18 things you need to know about SEO

Let’s take a look at some of the bigger ticket issues folks should focus on when optimizing their websites.  This list is not meant to cover everything, but to focus in on some of the more important aspects you should look at addressing. The first part of this list is presented in a rough order of importance based on getting work done.  In many case, you’ll find your own circumstances won’t allow your focus and...
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Announcing the integration of Yahoo traffic data into Bing Webmaster Tools reports

Bing Webmaster Tools will now be showing integrated data from Yahoo within certain areas and reports.  Given the combined effort the Search Alliance represents, it makes sense to showcase relevant data from both engines within a webmaster account.  Most areas and data within the accounts will not be affected.  The short list of areas you will notice changes in are as follows: On the Traffic Tab: Traffic summary report and Page...
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Help protect yourself from accidental index removals

Waking up to find your website, or portion of it, has been removed from a search index can be a perplexing and frightening experience. What if you could help reduce that risk by restricting access to sensitive areas of webmaster tools, and render them “read only” for assigned individuals?  Bing’s Webmaster Tools places exactly that kind of control within reach.  By managing user access levels, you can control who has...
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Burning questions? Come talk to us at SES SF and SMX East

Join us at SES San Francisco and SMX East! Bing Webmaster, and other Bing groups such as Maps, Local, Mobile and Core Search, will be attending the shows looking to talk to folks.  We want your feedback on current features, and idea for new things you want to see us build out, so these shows are an excellent chance to talk directly to the folks who do the work inside Bing.  The Bing Booth will be prominently located, so swing by, chat...
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You love links. We love links. Build for the right reasons.

From an early stage people are taught that links are important to ranking well in the search engines.  Too many people believe that its quantity over quality. Worse yet, some folks believe success lies in selling, or buying, links.  Everyone agrees getting a good link is hard work and almost everyone has a formula for what they feel will work. Before I get into the detail in this post, I want to share a quick, recent story.  I was...
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How To Build Quality Content

Building quality content is far more than simply building content.  And how do we measure “quality”?  In this post we’ll examine some of the factors often attributed to “quality” content, explain why you want to include them and help explain how the measurement of “quality” happens, though it may not be what you expect. We’ll tackle these in reverse order, first examining what qualifies...
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The Power of Local – why small, local businesses matter so much

There are a lot of businesses operating in the US.  How many is “a lot”?  Well, back when the last set of official stats existed for 2007, Canada’s population was just over 30 million.  Now you’re wondering what Canada’s population has to do with local businesses in the US, right?  Well, there was almost the same number of businesses in the US in 2007 as the population of Canada!  The actual...
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Keyword research: a wise investment of time

Keyword research. It should be the beginning of every content-related project you work on.  From search to social and from paid search through building your website’s navigation, keyword research will provide insights that can set you up for success.  In this blog post we’ll examine why you should perform the research and what the data is telling you.  We’ll also look at one internal Microsoft tool, and help you...
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Schema.org workshop announced - Sept. 21, 2011

On June 2nd we announced a collaboration between Bing, Google and Yahoo to create and support a standard set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. Although our companies compete in many ways, it was evident to us that collaboration in this space would be good for each search engine individually and for the industry as a whole. In the short time since the announcement we’ve received a lot of great feedback. We have participated...
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Webmaster Tools updates: expanded sitemap files types, new language coverage and more

While Bing Webmaster Tool users have been enjoying the latest features such as crawl control and user management announced in early June at SMX Advanced as part of the Honey Badger update, behind the scenes we’ve been working on the next round of improvements for the tools. The focus of the improvements released late last week are across a few main areas: Sitemaps Communication Internationalization Expanded navigation Sitemap file type...
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