Let’s take it easy this week with a quick review of what’s important to focus on, and why it’s important to stay focused on impressing your customer. We’ll start out with a quick review of top things to invest time in, share some useful blog posts on related topics and wrap up with some broader thinking around understanding, and catering to, your customer. 1 – the basics of SEO need covering – <title>, <...
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During the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time with startups. It’s always an amazing view of the world, to see things through the eyes of a small company or individual who is so focused on their product or service, that everything else is secondary. These folks are focused. Like a laser! They have an idea they believe in 100%. Every waking minute is spent in pursuit of achieving their goal. Spent in pursuit of supporting and moving...
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Last week we launched Connected Pages, allowing you to connect your social pages within your webmaster account, with the benefit being you get to see data about the social pages. We’ve seen a huge amount of activity with businesses connecting pages in the week since launch and for that, we’re thankful! As a quick overview here is the data you can now see inside WMT when you connect pages: On the Connected Pages Homepage: Impression...
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For any business, claiming an account inside our Webmaster Tools allows access to a lot of useful information. SEO Reports, link data (for your site and other sites), ranking information, keyword traffic data and so much more. Yet even all this usefulness comes with a limit. We could only show you data related to the websites you own or controlled. Today, however, we’re releasing the Connected Pages feature within Bing Webmaster Tools...
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Often you won’t know the quality of work to expect from an "SEO Expert" until you’ve already paid the bills, and the results simply fail to show up. In some cases, however, it’s a bit more obvious. Below is a solicitation email I received this week to my personal email address. An email address this company did not possess because I shared it with them, which means they either scraped the email from somewhere, or have...
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Well, not really, but maybe you could argue that that asteroid was a kind of “mobile”. And while those creatures would have been powerless to change their fate – extinction – today’s businesses are much better equipped to survive, if they take prudent and timely action. Which leads to the question… Are You Ignoring Mobile? We are hear the chatter about how important mobile is. But are you taking any action...
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Actually, there is more than just one rut, in reality. It’s more like a collection of ruts. It’s CRS. Cultural Rut Syndrome. And it’s when your business is making decisions based on “culture”, “history” or “process” instead of on, say, data, customer feedback or from the results of testing. Oh, sure, everyone likes to brag up how they do A/B testing, how they have guidelines for content...
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In the wake of the release of Windows 8.1 we are releasing a new tool inside Bing Webmaster Tools that helps web publishers manage the page previews that are shown in one of 8.1’s new features: Bing Smart Search. Using the Page Preview tool, which you can find in the Configure My Site section, you can now view, block, or a refresh of the page preview image shown for a given page on your website in the Bing Smart Search results. Bing...
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Social is all about sharing.  For businesses, the toughest part is figuring out how to encourage more sharing.  How to actually make that step happen. The obvious first step is positioning of the sharing options.  Place them out of the way and visitors simply won’t see them or won’t take the action. If you allow the human mind to *think* something is work, it’ll avoid it as if it was work. Making me look for a way...
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Video sitemaps or video mrss feeds can be submitted via Bing Webmaster Tools. This can be done either directly from the Sitemap widget on the webmaster Dashboard or from within the Sitemaps feature. We support various video feed or sitemap formats. See this blog post for details. Processing sitemaps can take from a few hours up to a few days. If you have questions you can email at bingfeed@microsoft.com. How To Submit Sitemaps From Bing...
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