Bing Webmaster Tools

Source: bing.com: Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your sites. Get data on how many pages of your site have been indexed, backlinks, inbound links and keyword performance.

To submit your site to Bing:

To request that Bing crawl your site, submit your site’s domain to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx.

To submit your Sitemap:

To submit an XML-based Sitemap for your site, copy and paste the below URL into the address bar of your browser–be sure to change “www.YourWebAddress.com” to your domain name–and then press ENTER:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

Get the SEO Toolkit: The IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit helps improve a Web site’s relevance in search results

More>>http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/default.aspx

Bing vs. Google on "I Love You"

John Yunker at Global by Design elaborates on the difference between using Bing (owned by Microsoft) versus Google on a simple search string translation of the words: "I love you."

Read more here.

Why not just go straight to: Bing translator?
Or how about Google translator?

Full disclosure: I'm a HUGE Google fan (no affiliation whatsoever). John is a Microsoft program manager and co-founder of Byte

Working with Google: Business tips to help you engage customers, monetize your site and work more efficiently

On this blog, we usually focus on helping you make the most of the products we've designed specifically with IT departments in mind. But Google has lots of other tools that other parts of your organization (such as the sales and marketing teams) might find useful.

So, in this post, we thought we'd go through a quick summary of the wide range of Google products that can help you do business. We've grouped these tips into three buckets: methods to optimize your website, details about how your company info can get listed on Google properties and finally, ways to improve your business operations.

OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE

Tip 1: Help customers find you with Google Maps

Pinpoint your business by embedding a Street View image on your website to show customers your storefront, office, building, parking facilities or anything else at the street level, or provide interactive door-to-door driving directions with a simple gadget. For a complete store locator solution, check out Google Maps API Premier

Tip 2: Engage users when they visit your site

Awaken and strengthen the community that visits your website by enriching it with social features. You can choose from a gallery of gadgets to add commenting, ratings and reviews, opinion polls, and more to your site. Learn more

Tip 3: Help visitors find what they're looking for

Add a customized Google-powered search box so that your visitors can easily find what they're looking for on your site. You can choose to show targeted ads alongside search results and earn revenue while helping visitors find what they're looking for with AdSense for Search, or you can purchase Google Site Search to offer your visitors an ad-free search experience.

Tip 4: Earn revenue from ads targeted to your content

Google AdSense enables website publishers of all sizes to display targeted ads alongside their online content and earn money. Sign up for AdSense and get access to Google's vast network of advertisers. If you're already selling ads directly to advertisers, learn how you can better manage your online sales and ad inventory with one of Google's ad serving solutions.

Tip 5: Measure website conversions on your website using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool to track how visitors interact with your website. You can set up "Goals" in Analytics to track how many visitors complete a desired action, such as submitting a contact form or making a purchase. This lets you see your website's ROI and optimize your marketing efforts. Check out this post for a tutorial on how set up Goals for your site.

Tip 6: Increase your conversion rates with Website Optimizer

Every web page has room for improvement when it comes to conversions. Testing a few simple changes with Google Website Optimizer can radically increase your site's conversion rate. Try it now.

GET LISTED ON GOOGLE PROPERTIES

Tip 7: Put your business on Google Maps

People search for businesses on Google Maps and Google.com every day. Make sure your business is easy to find and your listing information is up-to-date by visiting the Local Business Center at www.google.com/lbc. It's free, and with the new dashboard feature, you can see how popular your business is on Google, where people drive from to get to you, and how they search to find you. Check out this video to learn more.

Tip 8: Submit all of your content

Google can also help you reach out to the world by distributing your content on Google Web Search, Product Search, iGoogle, and more. Learn how Google’s free products can make your online investments go further with increased distribution, traffic and monetization.

IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS OPERATIONS

Tip 9: Simplify your IT environment, encourage innovation and cut costs

Managing email and other messaging software with multiple servers can be a headache. By switching to Google Apps, you can enjoy 99.9% uptime and take advantage of Google's data center infrastructure to ensure your information is secure. With your systems online, new features are automatically incorporated and collaboration can be done at a fraction of the cost of existing setups. Learn more

Tip 10: Archive corporate email in a central and searchable repository

Many businesses rely on backup tapes or .pst files to serve as their email archive. Searching through these sources can be time consuming and resource intensive. To minimize your IT operating burden and protect your business from costly e-discovery projects, you can archive email on-line in a central and searchable location with Google Message Discovery. Learn more

Tip 11: View and style mapping data with Google Earth Pro

If your business has GIS (Geographic Information System) data then use Google Earth Pro to view this map data with built-in GIS data import tools. You can also share styled map data quickly with colleagues and clients with Google Earth as a backdrop, leveraging Google’s comprehensive mapping data to make quick, location specific decisions. Learn more

Tip 12: Easily locate ALL of your internal documents using the Google Search Appliance 6.0
Your company’s internal search system can be just as good as Google’s – and just as easy to use. The Google Search Appliance (GSA) provides universal search for business, indexing all company content in a customizable way. The Google Search Appliance can search intranets, web servers, portals, file shares, databases, content management systems, and real-time data in business applications – and serve it up to employees in integrated, easy-to-navigate results. The new version of the GSA – GSA 6.0 – which just premiered yesterday, can now search billions of documents and provides rich customization features.

Creating Marketing For An Online Business

You should be able to find several indispensable facts about in the following paragraphs. If there's at least one fact you didn't know before, imagine the difference it might make.
Within this article on creating marketing for an online business, we will look at how you can go about successfully marketing your online business.

Each business is different and the type of marketing that it will do online so you want to find some way test enough from their competition. This is a general rule no matter what type of business you are possibly looking importance, whether it be retail or online.

One of the great ways that can work in creating marketing for an online business can actually be sprint from your website. Develop a forum or discussion board on which different topics of importance to your customers are listed. People will wish to come back again and again to read what others have to say and this provides you with some great repeat traffic. This can help your natural search engine traffic in getting your page is indexed as well as provide some back link opportunities, which will help in marketing your online business. Within your forum, you are able to create marketing of some sort because it is your website. When these customers are ready to okay, they will think of buying from you first because of the niche between your website and them. Within this way, you have created a win - win situation for both parties. You will have developed a stable flagitious of customers while besides giving yourself the opportunity to grow your business due to the opportunities listed such as back links, search engine traffic, and being and heavily indexed.

Another good way to help in creating marketing for an online business is to give right away free wares.

Those of you not familiar with the latest on now have at least a basic understanding. But there's more to come.

You can advertise your free giveaways in many of the freebie forums that can be found around the Internet. There is great traffic to these websites and if you are able to divert some of this to your website, you entrust be much the better for it. If you are using free giveaways, make sure that you are receiving something in return such as the person's e - mail address because they have signed up for your newsletter. When you are using giveaways as a form of advertising, you'll want to make sure that you are able to bias some sort of return on your investment so keep this in mind when posting to the freebie forums.

The final way in which we'll look at creating marketing for an online business is to write good sales copy. This is going to be matchless of the simplest methods for you commit wholly possibly the tremendously effective because my improving what is written on your website, you will be able to convert augmented of your traffic and this will have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Each of these three ways of creating marketing for an online business can be very effective. By taking the time to improve your website, you leave find that this will have the greatest impact upon your zot line of running a website and an Internet business. If your website does not run effectively and frame customers in, then going out and working on bringing traffic in is a off-course cause.

Take time to consider the points presented above. What you learn may help you overcome your hesitation to take action.

The Main 12-Steps Social Media Program for Traditional Marketing

When talking to marketers who haven't yet seen the "social media light," I forget that this stuff is still pretty new.

When I wrote about the need for a social network like Twitter - several years before Twitter was conceived - I never thought that my days would be filled teaching veteran marketers how to build social media service offerings.

Based on my daily interactions with marketing agencies, I believe we've finally reached the point where convincing companies that they need to be using social media to build awareness, audiences, traffic and leads is almost over.

Now it's about being able to speak to them in terms they understand (rather than in terms our social media peers understand), to explain why a social media strategy is absolutely necessary.

A new e-book from Channel V Media (a HubSpot customer and partner) lays out a good plan for agencies and companies trying to develop a social media plan.

They've spelled out 12 key things you must consider when developing a social media program for your business.

It's a good handbook for in-house marketers, as well as agencies, who are still trying to figure out how to replace their piece-meal campaign-after-campaign approach with a full-blown social media program.

Here's the 12 Steps:

1. Audience Identification. If you know who your audience is, you're already one step ahead of the game. The next step is to figure out where they interact online.
2. Platform Development & Design. Figuring out how to engage and interact with this audience.
3. Brand Campaign Integration. It's possible for a social media program to piggyback off a good brand campaign, but it has to be transformed into its cooler younger brother.
4. Content Creation/Coordination. You must create a consistent message.
5. Goal Mapping. In other words, how do you measure your success? Is it brand mentions? Traffic? Email sign ups? Leads? Sales?
6. Brand Identity. Everyone that is engaging via social media on your team must understand your goals and messaging.
7. Audience Attraction. Larger brands like to start spreading the word of their new, fancy and glossy initiatives at the outset, but if your social media program is good, your audience will find them on their own and the spread the word for you.
8. Social Media Listening. If you don't know what people are saying about you and your products, their related interests and more, how are you going to interact with them?
9. Community & Social Responsibility. Social responsibility is increasingly expected of everyone - and this engagement is an essential part of your online identity.
10. Internal/External Community Engagement & Response. Be everywhere. All the time. It's up to you to let people know that you are listening, engaging, helping, and offering solutions.
11. Brand Advocacy. Authenticity and transparency are such huge aspects of social media, your social media and management team must be 100% on board.
12. Customer Service. Good customer service involves listening (within and outside of social media) and responding appropriately.

Small Business Online, Small Business

Small Business Online, Small Business