Last week we talked about the coming of the Chicken.  I found it amusing that I started, almost immediately, to get tweets from folks asking if this was an algo update that was pending.

Was Chicken maybe a code name for a big update we were planning ahead of SMX Advanced?  Would more animals follow?  Perhaps Chicken was organic, and Cow might affect Image Search.

Fact is, it’s not. 

This Chicken cometh bearing a gift.

The reality is much simpler and in keeping with something we’ve been working to stay focused on here at Bing Webmaster Tools for the last couple of years…helping businesses. 

You’ve seen it through the deep toolset we released one year ago this week (with SEO reporting and now, competitive link analysis tools built in).  You’ve seen it in the Webmaster Guidelines we published earlier this year.  You’ve seen it in the Help and How-To documentation we’ve shared.  You’ve seen it in the webinars we’ve produced over the last 12 months (and there were about 12 we’ve been involved with over that time), you’ve seen it in the Sitemap Plugin we released for IIS and Apache servers, and you’ll see more of it as we move forward and work on sharing more information to help businesses plan and execute sound strategies.

Below you will find a video designed to help people understand some common areas they can take action in to improve their product, ranking and traffic.

The blog used for the video belongs to a coworker here at Bing, and is a hobby website her and her husband have so close friends can stay abreast of what’s up with their chickens.  Yup, they have chickens in Seattle (though they remain Chickless in Seattle), and yes, I scored some fresh eggs… (and if you’ve never tried fresh eggs, you need to – life altering!) …but that’s beside the point.  Nothing fancy, but a starting point for their aspirations of dominating the world of Chicken News, maybe…

The point behind the video is to help websites, new and old, through a hands-on review of a live site.  Their goal was to better understand what they could do to drive traffic, and now they, and you, know.  It’s true we don’t cover everything in the video – there was simply not enough time.  But, it’s a starting point for many folks, and hopefully, you’ll find a couple of funny moments in there, too… I mean, when was the last time YOU brought a chicken to the office?

We looked at some common issues many websites have around robots.txt files and sitemap.xmls.  We talked about content and explored new ideas for content creation, and built off existing ideas already in place. 

There were actually two chickens involved here: Business Chicken, who you see in the video, and Party Chicken, who was lounging in the green room (a crate with popcorn & bourbon handy – OK, popcorn yes, bourbon, no…) in case Business Chicken decided not to play ball.  She was awesome, though, I have to say.  A real pro.

We had a hoot and a half filming this (or maybe it was a cluck and a half…).  Unlikely we’ll ever bring in a Honey Badger for filming though, so you can skip those requests right now.

…and I guess Security will finally have proof that we had chickens in the building… 😉

Duane Forrester
Sr. Product Manager
Bing Webmaster Tools