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Webmaster Blog — Jul 2011

  • Jul
    29
    20 11

    The Power of Local – why small, local businesses...

    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 number the US Census Bureau states for businesses in the US for 2007 was 27, 757,676 . WOW! Now, here’s a more telling stat. Of those almost 28 million businesses in the US, roughly 22 million of them had no payroll. This means there were no “employees” in the traditional sense. This leaves me wondering how many of those 22+ million businesses have the time and ability to effectively market themselves online? My guess is relatively few of them. We do know, thanks to SEMPO, that the search services sector will hit $19 billion in spending this year, so it’s clear that a lot of those businesses are spending money on search services. As anyone in the industry can tell you, we’ve also seen an explosion in search service providers willing... Read More 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 number the US Census Bureau states for businesses in the US for 2007 was 27, 757,676 . WOW! Now, here’s a more telling stat. Of those almost 28 million businesses in the... Read More
    • Comments (3)
  • Jul
    25
    20 11

    Keyword research: a wise investment of...

    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 understand how to use the data shown in any tool to best effect. What the data is telling you In the most basic view, keyword research is telling you how many people searched for a given keyword or phrase, over a set period of time. With experience you'll be able to understand subtle shifts in searcher behavior, and tailor your efforts to maximize returns. By performing this research, you will much more clearly see how searchers perform searches. Some patterns you may see emerge as you study the data are: The use the plural v. singular versions of a word. The use of a single word v. multi-word phrases. Whether brand names factor into the searches. Patterns based on time of year, month or week. New, related keywords or phrases you may not have thought of... Read More 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 understand how to use the data shown in any tool to best effect. What the data is telling you In the most basic view, keyword research is telling you how many people searched for a given... Read More
    • Comments (1)
  • Jul
    25
    20 11

    Schema.org workshop announced - Sept. 21...

    On June 2 nd 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 in some conferences and we have seen a lot of discussion about our proposal on the web. We’ve also seen the Association of Educational Publishers publically announce their intention to build an industry specific extension! We’re genuinely pleased to see so much interest in the topic as it is very important to the work we do. We have been reading all of the feedback, following the discussions and debating amongst our working group many of the concerns and suggestions that have been raised. We have not been able to respond to all of the feedback, but we have incorporated some of it into our site already and we will continue to iterate on that. Going forward, this blog will serve as a vehicle for the team to share our thoughts... Read More On June 2 nd 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 in some conferences and we have seen a lot of discussion about our proposal on the web. We’ve also seen the Association of Educational Publishers... Read More
    • Comments (0)
  • Jul
    01
    20 11

    Webmaster Tools updates: expanded sitemap...

    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 expansion To improve the toolset for users wanting to upload sitemap types other than .xml files, we've enabled the ability for our system to consume TXT, Atom and RSS types. Currently the list is as seen in the image below: RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0, .txt files. Still included are standard .xml files. Watch for further expansion of this list of files types in the future. Staying current just got easier To help facilitate communication between webmasters and Bing, we've added the ability to opt in for notices from us. If we're seeing malware issues on your site, these alerts can help notify you quickly. If there are crawl errors happening when we try to find your content, these alerts will help you understand what... Read 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 expansion To improve the toolset for users wanting to upload sitemap types other than .xml files, we've enabled the ability for our system... Read More
    • Comments (15)

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