Today’s new businesses have much in common with their older counterparts. The need to acquire new leads, drive revenue, market their product or service. The need to manage overhead, do more with less and stay one step ahead of the competition. So from, say 1974 to 2014, some things haven’t changed much. One thing you never started a business without “back in the day” was a business plan. And that same thinking should be in place today, but in a...
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The Bing/Inc Roadshow is coming to an end. It’s been a jam packed tour for the last 4 events in Nashville, Chicago, Atlanta and Boston, with capacity crowds, excellent questions and easy access to answers. The panel, with industry heavyweights such as Maisha Walker of Message Medium, Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc, Marty Weintraub of aimClear (and myself) is set to meet up again during the final road show event in Houston, Texas. It promises to be...
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Malware, and the possibility of infection, is an unfortunate reality facing internet users today. At Bing, we take our job of providing a safe searching experience to our customers very seriously and this anti-malware effort is one of the core elements of the Bing Index Quality charter. We’ve been in this game for many years and have developed comprehensive solutions that minimize user’s risk of infection and maintain the integrity of our index...
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For every business online come an almost limitless number of areas to learn about, become proficient in and continually work on. Many people end up good in an area because repetition and the “school of hard knocks” teaches them a workable path. And while some areas are no brainers (knowing your product, for example), they still can present legitimate challenges to a business. Areas like Usability often get talked about, but are just as often...
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The internet can often feel like a giant cesspool of low quality, illegal or malicious documents. The mere mention of malware, adware and viruses is enough to send even the most experienced internet surfers running for cover. And yet, these represent just the tip of the iceberg of poor quality documents. Searchers also have to deal with phishing sites, fraudulent sites or sites propagating scams, spammy sites…. Well, you get the picture. On top of...
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Sometimes, despite a webmaster’s best efforts, Bing may choose to serve a title that is different to the title of a web site or document. Let’s walk through the process to see how Bing selects a title and what you can do to help us select yours. You have probably designed your site to maximize your CTR, you have reviewed best practices and SEO techniques, and you have a plan to maintain relevant and up-to-date content. Your HTML Title is exactly...
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In January we told you about our goal to bring the Power of Bing Knowledge to Webmasters. In April we followed up on that promise and announced Bing Knowledge Widget. For the first time, we empowered every webmaster to use the entity data from the Bing Knowledge repository. Since then, webmasters have added the embed code to thousands of pages to enhance their websites with the rich entity information from the Bing Knowledge system. Integration...
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The Bing Webmaster Tools and Inc. Magazine Roadshow scheduled for Chicago this week officially sold out earlier today! Great news for the folks who are intending to come to the Wit Hotel this Thursday! This follows a standing-room-only kickoff event in Nashville three weeks ago. The sad news is, for those in Chicago, we’re at capacity, though check for a wait list. The good news is we’ve got three more dates/cities to hit after Chicago...
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One of the key Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies for web sites is to have high quality sitemaps helping search engines to discover and access all relevant content posted on that web site. Sitemaps offer this really simple way for site owners to share information with every search engine about the content they have on their site instead of having to rely solely on crawling algorithms (ie: crawlers, robots) to find it. The Sitemaps...
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Over the last few years, we’ve had our Webmaster forums up and running. They’ve been around a while now in a few iterations, and like any community, the goal is to grow it to be vibrant and engaging. To foster the deep involvement of experts who help others, creating a community that contributes to improvements and makes its own gravity. There comes a time, however, when you sometimes need to re-evaluate, and once in a while, regroup. Thus as of...
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