Marketing Meerkat » search engine marketing

How Google AdWords Works

Marketing Meerkat — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:05:50 +0000

Some of the most recurring questions among Internet newbies are: “What’s Google AdWords?”, and “How does it work?” There’s the easy answer in the lines of “AdWords is Google’s online advertising paltform, which offers pay-per-click advertising, among several other forms of advertising. You bid on keywords and…” That’s not a bad answer but it’s far from being complete. If you’re looking for a more complete answer, whether you’re an Internet newbie or an Internet professionals looking for answers for your customers, here is an infographic by WordStream that should help you understand what’s behind this Google AdWords machine.

Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine

Marketing Meerkat — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 06:58:55 +0000

Bing was fully launched earlier this week and is a replacement for Live Search. With this move, Microsoft intends to gain market share over Google. They call it a decision engine, rather than a search engine, as it is supposed to help users make decisions quicker than with a search engine.

I seriously doubt Bing will significantly increase its market share over the next few months, but since it’s going to be heavily advertised, I believe a fair share of web users will try it out. This makes me think of Google Chrome. I guess quite a lot of web users tried it out, but only a few adopted it. It still remains on the scene as it is Google’s web browser. Bing is Microsoft’s search engine… it must be good, somehow.

Bing offers a number of new functionalities and gadgets. I’m not too familiar with them yet, but if you want to know more, I suggest you read Wired’s article on the topic. It reviews the whole thing: Hands on with Microsoft’s New Search Engine: Bing, but no Boom. They think Bing hides its best features, which I think is right as I didn’t notice most of them the first time I tried it out. I like the pictures used as a background. They are changed every day, or even maybe more often. That’s a pretty clever way to make people come back. Anyway, it is definitely worth a try, even if it hasn’t indexed my blog yet!

Bing
(click to try it out)

Using videos to generate traffic

Marketing Meerkat — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:59:22 +0000

Last year internet marketing research company comScore revealed that YouTube has surpassed Yahoo! in the number of searches made in the U.S. and has thus become the country’s second most popular search engine after its parent Google.

When doing a search on Google, you may have noticed all these videos showing up… If you’re running a business and looking at improving your online presence, it may be time to think about making your own video and uploading it onto YouTube. Not that web users will be searching for your products or services on YouTube, but they may decide to check out your video found in Google’s video results. All you’d need to do is to get your video on Google’s first results page for the keywords you target. Ensure you choose the right words when uploading your video… Give it a relevant title, and a relevant description. If you’re planning to upload several videos you may want to create a channel dedicated to your business, like Qantas or Quiksilver did. You don’t need to be a big player to get one.

The idea of using YouTube to promote your business is not new, but if you run short of ideas to improve your online presence, you should definitely think about it!