As many in the online marketing field know, Bing and Yahoo are joining forces in the coming months to bring consumers a whole new way to search the web. Starting in either August or September, Bing organic results will begin to display in the Yahoo organic results. This means that if you have been enjoying high organic rankings in Bing, then you will now have comparable organic rankings in Yahoo. Mostly this merger will impact the paid search side of things with Yahoo advertisers migrating over to the Microsoft AdCenter platform.  According to some estimates between 25-30% of the organic listings found in Yahoo will be from Bing. Some may ask why the alliance and how can I optimize my website to rank better in Bing?

Well, over the past couple of years Yahoo has seen their market share of searchers decline. This same trend has been seen by Microsoft, but in the past year with the launch of Bing and the creative marketing strategies that they employed to get people to try Bing, Microsoft has been seeing some increases in usage. Both search engines are both still sub par to Google, but do offer different population segments to advertise too. The Yahoo and Bing Alliance is contracted for 10 years and slated to bring the best of both search engines to the table. There are high hopes of cracking the semi-monopoly that Google has on the search world through this joining of competitors.

Now you might be asking how can I make sure that my website still is ranked high in both Yahoo and Bing? Well here are some tips to optimize for both Bing and Yahoo:

Signup for Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools. By setting up Yahoo site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools for your website, you will see what the search engine spiders see when they index your site. These webmaster tool platforms will show you areas that you might need to change to gain precious rankings. Bing recently launched a new webmaster tool platform which allows for more insight to what Bing spiders see when they index your website.

Follow proper SEO techniques. They are still search engines, so following proper meta tag implementation and making sure your on-site content is appropriate and keyword rich is still very important.

Check Your Robots.txt File. Be sure to check your robots.txt file to ensure that access is granted to MSN/Bing bot. If it is not, then you might be turning away the Bing spider and possible higher organic rankings in Bing.

This new alliance of Yahoo and Bing is a good thing for the search and online advertising world. Just be sure you are prepared and not left in the dust.

Charlotte, NC — Screen Pilot, a digital marketing and technology firm, has several simple steps for marketing professionals to realize the benefits of understanding what is occurring in their online marketing world. If you don’t have analysts to decipher your company’s Internet marketing results, there are five easy ways to add clout to your marketing budgets. You might just be surprised at how underutilized your existing web reporting tools are.

1. Uncover Hidden Potential:
Marketing professionals need to customize the way they track their digital marketing campaigns. They should take a look at what kind of measuring tools they currently use. Are the goals that have been set for a web reporting platform meeting the needs of the company? By creating a list of must-haves, it’ll be easier to narrow down what the needs are and how they can be fulfilled and by which products.

2. Add Tracking To Your E-mail Campaigns:
You can add tracking parameters to your e-mail marketing activity that enables marketers to start tracking visitors and their actions once in your web site that are driven by e-mail efforts. Setting up to measure conversions, from shopping carts or other areas of your site that are important to you, will enable you to see which e-mail campaigns have higher returns on investment (ROI) than others. With this tip, you can now test scientifically based on the ROI and not solely on the click-through rates and engagement factors.

3. Are Your PPC Campaigns Set-Up Correctly?
If you have potential customers click on your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads and immediately leave your site, your advertising money spent is wasted. You could be missing opportunities if your web statistics aren’t giving you the whole picture about the visitors you get from paid search channels like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Reporting from search engines only goes halfway in educating you on how effective your PPC actually is. Set up your reporting to measure key performance indicators from paid channels. It can help you increase ROI and make intelligent decisions about how and where to spend your marketing dollars.

4. Don’t Rely on 3rd Party Reporting:
It is very common that the amount of clicks the advertisers say you have is different than what you receive. Countless times we are requested to create audit trails for costly marketing channels that report higher numbers of clicks from their networks than you actually receive. Using your web statistics platform correctly will tell you exactly what traffic you received from a specific campaign and the value of that traffic.

5. Track Calls from Campaigns:
If you sell product offline then you need to track the call volumes that are generated from each specific digital campaign and types. This will easily tell you how effective a campaign’s response is when people go online but don’t convert. Quickly what channels such as PPC, email, banner ads and other create calls and which don’t. By adding this new dimension it might make you adjust some efforts for best returns.

If your current tracking and measurement tools aren’t producing results, you may need to reconsider the platform.

According to PC World “Quickoffice” is one of the Top 10 Must-Have iPhone Business Apps”! If offers Office functionality on the iPhone with an impressive suite of features!

Quickoffice is available for iPhone and iPod Touch running on iPhone OS 3.0. Enjoy superior Microsoft® Word and Excel CREATE & EDIT functionality today in a powerful productivity suite. VIEW, EMAIL, and ACCESS attachments with the most popular file formats.

The core Quickoffice suite comprises four great programs which allow users to work on important documents such as contracts, business plans, sales presentations, financial reports and other documents sent as email attachments – directly on their phone. Plus, Quickoffice users can “push” their documents to a printer, fax, projector or back to a desktop with complete confidence.

Suite features:

• Open, edit, and create text (.TXT) files, Word (.DOC, .DOCX) documents, and Excel (.XLS, .XSLX) spreadsheets compatible with Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows and Microsoft Office 2008 for Macintosh
• Auto-save and auto-restore
• High-fidelity rendering and crisp characters
• Advanced notepad editor
• Intuitive cut-copy-paste compatible with the iPhone OS 3.0
• Set custom passcode lock to prevent sniffy people from running the app and much more!

Quickoffice is running a special offer of 50% off for the first 10,000 customers at $9.99 which is a steal! If you are on the go and work with Microsoft Office then you’ll find this app invaluable. To learn more and to take advantage of the special offer click here.

When you have a team working from different locations and you need to collaborate on documents, DocVerse might be the tool you need!

DocVerse is a plug-in for Microsoft Office that adds functionality to the sidebar within Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint and Word. You can invite friends and colleagues to collaborate on any documents. As edits are made, the changes are synced to the cloud.

Apart from a hard copy, a web-based version of the document gets automatically save for team members to see making collaboration easier.

DocVerse also provides some great discussion and tracking features through the sidebar as well. It allows you to IM anyone collaborating on the document. You have the ability to track recent changes and who made them. There is a history tab that provides you with a larger view of the history of the document.

It’s real easy to use and great for employees who are already using Microsoft Office to get things done. Docverse is not free, however. It costs $49 per month for 10 users and 500 documents and $99 per month for 25 users and 1500 documents.

To learn more, watch the video below for a brief tutorial or visit Docverse’s website – http://www.docverse.com/

DocVerse from Amir Khella on Vimeo.