Is your site ranking rank? Do a site review – Part 4 (SEM 101)

This is the fourth of five posts on the topic of conducting your own site reviews. In the previous posts, we discussed why you'd want to perform a site review (Part 1), then took an initial look at page-level issues (Part 2), followed by a discussion of site-wide issues (Part 3), that can affect site performance for users and search engine ranking. In this post, we continue our look at site-wide issues that should also be examined in a site...
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Is your site ranking rank? Do a site review – Part 3 (SEM 101)

Let's continue our run-down of issues to consider in a site review. In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the whats and whys for doing a site review, and covered baselining pre-optimized performance and gathering tools. Part 2 covered important but often overlooked on-page issues that, if not properly addressed, can prove detrimental to a site's performance, both for search engine ranking as well as for usability and discoverability for...
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A king’s feast of video content, thanks to mRSS

One of the oldest truisms of Internet search is the familiar axiom, “content is king.” But while that’s great in concept, the premise only goes so far in reality. If your site is rich in text-based content, which is easily crawled and indexed by search engine bots, that content can stand on the merits of its relevance and value in earning you appropriate page ranking. But this is 2010; text is not the only game in town. What if...
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Is your site ranking rank? Do a site review – Part 2 (SEM 101)

Part 1 of this series of blog posts on site reviews, we covered the whats and whys of conducting a site review of your website to see if you are ranking where you want to be. If you have compelling content to share with your users, you want them to find your site! After installing and registering to use the many webmaster tools available on the Web (such as the Bing Webmaster Center tools and the Free SEO Toolkit!), you're ready to start...
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How to optimize image content (From the Forums)

Today’s forum thread of note is a discussion around what can be done to optimize image content for SEO. Several members of the Bing Webmaster Center forum community have chimed in with helpful advice. What do you do on your site to optimize images? What have you found to be most important when adding images to a website? Join in the conversation! To see this forum conversation thread from the beginning, check out How do we optimize images...
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Your top tech tips for SEO (From the Forums)

We have another interesting conversation thread to highlight today as our latest From the Forums column selection. One of our helpful users in the Bing community posted his list of the top “45 points for SEO.” This post has generated a good many forum reader replies – most positive, a few critical, and many contributing their own additional points to the conversation. What are your top tech tips for SEO? What have you done to...
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Most important tasks for SEO? (From the Forums)

Today’s highlighted conversation in the From the Forums column has a user ask, “What are the most important tasks for SEO?”. The conversation started back a while ago, but the quantity and quality of ideas generated are interesting to peruse. I want to specifically point out the recent post to this conversation by Brett Yount, our forums administrator (who, as of late, seems to be receiving more and more queries addressed to...
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301 to 404 gets 200 – oops! (From the Forums)

In another installment of the From the Forums column, today we have an interesting thread about a website that updated its content and used 301 redirects to migrate users to the new content. However, the transition to the new content in the Bing index was taking longer than they expected. The old content was not fading away. The amazing volunteer members of our community jumped right in and began examining the site in question. It was soon...
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Chasing the long tail with keyword research (SEM 101)

When a key opens a lock, it typically provides the key’s holder with a clear path to where he or she wants to go. Keywords and key phrases do the same for a website. They help direct searchers to content they wish to see on the Internet. But there is a key difference: whereas a lock key will typically match up with only one lock, keywords can lead a searcher down multiple paths to many matching, relevant websites. It is a filtering process...
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