Maps Advertising is Here & Why You Shouldn’t Be Surprised

Source: SocialSEO

Google has been slow to roll out its changes to Google Maps and AdWords. And this is with Google reason. Since Maps launched in 2005, they have struggled to make a monetizable maps listing. The concern was, if you give the advertisers too much control, the maps listings would become irrelevant to the searchers.

In 2008, Google took the first step to creating maps advertising with the launch of “Google My Business”. And again in 2011 with the re-branding of “Google My Business” as “Google Plus”. Google had successfully incentivized millions of business owners to sign up for a free listing with “Google My Business”. This information was then used to make relevant maps listings and social media profiles.

Now Google has the largest business directory in the world, but the question remained; how do they monetize this newly created audience without watering down the relevancy of the maps and directions search results? The answer is to take the advertising placement out of the hands of marketers and into the control of Google. By using a tried and true metric, quality score; Google has been able to make a grand compromise.

Advertisers can choose to participate in maps listings, but cannot choose when and where the advertisements display. Eliminating the possibility of off the charts directions or irrelevant search results. The Maps Advertisements will display, if the advertisements quality score is high and the location is relevant to the searcher's location.

Additionally, this is a great way for Google to improve paid search as a whole. As Pay Per Click managers rush to join the Map Advertising bandwagon, the less-than-quality advertisers will find their quality score to be a road block. Forcing them to reevaluate the campaign and to improve its relevancy.

For PPC Managers that feel this would be too much of a burden, consider this. If you begin maps advertising, you and your clients can now track “Free Clicks”. These clicks have technically always been free, but we now have the ability to collect data on how often people engage with maps features like:

• Saved Locations
• Shared Locations
• Navigation Clicks

(some not free, but trackable clicks include; phone clicks, location detail clicks, and sitelink clicks)

With this change, a lot of people are concerned that their free listings will go away. Fortunately, that isn’t the case; with maps advertising you are paying for additional space and ad-content within your existing listing. This is not paying for higher (or irrelevant) placements within the maps search results.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can begin Maps advertising, please reach out to our pay per click team; here at SocialSEO.

Written By: Josh Martin
Source: SocialSEO

Funny Automotive Commercials - Video Blog

Too much fun not to share!

Joshmartinblog.com

Pre Roll Ads Are More Effective - Video Blog

A new study conducted by AOL shows that video pre roll ads are more effective on short form videos than on longer video content. The study, which was released as an infographic, shows that viewers are 42% more likely to make a purchase from a brand whose ad they viewed before watching short form video content. Brand recall and affinity also go up for video pre roll ads in front of short form content when compared to long form content. An article published at VentureBeat explains that, “The findings contradict the traditional logic that the standard 30-second TV commercial is the most effective in swaying an audience.”

The study also shows that “viewers are adopting traditional avoidance behaviors during ads within long-form videos.” Instead of viewing the ads on long form content, they’re using their phones, opening other websites or even walking away – in short, the same behaviors they’d use when watching television without DVR.

Here are a few more interesting points from the study:

• Ads in short-form videos are more effective than ads in long-form content. More specifically, short-form video produced a 25 percent higher brand recall and a 42 percent higher purchase intent for the featured product or service.
• Viewers are adopting traditional avoidance behaviors during ads within long-form videos. Respondents found the ads to be too frequent and interruptive; as a result, they chose to avoid them altogether (by walking away, going to other sites, multitasking with their phone). This is the same “annoyance” behavior that is demonstrated when viewing television without the use of a DVR.
• Consumers want more targeted and humorous ads in both formats. In fact, 67 percent of respondents would be willing to be answer a question to make their ads more personalized and enjoyable.
• Consumers understand the exchange of free content for advertising, but they want to make sure their time tradeoff of watching ads also benefits them. They found coupons, contests and links as the most positive forms of engagement.

Click here to view a great infographic or download the PDF

Digital Video Ad Effectiveness Case Study 2008 - Time Flys?

Here is a little something I found today, what a trip down memory lane. Can you imagine a time where we questioned the usefulness of video pre-roll? Read on if you dare:


Despite the rapid growth of digital video advertising, marketers are still learning how to use the medium most effectively.  The IAB Research Council undertook a study of a video advertising campaign for a major national retailer brand. This research sought to provide insights into which combinations of lengths and placements of digital video advertising are most effective. The IAB commissioned Millward Brown and Dynamic Logic to undertake this research, which serves as a case study on digital video ad effectiveness. The findings of the study include the following:

15 seconds appears to be an optimal length for digital video creative in the pre-roll position. 5-second spots had trouble conveying a message; while 30-second spots risked turning off a viewer waiting to watch something else.

30-second spots do well at conveying a complex or emotionally resonant message, but work best in user-initiated placements (where the user must take an action, like clicking on an ad or rolling over an in-text link, to begin playing the ad) where viewers display more patience for long messages.
Pre-roll, in-text, and in-banner video ad placements can all contribute to achieving the goals of a campaign; however, different placements may perform optimally with different creative lengths.
As a single campaign case study, the findings here do not represent definitive conclusions. However, they do offer useful guidance for the industry, and point in productive directions for further research in the area of digital video creative length and placement.

Download the complete case study by clicking here

Social Media Contest - Tips And Tricks

Social media contests can be very successful for your business if your goal is to increase your fan base, increase engagement or increase your email subscribers. Since email conversions are much higher than social media conversions, smart marketers like to create contests that capture people’s email addresses. This way, they can follow up with them later on and inform them about news and specials.

I had the opportunity to work with Out And About Marketing and help them execute their #SochiDailyGiveaway contest. Winning a pair of skis or snowboards during the Olympics sounds like a great hook for passionate skiers and boarders – exactly the audience Squaw Valley wants to attract.

It’s no secret snow has not been great in Lake Tahoe this year. Despite the lack of snow, interest and participation in the contest has been through the roof. After all, this ski resort did everything right with the social media contest. The incentive, the prize, the urgency, the timing and the viral sharing were all put into place with the contest. The social media vendor used for the contest was Heyo, a very affordable yet solid solution and one that I consistently recommend to my partners.

The results of the contest so far have been outstanding:
In summary, here are 7 tips to make a social media contest successful:

- 6,975 new likes

- 30% email conversion rate

1. Make it relevant to your audience

2. Timing is everything

3. Keep it simple for people to enter

4. Make sure it’s mobile optimized

5. Come up with incentives guaranteed to get people to act

6. Capture their email addresses

7. Make it shareable to increase reach

Market Note: Social media is playing a major role in accelerating the decision cycle of consumers who patronize ski resorts. As a result, one of the country's largest such companies -- Vail Resorts -- has abandoned its long-time advertising strategies and practices. In their place, the billion-dollar-a-year corporation, which operates five major resorts and twenty hotels, has built a new in-house marketing operation that uses social media and other digital venues to constantly engage skiing enthusiasts in real time. CEO Rob Katz explains the dramatic changes.

Simple Tips To Set The Stage For Local SEO In 2015

After Google's most recent local algorithm update, the rules have changed for local SEO. Columnist Greg Gifford discusses how you can do well in local search in 2015.

The year is almost over, and many businesses are starting to look forward to 2015 and discuss their marketing plans. Luckily, David Mihm, the local search guru at Moz, just released his annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey, which helps give us local marketers more insight into which ranking factors matter the most.
The survey shows a definite shift toward more traditional web ranking factors. Last year’s Local Search Ranking Factors survey had Google Places and Citations weighted heavily, but this year’s study shows that on-site signals and links are the most powerful factors.
This shift is consistent with Google’s recent local ranking algorithm update, Pigeon. Many Local SEOs claimed they weren’t hit by Pigeon – but it’s more likely that, because they took a more wholesome approach to local SEO, their sites simply had more authority to begin with.
The most important point we try to hammer home to potential clients is that you can’t fool the nerds at Google. Everything you do, both on and off your site, should be working toward the end goal of making your user experience awesome… not trying to fool Google into placing you higher on search results pages.

So, taking what we’ve been able to figure out about the Pigeon update and adding in the results from the 2014 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, here are two simple tips to help you set the stage for Local Search success in 2015:

1. Be Awesome
2. Earn Awesome Links

Yes, it’s really that simple… but at the same time, it’s really not that easy for local businesses. Take a look at your competitors in your vertical – nearly every website has the same or similar content, and most sites don’t have that many inbound links.

Okay, So How Are You Supposed To Be Awesome?

The best thing you can do for Local Search success in 2015 is to take all the energy you put into trying to fool Google and instead use that energy to make your site better.
Take a long, hard look at your site and look at your competitors’ sites. What can you do to be better? You know that your potential customers will be looking at multiple sites, so make your site the best in your vertical.
Make sure you’re avoiding these common pitfalls – they’re all basic, but we still see far too many sites tripping up on these:

1. No Home Page Content. Your customers (and search engines) need to know what you’re all about. If your home page has a slider/banner and just a few sentences, you need to add more useful content there immediately.
2. Only A Few Sentences On A Page. Your customers (and search engines) are checking your website for useful, relevant information. If you offer a product or service, don’t just say, “We sell X, call us for more information!” Today’s shoppers want immediate information, so you need to pack every page with useful content.
3. Spamming Keywords. Far too many websites rely on this outdated tactic. You’re not going to rank well everywhere in your state simply because you listed out 100 cities separated by commas on your home page. Does that huge list of cities provide useful information for customers? No. Does it help you rank in Google? Definitely not. Get rid of the junk and populate your site with relevant, informative content instead.
4. Awful Title Tags. You’ve got about 500 pixels of width for your title tags; anything longer will be truncated when it’s displayed in search results. The title tag should summarize the page – it shouldn’t be a huge chunk of keywords you’re trying to rank for. Put your primary keyword phrase at the beginning and your business name at the end. If you’ve got 100 keywords stuffed into your title tag, you just look desperate.

Don’t Forget Your Local Optimization

With on-site signals now carrying so much weight, it’s more important than ever to have your local optimization ducks in a row. It won’t do you any good to bang out a ton of citations if your site doesn’t include the local signals that Google expects it to have.
Again, these are old-school basics, but we hardly see any websites correctly optimizing for local areas:

1. Include City/ST in your title tag. Remember, the title tag is incredibly important for optimization, and including your city and state is an important signal for local relevancy.
2. Include City/ST in your H1 heading. It doesn’t have to be the entire heading in and of itself — what’s important here is to include your city and state in the page heading to further show local relevancy.
3. Include City/ST in your content. Far too many sites forget to include City/ST information inside the site content. Optimizing for local search won’t work unless you’re talking about your local area in your content.
4. Include City/ST in your alt text on images. It’s amazing how many times we see sites that don’t include alt text. Remember, Google can’t see what’s in your images, so alt text helps provide a better understanding of your page content. Including City/ST information can really help boost local relevancy.
5. Include City/ST in your URL. If you’ve got the ability to edit your URL structure, try to include your city and state information in your URLs. Again, this can go a long way toward providing a stronger local signal to both customers and Google. Important Note: if you’re going to update your URLs, don’t forget to set up 301 redirects so that the old address is permanently pointed to the new one.

These are all just specific tactics to help with the main goal: to make your site more awesome. Stop thinking about how to make your site rank, and start thinking about how to make your site the best in your niche. That’s how you’re going to get your site to rank better and convert more visitors.

soucre:
SearchEngineLand.com
Greg Gifford

How Search Engines Work - Video Blog

Search engines have two major functions - crawling & building an index, and providing answers by calculating relevancy & serving results.

Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system.

Each stop is its own unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other file). The search engines need a way to “crawl” the entire city and find all the stops along the way, so they use the best path available – links.

1. Crawling and IndexingCrawling and indexing the billions of documents, pages, files, news, videos and media on the world wide web.
2. Providing Answers Providing answers to user queries, most frequently through lists of relevant pages, through retrieval and rankings.

“The link structure of the web serves to bind all of the pages together.”

Through links, search engines’ automated robots, called “crawlers,” or “spiders” can reach the many billions of interconnected documents.
Once the engines find these pages, they next decipher the code from them and store selected pieces in massive hard drives, to be recalled later when needed for a search query. To accomplish the monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the search engines have constructed datacenters all over the world.
These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing large quantities of information. After all, when a person performs a search at any of the major engines, they demand results instantaneously – even a 1 or 2 second delay can cause dissatisfaction, so the engines work hard to provide answers as fast as possible.

Search engines are answer machines. When a person looks for something online, it requires the search engines to scour their corpus of billions of documents and do two things – first, return only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query, and second, rank those results in order of perceived usefulness. It is both “relevance” and “importance” that the process of SEO is meant to influence.

To a search engine, relevance means more than simply finding a page with the right words. In the early days of the web, search engines didn’t go much further than this simplistic step, and their results suffered as a consequence. Thus, through evolution, smart engineers at the engines devised better ways to find valuable results that searchers would appreciate and enjoy. Today, 100s of factors influence relevance, many of which we’ll discuss throughout this guide.

How Do Search Engines Determine Importance?

Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as popularity – the more popular a site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in practice, as the engines have continued to increase users’ satisfaction by using metrics that interpret popularity.

Popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually. Instead, the engines craft careful, mathematical equations – algorithms – to sort the wheat from the chaff and to then rank the wheat in order of tastiness (or however it is that farmers determine wheat’s value).

These algorithms are often comprised of hundreds of components. In the search marketing field, we often refer to them as “ranking factors” Moz crafted a resource specifically on this subject – Search Engine Ranking Factors.

Source: Moz.com

What Is Link Building & Why Is It Important? - Video Blog

Click here to download or read the complete guide to link building

Whether you're brand new to link building or have been doing it for a while, we're sure you'll find something useful in this guide. The landscape of SEO and link building is always changing, and today, the importance of building high-quality links has never been higher. The need to understand and implement high-quality campaigns is essential if you're going to compete and thrive online, and that isn't going to change any time soon. This guide is designed to get you going quickly and in the right direction. There is a lot to take in, but we've broken everything up into easy-to-digest chapters and have included lots of examples along the way. We hope you enjoy The Beginner's Guide to Link Building!

Definition of link building:

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites. There are many techniques for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, SEOs tend to agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of their jobs. Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it can truly put you ahead of both other SEOs and your competition.

Why is link building important for SEO?

In order to understand the importance of link building, it's important to first understand the basics of how a link is created, how the search engines see links, and what they can interpret from them.

 Source:
Moz.com

How Can Social Be A Springboard For Success In Other Digital Marketing Channels? - Video Blog

Keep in mind that neither your customers' experience nor your brand starts with Twitter, Facebook, or your blog. Social media should take your existing brand and solidify it, galvanize it, and bolster it. Your efforts in social media should be an extension of everything else you do in all departments of your company. Capturing your company's voice and sharing it with the world through social media will open up unique opportunities in all other channels of inbound marketing, including SEO, branding, public relations, sales, and more.

Relationships:

To get the most out of social media, make the relationships you build with it your end goal. That might sound a bit utopian for anyone who is grounded in more traditional and tangible business measurement and metrics, but take a step back from the bottom-line, ROI-seeking aspect to look at the big picture for a minute. The relationships built with customers are the foundations upon which other aspects of your business can and will flourish.
Relationships flourish when you cultivate them, and no other area offers you the opportunity to do this as well as social media. Social channels have broken down the walls between individuals at an unprecedented rate. In 2011, Facebook released data showing that its users were, on average, 3.74 degrees of separation away from one another, making them nearly as connected to each other as Kevin Bacon is to the rest of Hollywood. In the years since that study, the network has only continued to grow. That's pretty amazing, and social media can take credit for making it happen.

Some of the most successful SEOs and public relations professionals earn their notoriety, at least in part, from the relationships they are able to build. They're also good at what they do, of course, but great relationships bolster their already solid effort. The relationships you build with your customers lead to advocacy and loyalty, traits that can support your brand during both the good and the bad times, representing an investment that will remain strong on nearly any platform and under nearly any circumstances.

Feedback:

Information can be shared through social media at an amazingly fast pace, and users are increasingly turning to social channels to share information in real-time. This information often takes the form of opinions, so if you're listening for the right cues from your audience, social media can become an invaluable source of insights and feedback. Incorporating social listening into product development work can act as an early warning system, save on customer service costs, provide valuable development feedback, and even help identify ideal beta testers without much expense.

Integration:

Social media is not something you can simply "tack on" to the rest of your marketing, branding, PR, and advertising efforts; it needs to be a fully integrated part of the mix. In doing so, you can create a cohesive and scalable experience for your customers. Think of it as a means to an end, and not an end in itself. Also, it's not as hard as it sounds.
Be sure to integrate social media into your marketing efforts as early as possible to help amplify and solidify your work rather than waiting until the end of a planning cycle to explore social options. If a social presence is clear from the start, your branding will benefit from additional customer touchpoints, PR will see a lift in impressions and reach, and customer service can proactively listen and activate where necessary.
As you can see, a social presence can have far-reaching impact for your organization when it is executed in an authentic and thoughtful manner. By making social engagement a core part of your operations rather than an afterthought, you have a better shot at fully leveraging its power.

Source:
Moz.com

Why Does Your Company Need Social Media? - Social media

Whether you are running a small, local operation, or heading a global, enterprise-level effort, the statistics above make it clear: Your customers are online. They are interacting in social channels with their friends, colleagues, and other brands in search of information, recommendations, and entertainment. If your company is not around to answer, a competitor will be. In doing so, your competitor will quite likely take away the customer at hand, along with anyone else listening.

There are tons of opportunities to add value—even to delight!—and making that connection can help build a person's relationship with a company, brand, or representative. Those relationships create the foundation for what can eventually become one of your greatest marketing assets: customer advocacy.

Because so much of the customer experience now lives on the web, social media enables brands to take part in a customer's online experience outside of the typical channels.

If you ever find yourself in a bind, your advocates will help remind the rest of the world who they're rooting for. Advocacy is not something that you can stumble upon or buy. Advocacy is earned over time through continuous and positive engagement with your customer base. It is earned through experiences that delight, and through the delivery of the highest class of customer service.

Source:
Moz.com

Content Value Is An SEO Myth

Similar to how a page's value is judged against criteria such as uniqueness and the experience it provides to search visitors, so too does this principle apply to entire domains. Sites that primarily serve non-unique, non-valuable content may find themselves unable to rank, even if classic on and off page factors are performed acceptably. The engines simply don't want thousands of copies of Wikipedia or Amazon affiliate websites filling up their index, and thus use algorithmic and manual review methods to prevent this.

Search engines constantly evaluate the effectiveness of their own results. They measure when users click on a result, quickly hit the "back" button on their browser, and try another result. This indicates that the result they served didn't meet the user's query.

It's not enough just to rank for a query. Once you've earned your ranking, you have to prove it over and over again.

source:

Moz.com

Trustworthiness Is An SEO Myth

Websites that earn trusted status are often treated differently from those who have not. In fact, many SEOs have commented on the "double standards" that exist for judging "big brand" and high importance sites vs. newer, independent sites. For the search engines, trust most likely has a lot to do with the links your domain has earned. Thus, if you publish low quality, duplicate content on your personal blog, then buy several links from spammy directories, you're likely to encounter considerable ranking problems. However, if you were to post that same content to a page on Wikipedia and get those same spammy links to point to that URL, it would likely still rank tremendously well - such is the power of domain trust & authority.

Trust built through links is also a great method for the engines to employ. A little duplicate content and a few suspicious links are far more likely to be overlooked if your site has earned hundreds of links from high quality, editorial sources like CNN.com or Cornell.edu. On the flip side, if you have yet to earn high quality links, judgments may be far stricter from an algorithmic view.

Source:

Moz.com

Low Value Pages Is An SEO Myth

Although it may not technically be considered "web spam," the engines all have methods to determine if a page provides unique content and "value" to its searchers before including it in their web indices and search results. The most commonly filtered types of pages are "thin" affiliate content, duplicate content, and dynamically generated content pages that provide very little unique text or value. The engines are against including these pages and use a variety of content and link analysis algorithms to filter out "low value" pages from appearing in the results.

Google's 2011 Panda update took the most aggressive steps ever seen in reducing low quality content across the web, and Google continues to update this process

source:

Moz.com

Strategic Cloaking Is An SEO Myth

A basic tenet of all the search engine guidelines is to show the same content to the engine's crawlers that you'd show to an ordinary visitor. This means, among other things, not to hide text in the html code of your website that a normal visitor can't see.

When this guideline is broken, the engines call it "cloaking" and take action to prevent these pages from ranking in their results. Cloaking can be accomplished in any number of ways and for a variety of reasons, both positive and negative. In some cases, the engines may let practices that are technically "cloaking" pass, as they're done for positive user experience reasons. For more on the subject of cloaking and the levels of risk associated with various tactics and intents, see this post, White Hat Cloaking, from Rand Fishkin.

Source:

Moz.com

Manipulative Linking Is An SEO Myth

One of the most popular forms of web spam, manipulative link acquisition relies on the search engines' use of link popularity in their ranking algorithms to attempt to artificially inflate these metrics and improve visibility. This is one of the most difficult forms of spamming for the search engines to overcome because it can come in so many forms. A few of the many ways manipulative links can appear include:

• Reciprocal link exchange programs, wherein sites create link pages that point back and forth to one another in an attempt to inflate link popularity. The engines are very good at spotting and devaluing these as they fit a very particular pattern.
• Link schemes, including "link farms" and "link networks" where fake or low value websites are built or maintained purely as link sources to artificially inflate popularity. The engines combat these through numerous methods of detecting connections between site registrations, link overlap or other common factors.
• Paid links, where those seeking to earn higher rankings buy links from sites and pages willing to place a link in exchange for funds. These sometimes evolve into larger networks of link buyers and sellers, and although the engines work hard to stop them (and Google in particular has taken dramatic actions), they persist in providing value to many buyers & sellers (see this post on paid links for more on that perspective).
• Low quality directory links are a frequent source of manipulation for many in the SEO field. A large number of pay-for-placement web directories exist to serve this market and pass themselves off as legitimate with varying degrees of success. Google often takes action against these sites by removing the PageRank score from the toolbar (or reducing it dramatically), but won't do this in all cases.

There are many more manipulative link building tactics that the search engines have identified and, in most cases, found algorithmic methods for reducing their impact. As new spam systems emerge, engineers will continue to fight them with targeted algorithms, human reviews and the collection of spam reports from webmasters & SEOs.

source:

Moz.com

Search Engine Spam Is An SEO Myth

As long as there is search, there will always be spam. The practice of spamming the search engines - creating pages and schemes designed to artificially inflate rankings or abuse the ranking algorithms employed to sort content - has been rising since the mid-1990's.

With payouts so high (at one point, a fellow SEO noted to us that a single day ranking atop Google's search results for the query "buy viagra" could bring upwards of $20,000 in affiliate revenue), it's little wonder that manipulating the engines is such a popular activity on the web. However, it's become increasingly difficult and, in our opinion, less and less worthwhile for two reasons.

	1. Not Worth the Effort Users hate spam, and the search engines have a financial incentive to fight it. Many believe that Google's greatest product advantage over the last 10 years has been their ability to control and remove spam better than their competitors. It's undoubtedly something all the engines spend a great deal of time, effort and resources on. While spam still works on occasion, it generally takes more effort to succeed than producing "good" content, and the long term payoff is virtually non-existent. Instead of putting all that time and effort into something that the engines will throw away, why not invest in a value added, long term strategy instead? 2. Smarter Engines Search engines have done a remarkable job identifying scalable, intelligent methodologies for fighting spam manipulation, making it dramatically more difficult to adversely impact their intended algorithms. Complex concepts likeTrustRank (which Moz's Linkscape index leverages), HITS, statistical analysis, historical data and more have all driven down the value of search spam and made so-called "white hat" tactics (those that don't violate the search engines' guidelines) far more attractive. More recently, Google's Panda update introduced sophisticated machine learning algorithms to combat spam and low value pages at a scale never before witnessed online. If the search engines' job is to deliver quality results, they have raised the bar year after year. This guide is not intended to show off specific spam tactics, but, due to the large number of sites that get penalized, banned or flagged and seek help, we will cover the various factors the engines use to identify spam so as to help SEO practitioners avoid problems. For additional details about spam from the engines, see Google's Webmaster Guidelines and Bing's Webmaster FAQs (pdf). The important thing to remember is this: Not only do manipulative techniques not help you in most cases, but often times they cause search engines to impose penalties on your site. source: Moz.com

Paid Search Helps Boost Organic SEO Is An SEO Myth

Put on your tin foil hats, it's time for the most common SEO conspiracy theory: spending on search engine advertising (PPC) improves your organic SEO rankings.

In all of the experiences we've ever witnessed or heard about, this has never been proven nor has it ever been a probable explanation for effects in the organic results. Google, Yahoo! & Bing all have very effective walls in their organizations to prevent precisely this type of crossover.

At Google in particular, advertisers spending tens of millions of dollars each month have noted that even they cannot get special access or consideration from the search quality or web spam teams. So long as the existing barriers are in place and the search engines cultures maintain their separation, we believe that this will remain a myth. That said, we have seen anecdotal evidence that bidding on keywords you already organically rank for can help increase your organic click through rate.

Source: Moz.com