Consumers are looking for local information. As a business owner, how do you earn not only the attention, but the business of today’s digitally savvy consumers? At Bing, we are always looking for ways to simplify your experience of managing your business online, and help increase the discoverabilityof your business by millions of users.   The launch of Bing Places for Business in the UK and Canada is the first of many steps in our...
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[not provided] got ya down? Feeling blue because your analytics won’t share data with you? Worried about decisions because of data prohibitions? Well, I’d love to tell you to not worry about it, but it’s the reality today. It’s the new norm and we have to roll with it. And it can pose challenges, no doubt. But is it the “end”? Hardly. Like so many times in the past, it simply means that SEOs need to get creative...
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Business owners who sign up for a Webmaster Tools account to analyze their SEO, check links and view reports can receive a credit for their search advertising on Bing Ads. Now we’ve extended this promotion outside of the US & Canada to France, Germany and the UK. Values are aligned for each country where the offer is applied (so the offer is $50 USD or equivalent in your location). There are also standing offers for Canada and the US in...
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Guesses abound. Supposition runs rampant. So-called experts profess to know what it takes. Smart, quiet types confidently smile feeling they know the secret. And if the average inbox is to be believed, the secrets to ranking better can be yours for the low, Low, LOW price of $10, this Sunday, SUNDAY, SUNDAY! Since the first search engine crawled out of the early morning haze that was a late night frat party…or from a quiet-type’s...
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On the 23rd of May this year we released Bing XML Sitemap Plugin 1.0: the open-source server plugin for IIS and Apache that helps websites generate XML Sitemaps compliant with sitemaps.org. The Bing XML Sitemap Plugin — which you can download from here— is unique among its peers in that it: Generates comprehensive Sitemaps based on incoming traffic Generates “delta” Sitemaps based on signature...
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Links matter.  No secret there.  How much they matter, well…therein lies the secretive part of the equation.  And as much as readers of this blog would love for me to slip up and say they account for N% of the equation, I won’t. The fact is, the actual value links apply varies based on other factors, so there is no solid number.  Back when everyone was chasing “keyword density” as a ranking objective...
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You’ve built your site.  You’ve included the latest ways to let people login.  You’ve made social sharing easy.  You’ve streamlined your shopping cart.  You’ve optimized your pages for load times.  In short, you’ve built the perfect beast, if I can paraphrase Don Henley. And during this build out, your engineering tested everything they installed diligently, right?  I mean, they...
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Things change quickly these days, so let’s take a look at some things, that as an SEO, you should know about today.  It often takes years for new areas of focus to reach many businesses in a meaningful way.  Everyone’s list of things to work on grows, and it’s tough to find space for the newest things to be added and prioritized.  This is true of new ways to do things, new tools and new tactics. With this in mind...
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We’ve brought you lists in the past, such as 27 Things That Help and Hurt SEO, 8 Skills and SEO Must Possess and 4 Areas of Search & Social Focus.  They’ve been, in general, pretty focused.  Now we’re going to bring forward a broader view of a general plan designed to help businesses set up a reasonable starting point from which to grow. We see this type of planning lacking in so many businesses today, and with some...
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Many businesses are focused on the technical side of SEO, trying to gain either large increases in rankings, or striving to eke out incremental gains, knowing that ranking well equates to more traffic, sales and revenue. Now, that technical SEO has always been important (indeed, that work WAS SEO for many years), and it will continue to need to be managed.  But pinning your hopes on technical SEO alone is a mistake. For a year+ now you&rsquo...
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