Are Bing users twice as likely to click on an ad than Google users?

"According to a study by search-advertising network Chitika, visitors who arrive at sites from organic search results on Bing are 55 percent more likely to click on an ad than if they arrived from Google.

Chitika looked at the clickthrough rates from 32 million ad impressions across its network of more than 50,000 sites in a week in July. Visitors from Bing clicked on an ad 1.5 percent of the time on average, versus a 0.97 percent clickthrough rate for Google visitors and a 1.24 percent clickthrough rate for Yahoo."

Official Bing statement: images and Flash and script, oh my!

"Don't put important text content into graphics. The search engine bot can't see image file content as you and I can. To the bot, references to images are merely links to external, binary files in the HTML code, the contents of which can't be indexed. Keep your page's important content (the stuff you want indexed so it is discoverable by search engines) in text form within the webpage. Use images instead for illustrations, photos, designs, and other, non-text elements on the page. [...]

The same recommendation goes for animations in the form of Flash and Silverlight. These are great technologies to use to present videos, instructional information, entertainment, and much more. But don't bury your useful text content within animations. Use them as enhancements of, not replacements for, your on-page, text-based content. [...]

Don’t use script or images for site navigation. Bots can’t read script. They can’t execute it to see what happens. That’s why you need to be judicious in your use of script on your site."

Yahoo Search Marketing: new math

"Setting the right bids in search marketing does require some calculations. [...] Cost-per-action measures how much advertising spend is required to get one action (in this case, one buyer). Most of the variables are fixed, but you control the cost per click and, therefore, the number of clicks you receive."

Editor's note: A much more detailed overview on how to price your PPC bids can be found in our AdWords eBook.

Google introduces local extensions

"Location extensions allow you to 'extend' your AdWords campaigns by dynamically attaching your business address to your ads. This new feature will be fully available in the coming weeks, with some advertisers having access to the feature starting today. [...]

Once extensions are set up, we'll dynamically match your business locations to a user's location or search terms and show the address with your text ads."

Not all of Google may be available in your country

"The name is 'world wide web', but it's not always. What are some of Google's services that will only work in one country, or a limited set of countries? (Unless perhaps you route around the block – geolocation by IP, as it's often implemented, is not an impossible hurdle.)"

Search engine newslets

• Some webmasters think that Google might have updated its algorithm.
• Stealth search engine Blekko raises $11.5 million.
• Search engine ChaCha raises another $4 million.
• Former Googler Sanjeev Agrawal to lead just-funded mobile search startup Aloqa.
• Has your Google web history been hacked?
• Chinese search giant Baidu posts gains.
• Zoom photo navigation in Google street view (video).
• For Mozilla and Google, group hugs get tricky.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

Based on user feedback we have improved the keyword manager in IBP 11 so that it now supports the Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool in many different languages.

In addition to the unique keyword database of KeywordIndex.com, IBP 11.5 now also supports the keyword tools of Google AdWords. That means that you can now get the number of searches for keywords in many languages, including English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and more.

IBP 11.5 is currently available in a beta version. We plan to release the final version of IBP 11.5 within the next four weeks. Click here to get the beta version of IBP 11.5.

Note: IBP version 11.5 will be a free update for you if you have the current version.

"IBP is jumpstarting our revenue."

"Premier Home Rentals, Inc. a luxury home rental company in Beaver Creek Colorado has been operating successfully since 1998 and online since 1999. We have always enjoyed a trickle of traffic to our site SkiHomeRental.com but found this past year to be more competitive in closing the calls we were getting.

I ran my first ranking report with IBP two months ago and now we have 54 new search engine listings, 30 on first pages, including 5 lucrative Google keywords on first page.

Not only have calls increased, the quality of the inquiry is more specific to our product, resulting in higher conversion and higher spending per client.

One call has just resulted in a record breaking deal! After 11 years in business IBP is jumpstarting our revenue and alleviating my concerns about another lean year. Not to mention it's fun to run the reports and see improvement each week, thanks for creating such a powerful tool."
Kristen Nye, www.skihomerental.com

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• Action plan: how to change the titles of your web pages to get more visitors
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• For how many keywords should you optimize a web page?
• How to save money with quickly created long tail keywords
• A new keyword tool with a unique keyword database
• View all past issues...