A lot of bloggers start creating content and wonder why they don’t gain traction. In most cases the simple factor is the mediocre nature of the content.

Take a look at the articles in Microsofts Small Business Marketing section and see if your content is up to this standard.

Of course some of the tips are not quite cutting edge but to the target market of the small business owner these articles are extremely useful reading and the format, as usual, is excellent.

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Excellent online marketing articles from Microsoft

Microsoft might not be as popular as Apple amongst bloggers but somebody at Redmond certainly knows how to linkbait.

When Tony Northrup published an article entitled 10 tips for improving your wireless network he followed pretty much every rule of linkbaiting and the article has 1831 links as a result. It’s also been on Digg twice.

Why this article works

The first aspect you notice is the article looks great, there is only 1 small advert on the left and the formatting is very easy on the eye.

Notice the good use of interesting and eye catching images and pictures, every linkbait article needs these.

Tony has also put his name at the top, anonymous linkbait never quite works as well.

Check out the “Related Links” section on the right, this is so Microsoft can make the most of every visitor by getting them to look at other interesting pages and articles. Retaining visitors is the hardest part of managing a social media campaign but having related links helps a lot.

The article follows the age old format of a top ten list very well. It delivers on the promise in the headline by having 10 tips listed, with diagrams and sub headings making it nice and easy to read.

Interestingly the article asks for feedback at the bottom so Microsoft can see which of their pages are most useful to people. How many blogs have this?

Funnily enough I’ve not actually read the article yet but it looks like it will be great.

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What Microsoft can teach you about linkbait

Today Microsoft launched Big Snap Search where you can win prizes for searching. Pretty cool idea.

The only problem is the new search engine hasn’t found itself yet.

Google, as ever, is spot on already. In fact Google is already hard at work indexing the search results from BigSnapSearch.com because Microsoft forgot to add a robots.txt file.

Via

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Microsoft launches new search engine but can’t find itself

Microsoft and Yahoo are joining forces in an effort to compete with Google in the search wars. Yahoo algorithmic results will be powered by the Microsoft / Bing algorithm and the paid results will be powered by AdCenter.

The announcement is good news because it’s clear that the two companies can’t compete with Google by themselves. I doubt it will make much difference in the UK because Yahoo has a very small market share as shown in the Hitwise data below.

The only drawback is that rollout is expected within 24 months following regulatory approval by which time Twitter or Facebook will probably have more search volume.

• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;
• Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
• Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.
• Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites.
• Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88% of search revenue generated on Yahoo!’s O&O sites during the first 5 years of the agreement.
• Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.
• Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!’s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country.
• At full implementation (expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory approval), Yahoo! estimates, based on current levels of revenue and current operating expenses, that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million. Yahoo! also estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual operating cash flow of approximately $275 million.
• The agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies. The agreement maintains the industry-leading privacy practices that each company follows today.

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Microsoft to power Yahoo search

This week I’ve been testing Microsoft Gatineau and it seems quite interesting. The interface is pretty slow though.

The demographic information is the best part. I can see that young people have a lower bounce rate than older people. Not sure how much use this information is though, maybe I should start showing ads targeted to students?

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Microsoft Gatineau screenshots from my first week

Microsoft is to ship Windows 7 without a web browser to appease the EU.

Microsoft has announced that it will ship a special version of Vista’s successor in Europe, titled Windows 7 E, without Internet Explorer 8. The browser-less version, a reaction to an antitrust investigation by the EU into whether Microsoft is abusing its dominant position with Windows and Internet Explorer, will be distributed in all member nations of the European Economic Area as well as Croatia and Switzerland.

This might be good to promote healthy competition and decrease the market share of IE but the EU doesn’t seem to have thought how it will affect search. Google has a 90% market share in the UK and will be more than happy to pay retailers to install Chrome and Firefox with Google as the default search engine on every Windows PC.

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Windows 7 to be shipped without Internet Explorer

Perhaps I’m very late in noticing this(?) but Digg seems to be using AdSense rather than Microsoft ads these days. Since Microsoft paid a lot of money for an advertising deal with Digg I wonder how much Google had to pay to have their ads displayed instead?

The targeting seems pretty good, as you would expect from Google.

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Digg Switches to AdSense

The MSN Live Search blog has just published a post about how the new index has increased relevance and is far superior to the old MSN.

We eat, live and breathe ideas and technology that makes our relevance better. Having worked on this release for a little over 9 months we could not be more excited about the relevance of our new engine. From our metrics, and more importantly our usage as customers, our new engine is so far superior to our old one. Consider this post a little tour guide, if you will, of our new engine and the things you might notice when you use it.

The only problem is that they point to the search results for Microsoft taco truck as an example of a search they carry “good” results for. If you check the results the first is a made for adsense spam parked domain. Oops.

They point to Chowhound as a good result so why is it only listed at number 6 when Google has it at number 1?

C’mon Microsoft there must be a better example to use than that!

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Live Search proves they don’t understand relevance

Last year Microsoft launched a new search engine which couldn’t find itself and obviously didn’t want to make the same mistake again.

It seems that the MSN Live Search results for each country have all been hand edited to include the geo-specific version of Bing.com as the top result. You can tell by the fact the URL being indexed is www.bing.com/?mkt=de-de when you search on MSN.de and www.bing.com/?mkt=en-gb when you search on MSN.co.uk

Those URL’s don’t exist and both redirect to a holding page so there is no way anybody would be linking to them. Google certainly isn’t indexing them.

Joking aside I’m looking forward to using Bing, about time somebody started eating into Googles 90+% market share in the UK. Most SEO’s with less than a few years experience probably don’t remember the days of optimising for more than one search engine.

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Bing needs a hand edit to find itself

Google is clearly not happy about the Microsoft Yahoo situation and Eric Schmidt has called Yahoo’s chief executive Jerry Yang to offer his company’s help in any effort to thwart Microsoft’s bid.

The main alternative (assuming the analysts are right in saying regulators wouldn’t let Google take over Yahoo) is for Google to sign a deal with Yahoo to power their organic and paid search results in the same way that they power AOL’s results. This would let Yahoo dramatically reduce their R&D budget and get an instant cash injection from Google. Of course they would then have to share ad revenues with Google but they would still get a revenue share in the long term and retain control of their brand.

What I fail to understand is how Google can get upset at Microsoft for wanting to take over Yahoo on one hand and then plan to show their search results all over the Yahoo domain on the other hand. Surely that would be much worse for competition?

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Should Google buy it’s way into Yahoo?