Week 4 BIng and More on Search

Time to Reflect
After taking our midterm last week, I decided to review today what we had done two weeks ago. Attempting to open the video from class resulted in a really long upload time.

Microsoft Bing
We had two guest speakers in class from Microsoft Adam Scott and Jeremy Lamothe. One thing I remember is that market share for Bing is growing - Bing now owns 30% of the market and is growing faster than Google or Yahoo.

Google Losing Their Edge?
With the recent happenings in China with Baidu it seems it has shaken Google's reputation. Recently discussions at the dinner table tend to drift in the direction of - is Google on a downward spiral?

I have noticed lately that some searches I do on Google lately come up with very poor results (ex. what causes a migraine). Using my own personal judgment gives me better results. I did a search recently on a health related topic where the number one hit was really inaccurate and nothing on the first page answered the search box question I was asking.

I do think that Google does spread itself a bit thin on the number of product lines they offer, considering that advertising is the revenue stream. It seems like they will need to start trimming some fat and eliminating extraneous products to focus on their core.

Advice for GOMC
Adam and Jeremy had some great advice for our teams for GOMC. Broad word matches bring in more traffic. The more keywords you ad on may make things too specific and may reach too small of an audience.

Other things we learned from Adam and Jeremy:

• you cannot bid on branded keywords or other trademark words.
• dayparting - advertise on Monday and Tuesday pull back on the weekend
• think about the time of day you advertise
  
• landing page demographics
• use 20-30 words at the most in a campaign of $200
• keyword matching options

More on Search
Topics discussed in the remainder of class were:

• website content above the fold
• organic vs. paid search
• searching "click here" will bring you to Adobe.com
• each webpage should have only one main idea

Best Practices - just a few of many

• use breadcrumbs
  
• three click rule
• spell check your website
• use short paragraphs
• active language,
• bullets
• custom 404 page
• linkbait & many links to your website
• meta tags
• robots.txt
• avoid Flash and pdf