The new interface sports several new enhancements, starting with a clean-up of the existing search engine results page to reduce clutter. The new Bing search engine results page is now divided into three columns, with the standard search results listings on the left hand side, and the new Snapshot and Social sidebars in the middle and on the right, respectively. The Snapshot column contains relevant info on a listing, pulled from sources all over the web.

Snapshot displays additional information on a given listing, pulled from sources all over the web. It will allow you to take actions such as making reservations for a restaurant, straight from the search engine result pages without having to navigate through different pages. The Social sidebar is the focal point of the new feature set, however. Bing can now connect with your Facebook account and will analyze content posted by your friends.

The system will analyze things such as comments, status updates, and even photos to determine who among your friends may know more about your query. Users will also have the ability to share their searches with their friends, and their friends’ friends, greatly expanding their reach. Microsoft plans to develop this system further, adding new partners and enabling integration with other social networks.

This report has further reinforced suspicions that Microsoft does not consider its search engine business to be of strategic importance to the company, despite their insistence to the contrary. Microsoft and Facebook have been forging strong connections over the past few years, with the latest effort being a $550 million patents deal that allowed Facebook to acquire 650 patents that would protect them from a lawsuit filed by Yahoo.

Recent earnings reports from both Microsoft and Facebook suggest that the sale of the Bing search engine would be good for both companies. Microsoft’s Online Services division, which maintains its Bing and AdCenter products, posted a loss of $479 million in its latest earnings report, an improvement over the previous year’s performance. Meanwhile, Facebook’s recent S-1 filing reveals that their massive growth rate is starting to slow.

This has caused some to speculate that Facebook is looking to get into the Search Engine business. They have the potential to become a serious competitor to Google in the Search Advertising business, thanks to the massive amount of data on user preferences that they’ve already collected. Facebook reportedly has over 900 million web users, representing countries from all over the world.

According to reports, Google web searches accounted for over 66% of web search traffic in March.

Performance statistics and data at the postal code level will be made available via the web interface. Additionally, Google has also rolled out a new location insertion feature for ads. Using this feature, advertisers will no longer need to worry about creating new ad text for each specific location they are advertising in. Simply insert a special bracket-enclosed tag, like so: “Find a {lb.city:local} store today!”, and Google’s system will automatically replace the tag with the viewer’s city name. Finally, Google has made several enhancements to the ‘advanced location targeting’ feature, including re-wording the available options in the back-end to make them easier to understand by advertisers, and changing the way ads are displayed in targeted locations.

In a stunning event, social media giant Facebook has announced that it has agreed to purchase the popular San Francisco-based photo-sharing service Instagram. Originally launched in 2010, Instgram quickly became popular with social media fans by providing an easier way to share photos taken with their mobile phone.

The acquisition was announced on April 9th, by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, through a Facebook blog post. The deal is expected to be a cash and stock acquisition valued at approximately $1 billion, and is expected to close later this quarter.

In his post, Zuckerberg emphasized that, although their people will be joining the existing Facebook team, Instagram will remain independent and he has pledged to help further develop their app and brand. Instagram founder Kevin Systrom’s blog echoed that point, stating that “Instagram is not going away” and that the service will remain as-is.

Zuckerberg has stated in his post that he intends to develop features similar to those of Instagram’s for use in their other products. The acquisition of Instagram is the company’s largest acquisition to date, towering mightily over their $70 million acquisition of Israeli mobile developer Snaptu.

Zuckerberg has noted that this is the first time they’ve acquired a company with so many users, and an acquisition of this scale is unlikely to happen again anytime soon. Facebook is currently in the process of going public, and is expected to go through with its IPO next month.

They have identified several key core businesses and and platforms that will be the subject of global restructuring and redeployment efforts. The layoffs are expected to hit hardest in the products division, headed by Blake Irving, as well as its marketing and research divisions.

Its advertising businesses, Right Media and APT, as well as its search business are expected to be hit hard as well. These moves are meant to increase the company’s ability to compete in areas that it excels in. Once complete, the company expects to see approximately $325 million of annualized savings.

The more immediate expenses related to employee severance, approximately $125 to $145 million before taxes, will be recognized in their second quarter financial results. The layoffs come at a time when the company is under immense pressure from outside parties, such as activist shareholder Third Point, and social media giant Facebook.

Unhappy with the work of the current board of directors, Third Point has been waging a proxy fight in an attempt to secure board seats for several of its own directors, including its founder, Dan Loeb. Facebook has responded to Yahoo’s patent infringement claims, stating that it will “vigorously defend itself” against Yahoo’s claims, and has filed patent infringement claims of it’s own.

The future looks uncertain for Yahoo, and many speculate that the end of it’s search business is near.

Before the law was official late Wednesday (6/29/2011), Amazon was sending out emails earlier that day stating they are terminating ongoing Associate Program contracts for anyone in residing in California. If anyone who want’s to continue working with them will have to do in another state.

What does this mean for affiliates?

Expect to see some of the 25,000 affiliates, especially the larger ones to relocate to states that don’t have similar tax laws.

You will have different approaches when doing keyword research for PPC and SEO. With PPC, you have the luxury of going after a larger and broader keyword list. It’s common to have a keyword list ranging from a few thousand in upwards to hundreds of thousand.

For SEO keywords – your list will usually be much smaller and more targeted. To rank organically, keywords must appear on the web pages. The more keywords you want to rank, the more pages you’ll need to create to support those keywords.

In this article, I’ll be covering keyword research for PPC.

Many people fall short when researching keywords for PPC. In many cases, they capture only 20% – 30% of possible keywords within their niche. This is where many PPC campaigns fail to make a positive return. The keywords they target are the most common and typically the most expensive. They don’t realize that the 70% – 80% keywords they didn’t target are the keywords that could bring them 50% – 300% ROI.

Understand Your Market

I know this may be a no-brainer but you’d be surprised how many people who do not understand their market. This especially holds true when it comes to online. Find out what your top online competitors are doing and what PPC keywords they are targeting. Understand your demographics. Where are your visitors coming from? Are they mostly U.S. visitors? If so, what states are providing the most visitors? The better you understand your industry, the better your understanding to what keywords to target.

Here are a few tools I’ve found to be quite helpful with market research:

1. Google Trends
2. Google Insight
3. Microsoft adCenter Labs
4. Quantcast

Build Your Keyword List

The initial keyword list you create is very important. Where many people fall short is that they usually target deep keywords before targeting broad terms. Deep keywords are keywords that usually have the main keywords in it. Let’s say we have a site about dogs. We want to target keywords all dog related.

A deep keyword list will look like this:

• dogs
• small dogs
• dog breeds
• dog
• breeding dogs
• guard dogs
• dog names
• dog breeders
• …

A broad keyword list will look like this:

• dogs
• puppies
• kennels
• canine
• house breaking
• german shepards
• border collie
• boston terrier
• bull terrier
• breed profiles
• humane society
• …

As you can see with the broad list, the term “dogs” doesn’t appear with the other terms but they do relate to “dogs”. If you noticed, I have the keyword phrase “humane society” under the broad list. Yes, this is a very broad term and I might be reaching, but this is a term that could convert very well. Here’s a secret, no one really knows unless you try it. This could be one of those “golden terms” that most people tend to miss.

So, create a broad list first. Once you’ve created this list, take these terms and go deep with them. As you can see, this will create a much larger keyword list. In addition to this, utilize misspellings and create a negative keyword list. You’re well on your way to a successful PPC campaign.

You will need to know about their demographics. On any online marketing campaign you need to know who it is that you are reaching out to. What does your ideal customer look like? How old are they? What income bracket are they in? Where do they work? Where do they socialize? What are their buying habits? The marketing strategies that you incorporate are going to use all this information. Fortunately it doesn’t take much to find out much of this. If you are targeting a certain geographic area, use the internet to find out as much demographic information as possible. In the US use the chamber of commerce for that area.

For your market targeting you will also need to know about their geographic location. What is the culture there like. Get familiar with ti and find out what things are typical for that region. Make sure you find out not only what marketing strategies are popular but find out also what things are taboo. What may seem harmless to one region may be a death sentence to your marketing strategy if your marketing research doesn’t find this information out.

You also need to see what other factors might affect the buying decision and behavior of your target market. What styles are in fashion for your target markets? What type of climate is it? Are they free with their money? It may seem like a lot of work but if you want your marketing plan to work, all of this research is going to pay off.

The most important part of your marketing research will be understanding your customers needs. The more you understand this, the better able you will be to create an ad campaign. This will help bring about some effective branding of your product and services as a viable part of their buying pattern.

Your best way to find out about your target market, though, is to spend time where they are. If your hope is to have a coffee shop, you are going to want to see first hand what works and doesn’t work You will want to know what the atmosphere is like in a successful coffee shop and spend time talking to customers to find out what they like and don’t like about it. The same thing is going to be important for any online marketing plan.

Wherever it is that your potential customers go to find out more about what you are trying to offer them, go and spend time there. If there is a forum that is used by those who typically are interested in your product or service, be a member of it or spend time reading what is going on. Get in the shoes of your target market and find out what it is like to be them. The more you can understand them, the more effective you will be a marketing to your target market.