Bing: Microsoft Reveals its New Search Engine [Video]

Following speculation last week that Microsoft was planning to rebrand its search engine, the company has announced that it will be launching Bing on June 3rd.

In addition to a new name, Microsoft is re-positioning itself in the search market as not necessarily a better place to go for navigational queries (i.e. – where’s the official site for my city government?), but rather to help people make what the company is calling “complex decisions.”

Technorati Tags: microsoft, bing, search engine, seo

Next week, at the D: All Things Digital technology conference in Carlsbad, California, Microsoft is expected to unveil its updated search engine, codenamed Kumo.

Now, we know that when it comes to search, the last couple of years were all about Google gaining market share, and everyone else losing it or, at best, stalling. The only thing that seems like a real challenge to Google (Google reviews) is real-time search, and none of the major competitors, including Microsoft, have done much about it.

So what do we know about Kumo? The Wall Street Journal claims it’s designed to better organize search results. This can be seen from the screenshot, which shows search results on the right, and categories such as images, songs, lyrics, albums, videos on the left. Microsoft has confirmed it’s been testing Kumo internally for a while, without giving much details about it.

Read more: Kumo: Can Microsoft Catch Up With Google?

Technorati Tags: microsoft, kumo, search engine, search engine optimization, seo

This is an excellent article about how some web sites make it very difficult for customers to give them money.

# 75: The percentage of those clicking the “forgot password” button that don’t come back to finish the purchase.
# 23: The percentage of those abandoning the checkout process at the first sign of a registration prompt.
# 45: The percentage of registered customers who have bad memories and register multiple times, some as many as 10 times, meaning sites requiring registration might have inflated data.
# 300 million: The number of lost dollars one major retailer found after taking away the registration button.

Read More: Stop Making It Hard For People To Give You Their Money | WebProNews

I have often had these thoughts as I surf through the web. Other things that make it hard for potential customers to give you their money are:

1. Intros - Any sort of entrance page adds an extra step to the purchasing process. Adding an extra step, anywhere, is a very bad idea.

2. Making it hard to understand what products or services your site offers - because we offer a free analysis of anyone's web site, we often get sent to sites where it is not immediately clear what it is that these people are selling. I've said it before and I'll say it a million times more, the web is about instant gratification. You have mere seconds to make an impression on your web site visitors. If, in those seconds, they cannot discern what it is you do, why would they stick around? You need to make sure you speak in everyday language as well as industry-specific jargon. Remember, not everyone is going to refer to your product or service the same way you do.

3. Making it hard to find out what geographical area you serve - If you are an online retailer that ships worldwide, you need to state that clearly and boldly on your front page. If you are a lawyer in Boise, you need to make it clear on your front page that you service Boise. So many web sites out there have no geographical information. I find that I often need to visit the contact pages and search for the area code listed in their phone numbers to find out where they are located.

4. If you absolutely must have some sort of registration process to make a purchase, think very hard about whether or not you need your customer's mailing address, phone number, or if password hint questions are really effective. If you're a bed and breakfast and you have a booking form, do you need to know where the people booking live? I'm sure once they're staying there, there will be ample opportunity to find out, but is it necessary to ask them in a booking form? If your web site offers a password retrieval process, why bother with a password hint question? Not only are they useless, but they make your password less secure as many people in our lives know the street we grew up on and what our mother's maiden name is. Making your registration forms longer is going to scare people away. Your forms need to be bare bones - only ask for information you need. The quicker your customer can get the process of giving you money over with, the more likely they will place the order.

These are just a few things that bother me, off the top of my head. I am a busy person, running a home business and taking care of my new baby boy. I don't have time to fill out my address on software sites when I purchase a piece of downloadable software. I don't need to figure out a hint question for a lost password when I purchase a $5 book. I usually hit the back button as soon as there is an intro page or music that loads with a page and I won't stick around very long so if you don't tell me what you do or where you are within the first second or two, you've lost a customer in me.

Technorati Tags: howto, seo, search engine optimization, user friendliness, make more money, profits

Last week we skipped a newsletter because it was my first Mother's day as a real Mommy. We had a lot of fun, but now back to business. This week we are going to look at tools to help you make the most of Twitter and get traffic to your site from it.

1. Sign up for your account at Twitter.com - Edit your profile and add your URL to the web site field. Brand you profile by using a custom background image with your company logo on it.

2. Sign up for an account at Tweetlater.com - This site will allow you to set up an auto-responder to anyone who follows your Twitter account. In your auto-responder, you should politely ask your followers to visit your web site.

3. Start following people. Most users on Twitter will follow you back, which means almost all the people you follow, will follow you back and get your auto-responder sending them to your site. Use the find people function on Twitter to look for users to follow that are somewhat related to what you do. Follow as many as Twitter will allow. Twitter tends to stop you following when your ratio of following to followers is one-sided. They generally do this once you reach 2001 following. When you have about 1900 followers, Twitter will allow you to follow more people.

4. After you have reached the point where Twitter stops you from following more people, wait about a week and then use Twitter Karma. Enter in your username and password and Twitter Karma will show you your account statistics. You can choose to see the people who follow you but whom you do not follow, or the people you follow but whom do not follow you back and all of your followers/following together. If you choose to look at the people who you are following but are not following you back, you can select all and Bulk Unfollow. Chances are, because you've waited a week, they probably won't follow you back, so if you unfollow them, it will free up some more space for you follow more people yourself. Of course, there are going to be some people who you really want to follow but whom may not ever follow you. Just make sure you unselect them before bulk unfollowing.

5. Set up Twiggit. Twiggit will automatically tweet anything you Digg with your Digg account.

6. Start Tweeting. Nobody likes following an idle account. You can use your account to create more traffic to your site as well by Tweeting about every new blog post and anything else new on your site, sales, new personnel, etc. You also want to actively involve yourself with your followers as well. Try ansering any interesting questions you see being tweeted that you know the answer to, and always answer your direct messages. The more you interact with your followers, the longer they will want to follow you. And the more interesting, valuable stuff you Tweet, the more your followers will recommend you to others. Be a valuable asset to the Twitter community and your followers and the whole thing will just snowball.

If you need any help or have any questions with utilizing any of these tools, or Twitter itself, please do not hesitate to email us. We do manage Twitter accounts for a small fee.

We hope you enjoyed this week's Sunday Sites and hope you'll read again next week!

Technorati Tags: twitter, tweetlater, twiggit, twitter karma, tweet, digg, seo, search engine optimization

t’s a fact of life in business that when there’s an economic downturn, the first thing that’s usually cut is available marketing spend, typically an unfortunate byproduct of accounting’s inability to justify costs without hard data in place. While the argument has been made numerous times over the years in books and articles that cutting budgets in a down economy is one of the worst moves you can make, I won’t rehash this old (but still valid) argument. Instead, I’d specifically like to address why cutting your search engine marketing budget in a down economy is a bad move, and why it’s equally important to place your trust in your search engine marketing company during a down turn.

Why It’s Vitally Important to Trust Your Search Engine Marketing Company in a Down Economy

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, economy, budget, marketing

Last week we looked at top blog directories and sites to submit your blog to. This week we're going to look at tools that give you information about your web site that you probably never even thought about.

1. Alexa- Alexa tells you so much about your site such as your traffc rank, pageviews, percentage of global internet traffic on your site, backlinks, bounce rate, demographics and so much more.

2. Yahoo! Site Explorer - This tool shows you the backlinks Yahoo! has recorded for your site, as well as the pages on your site. It enables you to submit further pages and site feeds.

3. Technorati - Technorati Blogger Central shows you your own blog's popularity or "authority" as well as the top blogs in the world.

4. dnScoop - This tool shows you a domain name's worth buy taking into consideration things like backlinks, PR, etc.

5. Site Report Card - this page tells you all sorts of things, like broken links, backlinks, load time, keywords and a lot more.

6. Compete - This is a comparison tool as the name suggests, that allows you to compare your web site data with other web sites. It gives you a neat graph with which to view the results.

7. Popuri.us - This site pulls info from some of the sites above, plus others to give you a good window into your web site's presence on the web.

If you need any help or have any questions with utilizing any of these tools, please do not hesitate to email us.

We hope you enjoyed this week's Sunday Sites and hope you'll read again next week!

Technorati Tags: web site, popularity, seo, search engine optimization, seo tools