In my previous post on developing your keyword list, we discussed techniques and considerations for developing a list of relevant keywords and key phrases for the pages on your website that are highly specific and (hopefully) not overly competitive. All of this is effort is geared toward making your website stand out from the competition in search engine results pages (SERPs). But developing a list of great keywords is just the start. You now...
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Mark Twain once famously said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” Twain never saw a webpage or performed search engine optimization (SEO) in his life, but his assessment of the importance of using the right words is, shall we say, illuminated. So why are words important in terms of SEO? Because users type them into search engines to try to find you!...
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Quick note from the author: The closing teaser from my last post said the next post would cover building a toolbox. I’ve decided to take another tack on this and make references to tools as we go along in the series to keep the unfolding story as interesting, active, and relevant as possible. Sorry for the misdirection! – Rick ———————————————...
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I have a good friend who creates websites for personal users and small non-profits. When I told him about my new project, blogging about search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO), he wondered aloud, “Who in the world cares about that stuff? What does it matter? There are only so many Amazons in the world, anyway.” I was initially surprised by his reaction. But his comments got me thinking – what is the...
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As a VP candidate once famously said, “Who am I? Why am I here?” I’m Rick DeJarnette, and I’ve been with the Live Search Webmaster Center team since fall, 2008, learning the ropes, helping with writing and editing work on both the tools Help system and the blog. I have a long and advanced technical writing background, focused on both IT Pro and end user topics. I’ve been involved with web technologies since the mid...
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The Live Search development team is busy making significant improvement to the quality and depth of our search index, and these changes often affect how our crawler, MSNBot, collects data. As we test new algorithms, we invite webmasters to contact us to give us feedback on these changes, especially if you have any concerns. Live Search always encourages webmasters to use our product support escalation paths to help identify and resolve issues as...
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Life can be cruel. You work hard to create new and compelling content for your site. You’ve studied legitimate SEO techniques. Everything is going well and your site is getting decent page rank scores across the board. Then it hits. A search engine penalty comes out of nowhere and knocks your site out of the index. Talk about a bad day. To be honest, most webmasters who get penalized know why it happened. They’ve used a myriad of...
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A few weeks ago, we wrote a post addressing the often-asked question of how to remove a URL from the Live Search index. Since then, we’ve received many questions about the process and wanted to provide more details about the turn-around time for processing these requests.. The reason for removal can affect the time needed to do the work. We strive to process each removal request within 48 hours of acceptance. However, some requests require...
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One of the best parts of publishing online is that, on the Web, anyone can have a world-wide reach. But while being global is made easy on the Internet, ensuring that the content you produce will be found by the right audience can be a real challenge. Search engines can have trouble understanding geotargeting because of a few technical limitations. These include: Search engines may not be crawling your site from the location of your customers...
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One of the most common challenges search engines run into when indexing a website is identifying and consolidating duplicate pages. Duplicates can occur when any given webpage has multiple URLs that point to it. For example: URL Description http://mysite.com A webmaster may consider this their authoritative or canonical URL for their homepage. http://www.mysite.com However, you can add ‘www’ to most websites and still get the...
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