Webmaster Blog

6 Hours of SEO, Social, Crawling and Authority Webinars in 1 Post

Duane Forrester — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:41:28 GMT

We’ve had thousands of people view these webinars, but if you haven’t seen them yet, here they are again. During the fall and winter, we put together a series of 6 webinars. Each is about an hour long, and captures the webinar presentation, as well as the live Q&A we did during each session.

Each webinar was free and open to anyone to join, which is a format we’ll obviously keep in the future. If there are topics you’d like covered in future webinars, let me know and we’ll see what can be done to get them produced. Drop your ideas in the comments below.

We covered a wide range of topics in over 6 hours of programming:

SEO 101

Started here with an overview of what to focus on, what to invest and why it matters. For most folks, its standard stuff, but for those new to the space, it’s a useful review.

Crawling Basics

In this session we talked more in depth about how we crawl, why we crawl and what we’re looking for. We gave tips on creating a site that search engines want to crawl, too.

Bing Webmaster Tools Overview

This webinar was designed to help folks learn more about the tools, how to use them and uncover useful data. We walked through all of the then-current tools and covered tips and tricks for finding and interpreting data. SEO Reports, Link Explorer, everything was covered, though we’ll need to provide some updates after our latest tools which were recently released (Site Move & Geo Targeting).

Authority Building

This webinar covered the topic of Authority. What it means to an engine, why we seek it in sites we index and what you can do to build your own authority, with an eye towards ranking better.

Search & Social

Here we looked into the merging of search and social signals, why social plays a role in search, what you can do to leverage social and how things are evolving.

Tomorrow’s SEO

This webinar wrapped up our series with a two-level view across this topic. First we explored the slow evolution of changing SEO tactics and pointed to ways to spot trends and be ready for change. The second portion dealt with managing your career as an SEO, listing out what skills you’ll need to be successful in the future and explaining why.

We had a lot of fun connecting with folks through our webinars, and we’re hoping to plan more in the future. It’s always great to make connections with folks running businesses today, and hearing directly from them what they’re working on and what type of help and support they need.

Duane Forrester
Sr. Product Manager
Bing Webmaster Tools

The Power of Bing Ads Infographic

Duane Forrester — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:36:00 GMT

The Bing Ads team has been hard at work. From launching Sitelinks that allows deeper engagement, more messaging, and improve CTR to the continued global expansion, the Bing Ads team is certainly riding the momentum to deliver a new improvements and functionality.

To show some of the recent progress, the team created this nifty infographic on the Power of Bing Ads. If you’re not a Bing Ads customer, you can sign up here.

If you've got a microscope handy, enjoy the info right here. Otherwise, click the image to see the full size version.

Query v. Session: Expanding Your Keyword Research Envelope

Duane Forrester — Fri, 03 May 2013 16:44:00 GMT

If you’re into search engine optimization at any level, you know that keyword research is the beginning of the journey. It’s your best bet to understanding what people are searching for and what content should be most popular on your site.

And, we’re all used to using the standard tools to perform the research. Enter a keyword, related keywords are returned along with the query volumes over a selected date range. To be fair, one engine’s tools limits this to the past 30 days or so, while one engine lets you see organic data with a selectable date range of up to 6 months. Differences aside, the work you’re doing remains the same: looking for query volume data.

Query v. Session

Maybe it’s time to start a new practice in your keyword research process. Try linking like-queries together over time to gain a sense of what the searcher is trying to accomplish. One query (and the data behind it) while providing pinpoint accuracy, may not tell the entire story. Developing a view of that searcher’s session, however, can be very revealing.

Here’s an example of the query v. session approach:

Query:

dog

Session:

Monday:
dog
adopt a dog
dog breeds
cavalier king charles spaniel
dog beds
dog accessories
dog toys
vet near me
dog friendly hotels
organic dog food
doggy day care

Tuesday:
puppy training
housebreaking a puppy
bringing a puppy home
dog sweaters
dog collars
dog leashes
dog park
dog allergies
pictures of ckcs

Beyond the obvious, if you look closely, you’ll see a pattern in the session data. With the query dog, while it has a lot of volume, you can’t understand the searcher’s intent. With the session data, however, a picture emerges that points to someone looking to get a new dog, adopt a dog, and maybe even a clue as to the actual breed the searcher is seeking.

If you can construct this session view of the keywords your visitors search on, it can help unlock a view into what they are trying to accomplish, making it easier for you to know what of your products, content and services should be shown and where.

If you have products that help with everything needed when a person brings a new puppy home, clearly the searcher in our example wants to know about them. And even if they show up after searching for breeds of dogs, or dog breeds, having built a session view around what entry keywords people find you on can help you know what content to link off to on the page they land on.

Getting the work done

While the traditional keyword research tools available today are great at helping with query-related research, building this session view is considerably more work. No tool exists right now that can tell you what a session looks like. In fact, for every website, those sessions could easily be highly individual. But where to start…?

Start with keyword research as usual. Then start looking at your analytics and building a view of the pathways people take through your site based on keywords they click to visit you. It’s worth taking the time to at least try to build this view out simply because of the insights about your visitors it can showcase. Look through your server logs if needed, just try your hardest to figure out what keywords people are coming to you through, and start working to understand what else interests them.

Now, just because no defacto tools exist to easily supply this view for you, doesn’t mean some smart folks out there can’t figure out a way. This industry is loaded with smart people doing clever things, after all.

If you’d like us to build such a tool, hit the comments below and get chatty. We can’t read minds, and the more people who speak up saying they need/want a particular feature, the better.

Duane Forrester
Sr. Product Manager
Bing

Announcing Malware Re-Evaluation and Geo-Targeting in Webmaster Tools

Vincent Wehren — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 23:30:00 GMT

Today, we are releasing two new features in Bing Webmaster Tools. The first feature — the new Malware tool — helps you understand whether or not you site contains malware and also allows you to submit and track a “Malware Re-Evaluation” request. You can find the new Malware tool in the Reports & Data section. The second feature — Geo-Targeting — helps you provide Bing with information about the audience you are targeting with your site or a section of your site. You can find the Geo-Targeting feature under the Configure my Site section. Let’s look at both these features a bit more closely.

A New Malware Re-Evaluation Workflow

Every day, thousands and thousands of sites on the web — many of them owned by webmasters like yourself — are unknowingly infected by malware. Often, this happens because of some vulnerability that allowed a malware distributor or hacker to take control of the site. As a result, the security of unsuspecting visitors is at risk, too. Therefore, to protect our Bing users, we scan the web to look for web pages that have been infected. If Bing detects that a site is willingly or unwillingly serving malware, or contains harmful elements that put our searchers at risk, we will tell our users that the page they are about to visit from our results could be dangerous. In addition, the webmaster of the site receives a notification in the form of a Malware Alert in their Bing Webmaster Tools Message Center.

The new Malware tool provides information about the malware we detected on the site. Previously some of this information was encompassed in the Crawl Information tool, but with the new Malware tool you not only get access to more details that help you understand the nature of the issue, it also allows webmasters to submit and track a malware re-evaluation request once they have cleaned their site.

What happens when I submit the request?

Once you submit a request, you immediately can track the status and progress inside the Malware tool. During the review period, we will perform several deep re-scans to establish if the site is truly free of malware. It is therefore important that affected site owners take the utmost care to ensure that all harmful elements – not just those listed in the list of sample URLs – have been addressed. Also, any vulnerabilities and security holes that allowed the infection to occur should be plugged. It is important not to request a re-evaluation unless you have done this work first and established that you’re good to go: if the malware is found during the review period, the re-evaluation will fail and you will not be able to submit another re-evaluation request for some time. However, if we register several clean scans, you will get the “all clear” and the malware warning for your site will be removed from our search results pages.

For more information about the Malware tool, see the help Malware help topic in our Bing Webmaster Help Center.

Geo-Targeting Your Pages to Specific Country Audiences

In addition to the new Malware tool we are launching a new feature called Geo-Targeting. This tool allows you to provide Bing with information about the intended audience for your site or a section of your site. Whereas other Webmaster Tools let you geo-target sites only at the site level, Bing Geo-Targeting provides you with a more flexibility: multinational sites do not need to verify each section they want to geo-target separately. Instead, Bing allows you to define a country affinity for your entire website or for sections of your website from within a single view and from within a single site account. On top of that, you can geo-target your site on multiple levels:

At the domain level: this option allows you to geo-target an entire domain to a specific country. This option is available to sites that are on so called “geo-targetable top-level domains”, such as .com, .org, .net. With a few exceptions, sites with country-code TLDs (ccTLD) will not be able to set a country-affinity at the domain level, as the ccTLD continues to provide the stronger hint. However, they will be able to use all of the following options as well.
At the subdomain level: this option allows you to set a country affinity for an entire subdomain on your site. This is great option if you are using sub-domains on your site to segment your content by country, say http://nl.example.comfor the Netherlands.
At the directory level: this option allows you to set a country affinity for a specific folder on your site. A great option if you are using country-specific directories or folders on your site, say http://www.example.com/italy/for Italy. All pages within the folder will be considered to be for your Italian audience.
At the page level: for even more flexibility, you can define country affinity at the page level. This is a great option if you have a single landing page dedicated to visitors from a specific country. For example, a site in the Netherlands — hosted on the a .nl ccTLD — can designate a single page, say http://www.example.nl/willkommen-deutsche-gaeste.html to be targeted at a German audience .
(Note that when multiple geo-targeting rules apply to a page, we will use the most specific. In other words, the order of precedence is: page > folder > subdomain > domain)

When should I use Geo-Targeting?

You should use the Geo-Targeting feature for sites or sections of a site that have been created for an audience in a specific country. You generally don’t need to geo-target sites (or site sections) that are aimed at a global audience or that apply to multiple countries. If, for example, you have a multilingual site that has a German (language) section, you needn’t geo-target it specifically to Germany if you also are targeting other German-speaking audiences such as from Switzerland and Austria with the same content.

Once you have geo-targeted a site or site section, your input will be seen as a strong signal that adds to other signals we are already using one that gets stronger as we see more data. You should therefore start today and make sure to use the Geo-Targeting tool as an integral part of your long-term global SEO strategy.

Enjoy!

Vincent Wehren
Senior Program Manager
Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Business Portal is Now Bing Places for Business

Bing Search Blog — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:52:38 GMT

Your customers are online – are you?

We know time is in short supply when you are busy running your business. That’s why at Bing we are always looking for ways to simplify your experience of getting your business online and managing your business reputation on the web. The launch of Bing Places for business is the first of many steps in our effort to provide you with all the tools you need to easily and quickly find local customers online.

Whether you are new to Bing Places for Business or if you had already claimed your listing on BBP, please review the scenarios below for applicability to your business.

1.) If you’re new to Bing Places for Business, e.g. your business was never claimed, go and claim your listing now.

2.) If you already have a business listing verified, rest assured that your data will be migrated from Bing Business Portal to the new web experience under Bing Places for Business over the next 3-4 days.

a. Note: where you used to have to email in a spreadsheet for bulk uploads, you will now be able to perform that upload through the web interface.

3.) If you had a listing under Bing Business Portal, but never completed the verification process, you will need to do so before your listing will appear to potential customers.

4.) Finally, remember customers have a lot of options when searching online. Put your best foot forward by uploading detailed information about your business e.g. days and hours of operation, payments accepted, parking information and pictures to engage those customers.

Just use the same username/password to access your existing information at http://bing.com/places.

Also as part of our drive to simplify the experience we are retiring a few business promotion and management services that were being previously offered. Starting today we will no longer provide the option of creating deals, coupons, QR codes and mobile sites as well as removing the ability to create and print collateral for your business.

Finally, as we said at the outset – this is only the first step. Our goal is to make it easier to claim, enhance and promote businesses on Bing.

Stay tuned for exciting updates in the coming months.

- Ginny Sandhu, Senior Product Manager, Bing

SEOs With Their Heads in the Sand?

Duane Forrester — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:01:25 GMT

Over the last 3 months I’ve spoken at 9 conferences and done 5 live webinars. And a trend has emerged, unfortunately. This trend is split between companies and consultants, though from along the singular line of SEO work.

To illustrate, I’ll paraphrase a recent Twitter exchange. No names, to protect the innocent, and if they read this, ferme la bouche… ;)

Tweeter: Duane, we have a lot of problems with scrapers. If we write a message for them to stop in the meta keywords tags, will we get penalized?
Duane: Huh…? Wha…? Por que? I mean, WTH…?

Tweeter: We think we can get them to stop scraping if we post a message there to them.
Duane: Well, it’s unlikely you’ll get penalized, but if the message is way off topic, the algo might look at you funny, wondering why you’re tag is so oddball. I wouldn’t do this.

Tweeter: Understood, though we’d like to try this.
Duane: Why the heck would you waste your time with this? It’s not going to stop the scraping, and “could” lead to other issues. There are other ways to actually block scrapers.

Tweeter: We agree, but this client is thinking they want to try this…
Duane: Tell them not to.

I know some readers will laugh at this, some will think it’s a clever move, but in my mind, what struck me and stayed with me all week was this thought.

What are businesses thinking that they see this sort of thing as worth investing time in? And what are consultants thinking in entertaining stuff like this? (In fairness, I have no idea where that actual issue stands now, or how emotionally invested each party really was in the scenario – clearly the consultant thought it iffy at best; at least that was my impression.)

But, when I look back at all the people I’ve talked to over the last three months, from airplanes, to cab rides, from airport concourses to hotel lobbies, from halal carts to restaurants, I keep coming back to this trend. And it’s a trend we’ve all been guilty of following.

Burying our heads in the SEO sand. (Not to be confused with a “sandbox”, which may or may not exist… SEE! There I go perpetuating the trend…! It doesn’t exist… or does it…?!) ;)

What I’m really getting at is the inability for many SEOs to expand their scope to include the other important aspects of work needed for a site to be successful. I still meet SEOs on every trip who think usability is someone else’s job. Or that all site design should go through SEO for approval. Or that social is simply the integration of “little buttons on the page”. Or that once they get visitors to a site, their work is complete. Nothing frustrates me more than people tossing the ball over the wall.

Guess they all missed the memo about today’s “SEO” being a highly complex blend of tactics and methodologies. In fact, I think we’re damn near at the point where we need to stop wrapping all this work under the umbrella of SEO (I realize that horse is at least comatose, if not entirely dead today...). That’s just the technical work you do on pages and systems. What the real focus needs to be on is the all up digital marketing plan. How each component supports the other and how to use each to best effect.

“Sure, you say, but my clients don’t get all that “big think” talk. They just want SEO.” I’d suggest that your role, whether you’re an inhouse SEO or a consultancy is to educate the client. No client (well, very few, at least), would blindly push to spend their own money in a direction that gives them less of a return. SEO can help, yes, but layer on social engagement, usability and targeted content creation and you’ll build a legacy site – one capable of being a leader for years into the future. Understandably, this approach is more complex, but set yourselves on the right path now, and take advantage of each step along the way.

One of the single most critical efforts anyone in SEO can do is to help their business or client understand what is worth investing in, and what isn’t worth investing in. This means you need to know far more than just SEO to offer guidance. A person who only knows SEO and excludes other tactics is like a ship that can only turn left. Best case, you move in circles. Worst case, you can’t avoid the rocks. Neither case is even remotely close to ideal. Better to learn more, be able to offer better guidance and craft an environment where people understand all this work is inter-related and influences user behavior, which impacts engagement, perception and revenue.

Or, keep your head in the sand. Must be nice and cozy under there, with no changes to worry about. Will you be prepared for what changes next, when you finally come up for a look around?

Duane Forrester
Sr. Product Manager
Bing Webmaster Tools
@duaneforrester

Common Questions for Bing from Businesses

Duane Forrester — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:41:00 GMT

Let’s take a look at some common questions we see frequently whenever we meet with businesses at conferences and events. These four questions pop up in most of the interactions we have, and also in hallway conversations. The questions might seem simple enough, but as usual, the answers are a bit more detailed.

I want to do search engine optimization (SEO) for my site because it’s free. Where do I start?

a. First and foremost, it’s important to remember that SEO is not free. While you may be able to perform the work yourself and not pay someone, your time is valuable, so it’s important to know when you should just outsource the work and keep your time invested in other areas of the project or site.

b. Finding a good consultant can be hard and expensive. It takes time to learn SEO and the skills are in demand, so be sure to vet anyone you’re considering hiring. Set up and interview, ask for references, look at past work they’ve done, ask past clients if they’d hire the consultant again. This will take time, but could save you a lot of money in the long run.

c. At the very least, you should learn enough about SEO to talk to a consultant. The best practices for SEO are well known and resources such as the Bing Webmaster Guidelines and Bing Webmaster Tools can help you learn even more, from a trusted source. The Bing Webmaster Tools actually run SEO Reports for you, automatically sharing the basic information of what work you should cover for your site.

d. After that, start reading. There is a lot wrapped up in SEO these days. Social plays a role, usability matters a great deal and creating excellent content that encourages visitors to engage and share takes work. SEO for Dummies can help you get started and provides clarity on many acronyms used in the industry in clear language. A bigger view, with much more depth, can be found in The Art of SEO. Don’t Make Me Think is an old standby around usability, while When Search Meets Web Usability is a newer view on this important topic. I also highly recommend The Power of Habit to help understand how consumer habits can be changed and how that impacts your brand. Internet Marketing in an Hour a Day is another great book. Covers the most needed parts, while staying at a high enough level to avoid getting you sidetracked. Need a book that covers more of the international side of things? Well, take a look at Global Search Engine Marketing. And that's a very small sample of what's available as books on this topic. Your resources become almost limitless if you start including blogs to read.

What’s the single most important thing for SEO?

a. This is tough, because SEO work is largely a collection of technical items which need to be sorted for every website. That said, if we look at things from a broader perspective, I’d have to say the number one thing you can do to influence your ranking is to produce content that encourages people to share it. Sounds easy, but it isn’t. It requires you pay attention to how you build your content, what content you build and then watch how visitors interact with that content? Do they spend more or less time on each page? Try to figure out why. Do they share some pages more than others? Again, determine why. Spotting those patterns can help you fine tune what content you produce, how you show it and what options you share with visitors to your site.

b. In the big picture, here’s a list, in order, of the areas you should focus on:

i. Create unique, in depth content

ii. Social engagement

iii. User Experience/Usability

iv. Link Building

v. Search Engine Optimization

c. If you create excellent content, users will engage with it. They will then share it with friends and build links to it online. The usability of your site is what wins those visitors over and creates fans for you. If you get these first three elements right, the link building happens automatically. SEO is the technical work you will still need to perform, but it’s much more successful when the first four elements are up and running well.

How does social affect search? What should I do?

a. Social signals can help us determine topical authority. It’s like when you see a crowd of people. You’re drawn to it to find out what’s going on. You get in line, then see a new product on display that you want immediately. You get in line, buy the product, then tell all your friends about it, which then attracts more people. When social signals start to develop and point to a site/URL/Product/Service, the engines notice this and want to take a look. If people think the item is worth talking about, we want to index it and try it as a search result to see if our users (searchers) will like it as well.

b. Social is also a way to build a community with your customers. By doing this, the relationship strengthens with them, and they become fans, willing to spread the word about your product/service to friends, family and so on.

Can’t I just figure out the marketing side later?

a. While it might be tempting to let marketing slide and figure it out later, the reality is a well-crafted marketing plan can help you determine if you’re moving in the right direction to start with. Imagine building an amazing product, then finding out its reason for being is seen as negative. Something no one wants to talk about. This will kill an excellent product, that negative association. This happened with Febreze. The product was designed to eliminate bad odors, but no one wants to admit their home and cloths smell bad, so consumers initially avoided the product because of the negative associations. Marketing went back to the drawing board and created the campaign “It’s not clean until its Febreze clean”, then had the chemists add the distinctive scent we know today. By changing the habit of folks cleaning their homes to use the product as the final step in the cleaning, and by adding that scent, they turned a dead end product into a billion dollar product line for the company. (This story is explored in great depth in the book above, The Power of Habit.)

b. Smart marketing starts well before a product is created, and the data gathered, can actually help inform what product is built and which features it contains. Marketing is about connecting with consumers in a meaningful way. First step is determining what the consumer feels is meaningful. The second step is to build with that in mind.

c. Getting SEO done can be as simple as installing a plugin if you’re using Wordpress, then filling in the provided blanks. Even if you’re not using Wordpress, SEO needn’t be overly complicated. Just follow the best practices; build your systems to be SEO friendly and set processes in place that maximize the options available to you to optimize the page. Keyword research, the starting point for all SEO, is free, simple and an easy way to at least ensure the content you produce aligns with phrases people search for. That’s just wisely choosing which words to use in your text, and this action has no barriers at all.

We love getting out to meet with businesses as often as we can, so if you see us at a conference, event or show, feel free to step forward with questions of your own.

Duane Forrester Sr. Product Marketing Manager Bing Webmaster Tools

The SEO Tag: Empowering Webmasters To Rank Better

Duane Forrester — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:03:00 GMT

Since search engine optimization first became a viable marketing tactic, SEOs have sought to decipher the algorithms used by search engines in an effort to place their content higher in the rankings. In the vast majority of cases, this was done to ensure two things:

1 – good content ranked well

2 – the business producing the good content received traffic

Along the way, some SEOs abused the systems to try to game the results. Back and forth for years, the engines and so-called “black hat” SEOs have waged a behind-the-scenes battle to position content on the Search Results pages. It’s pretty easy for the engine to win this battle in the long run, though, as we own the pages.

As time has progressed, we’ve been able to tackle spamming issues at many levels. In most cases today, most websites follow the known best practices and simply do the right thing. They’re too busy running a business to try trickery to rank better, trusting we will sort the rankings properly.

And now it’s time to reward that trust and your hard work.

Bing today is announcing the creation and support of the SEO tag.

The goal behind this tag is two-fold:

First, as Bing has launched many new tools over the past year+ designed to help websites improve (Webmaster Tools, SEO Reports, Link Explorer, Bing Sitemap Plugin, Disavow Links, etc.), we’ve seen the positive feedback generated by this desire to partner with websites, instead of keeping them in the dark about important data by blocking it or not sharing it.

Second, and more importantly, you run the business, not us. So it’s time you take control of not just your SEO work, but of your rankings as well!

To that end, the SEO tags can be implemented today allowing you to tell us where you should rank. The code below explains it clearly if you’re an SEO. Place the tag inside your page code, fill in the blanks for us indicating which result your page should appear at, and when a query is performed, we’ll scan the page and place you accordingly.

<link rel="SEO" query="weather" set_to_position="2" />

<link rel="SEO" must_be_before="*.mycompetitor.com/*" />

That second line is very handy, too, as you can skip the actual rank position, the “set_to_position” portion, and simply specify that if a competitor’s page is ranking for a term, that you are to rank one spot higher.

Upon launch we’ll only recognize one “must_be_before” tag, but beginning on April 1st, 2014, you’ll be able to stack up to 50 of them in your code to offer greater coverage for your site.

To ensure compliance with this request, should you insert more than one “must_be_before” tag this year, we’ll simply contact your host and arrange for the server hosting your site to be put into a low-earth orbit for the following 365 days.

If you really like this idea, drop some comments and we’ll look at installing a “Rank Me” button inside webmaster tools for you, to streamline the workflow.

More details are available in this Help & How-to Section.

Does SEO Still Have a Role to Play?

Duane Forrester — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 21:04:00 GMT

With social such a factor for businesses today, it’s easy to overlook the tried and true in search of the new and shiny. At the last two conferences I’ve attended, it’s a theme that’s surfacing: if we’ve got social, and it drives business, do we need to invest in SEO?

For those reading this blog, and in the industry, the answer might seem obvious, but let’s examine this a bit.

Social has the ability to take a website form launch to IPO at warp speed. The ability to activate customers to become advocates and spread the good word about your business has never been greater. And businesses should be using social to do the heavy lifting of engaging with customers and driving awareness and positive growth.
Using social to accomplish growth is not a simple, straight line option, but its proven to work and when you figure out what resonates with your customers, it’s like uncovering the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

So many sites, apps and businesses rely on social alone, as I’ve learned working with startups for the past year plus. Many of those businesses think of marketing their product in terms of social only. Their sole focus being to spread the word via Facebook and Twitter to drive awareness of their product.

And with SEO being a bit complex in many site owner’s eyes, it’s tempting to seek a shorter path.

But if you feel SEO is related to usability, it’s still an important area to cover. Improving your website should always be a priority, and sorting SEO-related factors is no different. SEO is as important today as it was 5 years ago.

Title tags still should be unique to each page and relevant to the content of the page. Meta descriptions are still best when optimized to be relevant and to contain a good call to action, given their prominence on the search results page. Meta keywords are still not really used for ranking in any way. Clean URLs can help with crawling, well written article titles (<H1s>) are appreciated by readers and depth of content matters a great deal today – much more so than 5 years ago.

Understanding what form of content your customers like to consume is important so you can deliver it to them: video, audio, written text, lists or long-form, etc. Catering to your customer is a way to get them to love you. In fact, 0ne of the surest ways to get a search engine’s attention is to create a site that customers love. When they love it, they tell others and we see that information spread across the web.

So while it might not seem like the tactics employed in SEO work aren’t really changing, and that SEO can be put on the back burner in favor of a social-only approach, the reality is that it’s still a blended approach, with the focus being on an amazing customer experience, that wins the race.

So, yes, SEO very much still has a role to play. Links still have a role to play. Usability’s role continues to become more and more important. Content still matters greatly and social is an important component, too. Mobile matters more than ever now as well, meaning sites need to think beyond the laptop and plan for success across tablets and smartphones. Stick to the known best practices and focus on impressing customers – it’s a path to success.

Search Engine Optimization Best Practices for AJAX URLs

Duane Forrester — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:03:18 GMT

As a member of the Bing Index team I am often asked by web publishers and Content Management Systems (CMS) companies to provide coding best practices for their web sites. Today, I am pleased to share a fundamental improvement to our previous coding best practices related to AJAX.

AJAX URLs

In the past few years, AJAX (shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) has become extremely popular with web developers looking to create more dynamic and responsive experiences by exchanging small amounts of data with the web server. Often AJAX is used as a technique for creating interactive web applications, but more than ever people are using AJAX to spice up all their site: what was once limited to some areas of only a handful of websites has grown to become the standard for many web sites and Content Management Systems.

Exchanging data asynchronously requires the execution of scripts when particular page events occur. Search engines face challenges when it comes to interpreting or executing this kind of code. Therefore, content contained within an AJAX-enabled page or control was often not accessible nor indexed except if you were following SEO best practices overly-complicated techniques or protocols.

The new recommended SEO Best Practice for AJAX URLs

Modern browsers including Internet Explorer 10 support an HTML 5 JavaScript function called “pushState”. This pushState function allows web developers to change the entire display URL — with the exception of the domain, port and scheme (http://) portions — using JavaScript. It also allows web developers to modify the page title and the session history information. This ability is a game changer for AJAX SEO.

The Internet has some great examples of webpages showcasing the use of pushState, such as http://diveintohtml5.info/examples/history/fer.html, and http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/10/31/html5-history-in-ie10.aspx is a great place for coding best practices including cross-browser considerations.

Before this pushState function was supported by modern browsers, JavaScript was only allowed to change the URL fragment, that is, anything behind the “#” symbol. AJAX applications were using this fragment to save and restore the state of their application. Since the URL information after the # was never sent by the browser to the server, developers had to rely on overly-complicated protocols such as “crawlable AJAX”, which uses the #! (“Hash bang”) signature. This was meant to make AJAX development easier in regards to SEO, but it actually complicated things both for search engines as well as webmasters trying to implement, maintain, and debug their AJAX-driven web pages and applications.

With pushShate, we can fully omit the complexity of transforming between “pretty” AJAX URLs and “ugly” static URLs. Search Engines will crawl and index the same URL used by you customers. We are back to business as usual for SEO, including pretty SEO well-understood URLs schema http://domain/path/file?name=value_parameters. This helps you focus on the usual SEO activities (links, page content, etc.) without having to do worry about complex page transformations.

Linking Strategies using pushState

With pushState, you can generate almost any URL you want in the browser’s address bar. However, with such great power comes great responsibility. Here are a few things to keep in mind when exercising that power:

Avoid broken links

A common mistake with pushState is that you may create a broken link in the address bar, remember that people may bookmark, share, link to the link created by pushState also any URL created by pushState should work directly, too, also refresh the whole browser for any URLs created by pushState to verify if this URL exist. A coding best practice to avoid broken links creating URLs with pushState is to limit change to URLs query parameter values.

Search engines discovering this link should be able to see the same content as well (and remember that Bing recommends you avoid cloaking).

Avoid duplicate content

With pushState, it is easy to create new URLs. In fact, it is so easy that a pushState-enabled web site may start to generate way too many URLs. Remember that less is more for your site and that having fewer URLs better. Another tip is to use pushState to inject all useful, significant parameters before the question mark and all — at least from a search engine’s perspective — “useless” parameters after the fragment part of the URL (that is, after the #).

For instance, if you have a music player web application and offer the ability to pause a song and bookmark it, it is highly preferable to link to a URL such as http://www.example.com/musicPlayer.aspx?song=TheCanadaSong#pausedAt=42 instead of http://www.example.com/musicPlayer.aspx?song=TheCanadaSong&pausedAt=42. The latter approach may lead to many duplicate content URLs. The Ignore URL Parameters tool in Bing Webmaster Tools can help mitigate, but prevention is better.

What about Browsers or Crawlers that do not support pushState?

Since not all browsers or even crawlers will support pushState you should make sure that both have a good experience:

• For browsers and crawlers that do not yet support pushState, you should continue to offer links that allow direct navigation to a URL for a given page state.

• For customers with modern browsers that support pushState, you can refresh parts of the web page and update the URL.

Conclusion

As with our blog post related to building Websites Optimized for All Platforms, we aim for our SEO guidelines to be easy to adopt and to remain valid for years ahead. We feel you should not need to be an expert to create web pages that are search-engine friendly and want to avoid technically overcomplicate solutions. The combination of AJAX and pushState make this possible.

Related Links

• HTML5 History in IE10

• MSDN Magazine : Building HTML5 Applications : A History (API) Lesson

• SEO And Accessibility With HTML5 PushState

• Dive Into HTML5

• HTML5 WC3 browsers history

Fabrice Canel

Principal Program Manager

Microsoft - Bing

Bing WMT Launches Site Move Tool

Duane Forrester — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:20:00 GMT

Moving domains? Site IA redesign? Finally managed to get your hands on a coveted domain name and willing to make the jump? Have you just gone through a big site redesign with a new directory structure, and want to let us know about it so that we can update our index to reflect your redirects? Then we have good news for you!

Let us know via the Site Move Tool.

Today we’re adding another item to your toolbox that lets you do just that. The new Site Move tool under the Diagnostics & Tools section in Bing Webmaster Tools can be used to tell Bing that you have moved and permanently redirected your site, or a section of your site, to a new location. Although permanently redirecting your URLs using 301 redirects is normally enough and the new tool doesn’t replace these redirects, the Site Move tool can help speed things up and get your redirects reflected in our index more quickly. More details are available in the Help & How-to Section of Bing Webmaster.

Not just for domain moves

Whereas other Webmaster Tools only allow a "Change of Address" from one domain to another, we wanted to allow web publishers more flexibility. So, we will offer two different types of move notifications to support the following scenarios:

1. You are moving and redirecting a bunch of URLs from one place to another within the current site. This scenario is great if you want to notify us of a major URL move within the same site. This comes in handy when you’ve redesigned your Site Architecture and are now redirecting many URLs to new locations, and you want us to pick up on this change as soon as possible.

2. You are moving and redirecting URLs from this site to another verified site. This type is a great way to notify us that you are moving from one domain to another domain. You can move to any other domain that you have also verified as a site in Bing Webmaster Tools.

However, that’s not all! Once you’ve selected one of these two options you can also select a move scope using the corresponding drop-down menu. Let's look at the options offered here:

Domain: the domain option should be used if you are moving an entire root domain and all its contents to a new address. This option is available if you are working from within a verified site that represents a domain (not a sub-domain or directory) and when you have selected to move from one site to another. It’s similar to what other tools call “Change of Address”. For example, you want to notify us that all URLs on http://contoso.com are now permanently redirecting to http://contosonew.com. This will let us know that all subdomains on the contoso.com domain, including, for example, www.contoso.com, static.contoso.com etc., are now redirecting to a new location on contosonew.com

Subdomain: this option allows you to tell us that you are moving all URLs from a specific subdomain elsewhere. Example: you want to tell us that all pages under http://blogs.contoso.com/ are now moving and are permanently redirecting to http://www.contosoblog.com/.

Directory: the directory option allows you to let us know that you are moving all URLs in a directory (folder) to a new location. Example: you want to notify us of the fact that all URLs under http://www.contoso.com/old-folder/ are now permanently redirecting to http://www.contoso.com/new-folder/.

Here’s a quick screenshot of what the Site Move tools looks like inside the Webmaster Tools – the example shows a notification of a move within the same site, reflecting that the folder http://www.bing.com/community/, and all of its contents, has moved to http://www.bing.com/blogs/. (click image to enlarge)

How long should I keep my redirects in place?

As stated before, the Site Move tool doesn't replace the need for redirects from the old location to the new location, so before notifying us of a site move, you should make sure that the permanent redirects are set up correctly. That said, over time, the redirects will become obsolete as the new locations start to gain traction (in the form of links, clicks, trust, etc.), but since this transition will take time, you should plan to keep the redirects in place for at least several months.

Are there any restrictions?

The Site Move tool does restrict a couple of things: one of them is that we will check, before accepting the notification, whether you’ve correctly set up your redirects to be permanent (using 301’s) and if we can resolve the URLs at the new location. The other is that once you’ve notified us about a move of from A to B, we will not allow you to move the new location (B) for at least six months.

Bing Webmaster Tools is on the Road

Duane Forrester — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 20:04:23 GMT

Grab your suitcase, book a taxi and join us for our SouthWest road trip!

This week we’ll be attending SXSW in Austin, TX and enjoying some of the best food trucks the nation has to offer. From 5 – 6 PM on March 8th, join Duane Forrester as he teams up with Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan for How To Rank Better in Google & Bing, where we’ll discuss the do’s and don’ts of search marketing.

After a quick run from Austin to San Jose, we’ll be at SMX West on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week. Monday (March 11) at 3:30 PM PST will see us in the The Search Police: Matt & Duane’s Excellent Search Engine Adventure session. Should be a great time as we talk about the junk we see and how to stay lily white in your own search efforts.

At 1PM on Wednesday (March 13), we’ll take part in the conversation around What’s Needed For SEO Success In 2013 & Beyond? This proves to be an eye opening panel discussion you will not want to miss as we cover a wide range of topics from seo tactics to skills you’ll need for success. This panel reads like a who’s who from the industry, so you want to save time to attend…

Greg Boser, SVP of Search Services, BlueGlass Interactive, Inc. (@GregBoser)
Annie Cushing, SEO and Analytics Consultant, (@AnnieCushing)
Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer, Google Inc. (@mattcutts)
Janet Driscoll Miller, President and CEO, Search Mojo (@janetdmiller)
Duane Forrester, Sr. Product Manager, Bing (@DuaneForrester)
Rae Hoffman, CEO, PushFire (@sugarrae)

It’ll be a busy week, but if you’re in either location, please feel free to swing by and say hello!

Tomorrow's SEO Webinar Video

Duane Forrester — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:32:00 GMT

The final webinar in our six-part series can be seen below, where we talked about Tomorrow’s SEO. We covered topics ranging from what technical aspects you’ll want to understand to skills you’ll need to be a top-tier SEO in the future.

If you enjoyed the series, let us know in the comments below. If you want more webinars, drop a note below.

Here are links to the rest of the webinars in the series as well. Thanks again for everyone’s time and engagement. We had great crowds at every webinar, with loads of excellent questions posed – all of which were captured in the recordings so even if you missed the actual live webinar, you can still get the full experience in the videos.

Search & Social Webinar
Authority Building Webinar
Bing Webmaster Tools Overview Webinar
Crawling Basics Webinar
SEO101 Webinar

Building Sitemaps Manually?… Stop Until You Read This!

Duane Forrester — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:26:00 GMT

SEO is a complex and ever changing area but there are some key elements that are still as relevant now as they were a few years ago. One of them is building high-quality XML Sitemaps, a comprehensive and accurate representation of your website. That way, you keep control of what you want search engines to index in order of priority and you inform them of new or updated content on your website.

Because XML Sitemaps are so important, we want to make it very easy for webmasters to generate them and publish them for the use of all search engines. That’s why we are excited to open today the public beta program for the Bing Sitemap Plugin, an open source server-side technology that takes care of generating XML Sitemaps compliant with sitemaps.org for websites running on IIS as well as Apache.

How does it work?

The Bing Sitemap Plugin generates two types of Sitemaps:

1. A comprehensive Sitemap of all URLs seen in server traffic

2. A Sitemap dedicated to store URLs that have changed recently

Having both comprehensive and delta Sitemaps provides you with significant benefits, as you will always have a full, up-to-date list of all URLs on your website that search engines can use for deep crawl, as well as a concise Sitemap of URLs that were modified recently, which search engine crawlers can prioritize. This can help in keeping bot traffic bandwidth down. In addition, the Sitemap Plugin automatically adds <lastmod> values to your Sitemap, and generates <priority> values to the Sitemap based on how popular your URLs are.

You can find more information about the Bing Sitemap Plugin in our Bing Webmaster help center.

If you want to jump in and go directly to the plugin download page, binaries for IIS (x64 and x86) and Apache (Linux) as well as the sources for both are available in the Microsoft download center.

We also welcome your feedback, suggestions and feature requests in the Bing Webmaster forums.

What to Invest in, Women 2.0 and our next Webinar

Duane Forrester — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 19:21:00 GMT

Bing WMT had a great time this week presenting at Women 2.0 in San Francisco. It was exciting to see so many startups moving forward and to watch the prizes awarded for the pitch competition. Well done to everyone!

Before we get too far into this post, just a quick reminder that Thursday, January 21st at 9AM PST (12 noon EST) will be the last in our six-part webinar series. This one will cover Tomorrow’s SEO and we’ll look at what you should be focused on for tactical SEO, as well as review the skills an SEO will need to maintain their careers as the space evolves. Sign up here for this next webinar, and the earlier ones are available right here in the Webmaster Tools blog.

One of the areas that was of particular interest this week in SFO was the areas a business should invest their time in online, and how to prioritize them. Startups and established businesses often face the same issue, which is the need to do less with more. Drive traffic, yet spend less time doing so. Drive sales, but cut marketing costs and so on. It’s a tough spot to be in, but we’ve all been there. If you’ve got suggestions of your own to help cure this problem, drop them in the comments below. In the meantime, here’s a quick rundown from our point of view, in order of importance.

Content

This is number one for an excellent reason. Content is what searchers are looking for. Don’t be mistaken in thinking that searchers only want log pages of text, either. They may only need snippets of content – such as the temperature, which hardly requires paragraph after paragraph to illustrate.
But in most cases, you will need to provide some depth of content. The days of “thin content” (using the minimum amount of text to cover a topic in an effort to cut the time it takes to create content) are largely behind us. Those types of sites simply don’t provide the value searchers are looking for.

Ecommerce sites often suffer from issues around this, as much of their content comes from external sources and it’s not realistic to write 500 words for each of 10,000 products. What they can do, however, is identify the high value content (high value to the website AND high value to searches as identified through their analytics). By doing so, they often find the number of actual products they should craft unique content around becomes much more manageable.

Social

There’s no denying social is here to stay, and for good reason. We are all social animals, as human beings. We seek positive feedback from peers, we seek affirmation for decisions and so on. Social blended with search helps engines bring forward more accurate results. By understanding searchers better, we can better serve them.
From a business POV, there now exists the unique opportunity to leverage the “online word of mouth” that social encourages and tap into those feelings that drive most of us every day. If a business encourages people to engage and friend them on Facebook, for example, their “friends” may show up under their SERP listing. If I recognize one of my own friends as someone who has liked that business, I’m much more inclined to engage that business myself. My friend may never have mentioned your business to me, but their thumbs up via social spaces is a clear signal I can trust you, too.

Another reason social is so important today is due to the timing. Social signals around a topic, item, or product that’s going viral get seen very quickly by engines. That’s a signal to use that something is up and we should investigate.

Further to this, like a crow don the beach draws others to see what’s happening, a social crowd around your brand draws the engines to investigate. If you’re popular with a group of people, we may opt to rank you higher to see if you’re a quality result for our searchers.

User Experience

Too many businesses skip this step, but here it is in plain view: usability will affect how people engage with your site. It can affect their experience, their perception and their desire to recommend you to friends or follow you socially. It can affect how they navigate, what they see and how they buy…or don’t buy.

Given a choice between paying a consultant for SEO advice, or doing usability testing, opt for usability testing. It’s far more enlightening and often you’ll see greater up front returns from this work that with SEO (remember, SEO is a long game).

We did usability testing before launching the new Bing Webmaster Tools back in June and it opened our eyes. People who were actual webmasters were mystified by our old navigation, labels and had little idea how to get work done in our tools. That usability testing changed how we labeled buttons, how we grouped content, what content we produced, the visual layout of the page, the colors used within the tools and more.

Oh yeah, it might be obvious, but we’ll say it – if people love your site, and squawk about it, the engines see that and want in on the action, often ranking the site higher to test it with searchers. Prove to be a searcher favorite and you’ll enjoy high rankings for a long time to come.

Links

This one is pretty simple. If you’ve nailed the content, invest in social and have an excellent user experience, you’ll get all the link you’ll ever need. Buying links is a dead end, a waste of money and potentially dangerous, so avoid that practice. Pretty much all the link building you’ll ever need will be accomplished indirectly.
If you’re stuck in history thinking “links shall save thee”, well, you need to get with the times.

SEO

At the back of the pack is SEO. It’s still important to optimize a website, so you should cover the basic best practices around SEO. Would I rewrite the code base of my large site to allow the use of H2 tags – nope. Would I make sure that same site has H1 tags that can be edited if needed – yes.

The basics of SEO are well known, so there’s no need for any business to invest in poor consulting (which happens way to frequently). If you’re in charge of SEO for your company, you’d better get up to speed enough to at least know if that consultant you hired knows their stuff. Tools like our SEO Analyzer can help by giving you reports of what SEO work is needed. Talk to your consultant to see if what they suggest covers the same points. If they’re good, they’ll cover a lot more than we show you.