31.6% in June 2010. Yahoo sites had 3.2 billion search queries and Microsoft sites had 2.2 billion search queries in June 2010. That’s a total of 5.4 billion search queries in one month. So if you can get your site listed highly in the Bing organic listings, then that will carry over to Yahoo and it should produce a good amount of traffic to your site. HOW TO OPTIMIZE FOR BING Optimizing your web site for Bing.com is not that much different from optimizing your web pages for Google. Just like Google, Bing requires optimized web pages, good content and high quality inbound links from other sites if you want to see your website in the top 1o results for keywords related to your legal practice. The difference will be the weight that Bing puts in the different ranking factors. Things that work well with Google might not have the same effect on Bing and vice-versa.  In some cases you might be ranked well at both Google and Bing but not for all keywords.  So its going to take some expermenting to see what works the best and here are some quick tips. Optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your site for Bing. If possible, optimize each page of your website for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination. The more targeted the optimization, the more likely it is that the web page will be listed in the top results. Use the webmaster tools at Bing and register your site and also a sitemap. They also have a bunch of good Search engine optimization tips for your site. Its time to recognize that Google is not the only search engine out there and that BING is for real and it makes sense to try and get your site ranked well at Bing in addition to Google. If your law firm needs assistance with their SEO marketing campaigns or if you want us to help you get good Bing SEO organic rankings for your legal site, contact us today.

Getting Your Legal Site Ready for the Bing/Yahoo Merger Read More »