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.

To begin the experiment we looked at numerous New York City hotels, that all have business listings on TripAdvisor.com, with a hyper-linked URL to their website. Next we looked up the back-links in Google and Yahoo for all of the properties. Surprisingly, none of them showed any back-links from TripAdvisor.com. On one of the properties we profiled, the Library Hotel, we did find a back-link from Trip Advisor, but it was coming from the French version of the site.  It also was part of a review that someone had embedded a link. As we could not find any back-links from TripAdvisor.com for these properties, we then went back to the Trip Advisor business listing itself and found the real issue.

Once we pulled the TripAdvisor.com business listing source code, we noticed that the actual link is not physically there but rather JavaScript code instead. This script is generating the link and its anchor text on the page. When the search engine spiders visit a page with a Business Listing on it, this script is not allowing the link to be indexed which would normally show up as a backlink from TripAdvisor.com. So, as a business owner, you are still getting the traffic from people clicking on the link in your listing, but from an SEO standpoint you are not getting the “link juice” from the TripAdvisor.coms’ 8/10 page rank!

Some might ask the question “Why not just drop the link in a review on TripAdvisor.com and that will suffice?” Well, on TripAdvisor.com you can’t do that. Unlike the French version of the website, the .com version does not allow reviewers to put hyperlinks within their reviews.

So the moral of the story is this, be sure you know the full SEO benefit you are getting from purchasing a listing on any social travel related website, especially TripAdvisor.com if that is something you think you’re getting. In their defense, we find nothing on their site that remotely even leads anyone to believe that there is SEO value in a Business Listing, it simply is assumed that because they are offering a “link” to your property website, there is inherent link value associated with it.

If you’re a hotel or resort owner and you want to talk to us about SEO for your property, please get in touch. We have tons of experience in amazingly successful hotel internet marketing & SEO campaigns and we are a full-service digital marketing agency.

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.