SEO India, SEO Consultant

Google has released three new options for advertiser goals in the AdWords opportunities tab. These are:

1. Maintain or Decrease Cost – Identify ideas that might help you maintain or decrease your current spend.

3. Balance Cost and Traffic – Review a mix of ideas that are aimed at either increasing traffic or decreasing costs.

It has been a pretty busy month for the AdWords crew, it seems. The company recently added the ” Analyze Competition ” feature to the opportunities tab. They also launched a new click-to-call from Apps format, announced the Google Display Network, some changes to reporting, and the availability of sitelinks in all AdWords campaigns.

As we talked about in a recent WPN article, it’s time to start taking your Bing optimization seriously if you haven’t been already. For one, Bing will soon power Yahoo search. For two, Bing deliver’s Facebook’s web search results, while Facebook is giving people more reasons to search with them.

Bing is making changes of its own. It’s been a very big week for the search engine (or “decision engine”) if you will. It’s up to you to decide if any of these changes will have a direct effect on you, but some of them may attract more users in general, and if nothing else, that gives you even more of a reason to give Bing a fair amount of your focus.

Bing has made some design changes and added a bunch of new features. For starters, the quick tabs have moved from the left pane to the just below the search box.

“Secondly, you will see a new design aesthetic applied to Bing,” says Bing Corporate VP Brian MacDonald. “We have tried to bring you an experience grounded in clear readable typography that helps you find your way and organize information. With the new design the rich content in Bing really stands out from pages that are clean, light, open and fast. Result pages are not presented in a one-size-fits-all-layout – instead, Bing results pages are richly and visually organized, making the whole search experience feel dynamic and alive.”

Bing has launched some new entertainment features for music, games, TV, and movies. In addition to an entertainment hub at bing.com/entertainment, users can now find richer search results in these categories.

“76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go,” says Bing Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi. “So we see a great opportunity to help customers make important entertainment decisions — from deciding what movie to buy or see, which TV shows to watch online or on your TV, what music to listen to, how to find and safely play your favorite casual games – Bing is making a first step today to help make entertainment on the web easy and fun, so you spend less time searching for entertainment and more time doing the stuff you love.”

Bing is now putting lyrics to songs on the search results page, as well as full length streaming of over 5 million songs (in partnership with Microsoft’s Zune branch). Users can stream any of these songs once at their full length. After that, the song will allow for a 30-second preview. Of course users are given the option to buy songs from Zune, iTunes, or Amazon.

Bing is now providing info on over 35,000 games, including reviews, cheats, and walkthroughs. In addition to that, Bing is offering about 100 games that can be played right from Bing.

“Just Search, Click. Play . So you can now search for your favorite casual game, and with one click, be playing the game,” says Mehdi. “This is cool for a couple of reasons. First, it’s easy. Second, hosting the games inline means you can be sure they are actually games and not malware. Finally, the Microsoft Games team included some fun social features that allow you to actually invite friends from your social network to play with you right from the game.”

Bing is now offering thousands of episodes from over 1,500 shows (including some HD). They also provide guide information.

It’s been a while since we looked at one of the Google Q&A webmaster videos that Matt Cutts does, but I found this recent one particularly interesting, considering the emphasis that has been put on freshness in search engines lately.

The user question in this particular video says:

Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they’re updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs & other dynamic sites? Isn’t the content more important than the simple # of posts per day/week?

Matt’s response is that it is indeed much more important to have quality content, but frequency can be a nice thing to have for the users.

Essentially, if you post more frequently, people have more of a reason to keep coming back. That can be good for page views. However, as Matt says…

“Whenever you’re thinking about search engines, it’s much, much, much more important to think about the quality of your content. For example, on my blog, I don’t post every day. Sometimes I don’t post every week. But I try to make sure that each post has something useful about it…”

Matt implies that you’ll be better off in terms of search, if you wait until you can deliver some value to a post, rather than just crank stuff out that isn’t that much different than stuff that’s already out there. This strategy is likely to attract a lot more links, he says.

Google has launched Ad Sitelinks for all AdWords campaigns. The feature was made available late last year for advertisers’ top performing ads, but is now available via a one-line format for all campaigns.

Google says advertisers who have used the format in the past have experienced big gains, and have boosted clickthrough rates by over 30% (on average).

“When a user’s query matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks-enabled seo campaign, Google will automatically determine if your ad qualifies to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format based on the quality of that ad,” says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. “Ads that currently qualify for the two-line format will not be affected by the addition of the new one-line format.”

“You should keep in mind that Ad Sitelinks is a campaign-level extension, so the links you create should be relevant to any ad in that campaign,” Friedman adds.

Advertisers can set up ad sitelinks for their campaigns by finding the option in the Campaign Settings tab in their AdWords accounts. It’s listed as “Show additional links to my site” in the “Ad Extensions” section.

Microsoft made some significant announcements related to Bing at SMX Advanced in Seattle. Later this summer, Bing will offer a redesigned version of Bing Webmaster Tools based on feedback from webmasters. The tools will provide webmasters with a simplified, more intuitive experience that delivers a comprehensive view of how Bing indexes their sites, a representative for Bing tells WebProNews.

Highlights include:

- The Bing Webmaster Tools have been re-engineered from the ground up to offer more data, including enhanced charting functionality, through a modern, improved user interface. The new tools remain web-based, and basic functionality will be available through most web browsers.

- The tools assess performance in several key areas, including crawl, index and traffic. Each area will offer granular data going back as far as six months with enhanced, on-the-fly adjustable charting, enabling webmasters to focus on the timeline trends that are most meaningful to them.

- The update also includes a new experience built with Silverlight, featuring rich visual charts to help webmasters quickly analyze several months of data to identify trends and drive insights.

More here.