All Seo Bing

Get to know your Searchers

2010-01-04T00:54:00.001-08:00

How do people search? Think about yourself if you want. How do you search?

Most people actually search broad to narrow and this is a real cool

thing to know.

I'm going to repeat that most searchers start broad and they get narrower and narrower and narrower, and a huge mistake with

newbies SEOs is that they optimize sites for very, very broad

terms.

I agree... these general terms are the ones you want to appear in top position but let's be honest. Depending on what your product or service is, that's not going to happen unless your company is big and your site is consider like a hub.

So imagine you have a SEO company in Brooklyn. You could try to optimize for SEO company for example, but if you type in any Search Engine that how many results do you have? Millions and millions.

So let's narrow this in 2 steps:

- SEO company New York

- SEO company Brooklyn New York

Believe me, it's gonna be easier and much more profitable for you, to rank in top position for the search SEO company Brooklyn New York.

This a simple example, but try to take it into your website. Do you get the idea?

Search Volume... and Bing beats Google

2009-12-17T09:45:00.000-08:00

Another good month for Microsoft's Bing. Latest comScore data for November search volume is showing an unexpected result. For the second time Bing managed to beat Google in terms of total US core search volumes, while .

Let's check the results:

- Bing represented 10.3% of the market in November, up from 9.9% in October, according to comScore. That's up from 8.0% in May.

- Yahoo’s search volume continues to go down. Its share was 17.5% in November, down from 18.0% in October. That's down from 20.1% in May.

- And the giant Google was 65.6% in November, up from 65.4% in October. That's up from 65.0% in May.

So as you can see from those numbers Bing represents a little bit more in the market adn seems to have a sustainable grow at least in US.

The importance of links

2009-10-12T07:07:00.000-07:00

If there's something we need to get in our site is this: links, links, links.

Why??

A link to your site indicates the Search Engine that your site has relevance and that there are users that find so and decide to link to your site.
Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link. You want quality links.

Your site's ranking in Bing or Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating.

Links are important but you need to get them appropriately, no link schemes, no conspirations. Some examples of link schemes:

* Links intended to manipulate PageRank
* Links to web spammers
* Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")

Of course, if you pay links with advertising purpose is fine as long as you set add a rel="nofollow" attribute to the tag or redirect the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file.

Bing Goes The Internet: The Creepiest Jingle Ever

2009-08-10T09:31:00.000-07:00

Microsoft launched a competition for a Bing jingle with help of their Youtube channel two weeks ago. Here is the announcement on the bing-community site itself. The user comments are quite entertaining.

Bing Goes The Internet: The Creepiest Jingle Ever

http://mashable.com/2009/08/05/bing-goes-the-internet/

Microsoft - Yahoo! Deal

2009-07-30T03:22:00.000-07:00

After the intrigue of the last hours, finally we got it.
A search and advertising deal announced Wednesday means Yahoo’s once-dominant search engine will grind to a halt for 10 years, replaced by Microsoft’s often-revamped and newly branded Bing. Yahoo gets a big slice of text ad revenue, and Microsoft buys itself into a (distant) second place in the search race, still with less than half the searches as Google.

And what are the effects for this?

Yahoo: becomes an entertainment portal, will have Bing branding and the search results will be slightly different.

Microsoft: gets a huge bump in traffic to its revamped search engine and online text ad platform. Bing will fly from 8% of US searches to 30%.

The Market: 2 players: Google 70% and Microsoft 30%. Will it change? Probably.

Improving your content = Improving your rankings: 3 steps

2009-07-22T06:20:00.000-07:00

As I've said many times, content and links are the key. So, I'm gonna talk about the first one cause if it's good, links will come naturally.

In SEO, not only it's indispensable to create great content, you must be great at getting that content linked to. So when creating and updating your content you can follow these steps:

1. Till Bing brings us similar tools... use Google Insight for Search to find what people are looking for. This tool is great to learn about behaviours and seasonality. With this tool you search for a word and you'll see the trends in numbers of total searches and related searches to it.

2. Use keyword generators or any tool that gives you related words for a term. In this way, you'll be able to update your content including these keywords. Please, forget about hidden text or spaming techniques. Just a relevant content with the important words. The tool WEBCEO is free and really interesting.

3. What are the trendy topics related to you content? If for example in you site you talk about music, probably if you include something related to Michael Jackson you could attract more traffic. Just take some time to check the latest groups in Facebook, the popular topics in Twitter, post with more diggs etc.

Hope this helps!

Bing + Twitter : BingTweets

2009-07-15T08:51:00.000-07:00

BingTweets, what a interesting idea. You search something and get the results + the last tweets about your query.

For example, as I'm impatient to know what new stuff Guitar Hero 5 brings:

In this way bing goes real... time!
If we can combine a good site with an interesting but I'd delete the trending topics and share this results. I'd include them but in a smaller size cause they kind of hide the search bar. And it's also significant that the share result is a bit.ly URL to make it shorter and track the results.

BingTweets pulls in trends from Twitter and filters into categories such as “Popular Now,” “People,” “Places” and “Products” enabling easier navigation of the ever changing trends on the Web. You can also fire off a search on any topic of your choosing to see the related search results from Bing and Twitter discussion.

Another extra point for Bing.

Bing getting Big

2009-07-09T07:57:00.001-07:00

It's amazing that in only one month Bing is bigger than sites as Digg or Twitter. Just checking Alexa I've got this:

The evolution since Bing was released has been really possitive. However, it's still really far away from Google:

I wonder... where it's gonna be Bing in 3 months?

In Bing you can Google what you want!

2009-07-02T11:19:00.000-07:00

"Bing helps you Google the best choice, faster. And shows related Googles right there on the results page. Bing knows what you like to Google.”

A really funny video to introduce Bing:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Twitter and the Search Results in Bing

2009-07-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

Another thing to take into account for a complete SEO with Bing is going to be Twitter. Now, Bing is displaying Twitter results for a few thousand “prominent and prolific” Twitterers in their search results. The Twitter results show the person’s latest Tweets and a link to “see more tweets” from that user.

So, if you are a "power" user in Twitter, you can see yourself in the search results. Here is the example that you can find in other blogs related to this new feature:

CatalystGroup Search Engine Preference: Google vs. Bing

2009-06-29T02:41:00.000-07:00

We've just included in our Network this interesting study about Search Engine Preference.
You can find it as a post in our Forum in: www.allseobing.ning.com.

There's all kind of data like the User Behaviour, Time on Page & Scrolling etc.

Really interesting.

Best Match in Bing

2009-06-28T04:11:00.001-07:00

This feature is great. If you own the official page of a brand, you're gonna enjoy this.

With Bing, we have now the Best Match. Look at this:

If you search Apple you'll see in the top the Best Match with the official site tag next to the URL.

You may ask yourself: And why is bing doing this? Don’t search engines deliver the best result at the top of the page anyway? Well, that's true. We all asume that the first results are always the most relevant ones but it's also a fact that sometime you search for the official website and you click on the first results and it's not the one.

It's also really interesting the incorporation of some of the key features of the official site right there on the search results page. Best match can include a “search within” bar that allows you to set up a query of the official site. Where appropriate, Best match also includes a customer service number at the top of the page.

And... site specific tools can also be incorporated on the page. For example, you can track your parcel en route within Best match for the query “UPS”.

I really think this is a plus 1 for Bing.

Problems when using Bing

2009-06-23T14:32:00.001-07:00

We've just started a network that I'd like to treat as a forum to post and answer questions about SEO in general, SEM, Internet etc.

We are 3 members as we've just started so I'd like you to participate. Just register in 30 secs and start participating. Join us in All Seo Bing Forum

The first member has posted an interesting question(and sorry for the caps):

WHEN I USE BING AT HOME IT OPENS TO BEAUTIFUL PICTURE OF THE DAY..

ON MY OFFICE COMPUTER IT ONLY OPENS TO A BLACK AND WHITE OPEN PAGE
WITH NOTHING. WHAT IS IT I NEED TO DO TO OPEN THIS GREAT SITE TO SHOW
TO MY OFFICE STAFF...SAME ON ALL THE COMPUTERS HERE.

Answers and ideas welcome.

Visit All about Seo... and Bing

Google: Flash Indexing New Improvement

2009-06-19T09:34:00.000-07:00

Flash... the eternal problem. Visually great, shit as SEO and SEM.

Well, although there have been a lot of improvement since June 08 regarding reading the content from a Flash Site (and I really have to thank Google for that) there was a long road to improve it. But as you can see in the Webmaster Central Blog, Google has just improved it a bit with external resource loading.

Now when a SWF file loads content from some other file (HTML; XML, text, another SWF etc.) Google can index the external content too. This means that the search quality will be better cause all the relevant content contained in the external resources will appear in response to user's queries.

Obviously, if you are not interested in your external resources to be crawled you can use an appropriate robots.txt.

This is the example Google shows for the query 2002 W Transporter 888. In this case Google wasn't able to show any snippet but now, it's possible:

Now we can count on these improvements when Google handles SWFs:

* Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
* Discover links within Flash files.
* Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
* Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
* Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. The last update on June 19: The version of ActionScript isn't particularly relevant, but often asked. :) We index sites with AS3 as well.

Almost a SEO Guide for Bing

2009-06-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

Following the Google example with its Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Microsoft has recently published a PDF about Search Engine Optimization called Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters. AS you may have checked already, Google has provide a lot of SEO advice and the Webmasters Forum is really really interesting.

The guide is not that SEO specialized, but we find a complete description of the user interface changes launched with Bing, and how those might impact site owners. It also touches on SEO a bit.

So... if I have to compare from a SEO perspective, I have to say that I consider Google's Guide, much better than Bing's Guide

Meta Tags: noindex, nofollow etc.

2009-06-15T01:20:00.001-07:00

Let's continue with another important part in SEO.
As you could see in the code I pasted in the previous post about Meta tags there's a part that says:
meta name="robots" content="..., ..."
meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..."
meta name="msnbot" content="..., ..."

These meta tags can control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing. The robots meta tag applies to all search engines, while the "googlebot" meta tag is specific to Google. The same with msnbot, which doesn't allow MSN to crawl your site.

The default values are "index, follow" (the same as "all") and do not need to be specified. However, when you want to specify something to the crawler, you have to use something like (when specifying multiple values, separate them with a comma):

* noindex: prevents the page from being indexed.
* nofollow: prevents the crawler from following links from this page. This means that Google/Bing does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links.
* noodp: prevents the alternative description from the ODP/DMOZ from being used as your site description. As you know, Google/Bing use several sources to describe your site in the Search Results. One of them is DMOZ. If you don't want them to use that you'll have to use this combinations:

If you only want to avoid Google to use it, you only have to use googlebot in the name: meta name=googlebot.
In case of MSNbot:meta name=msnbot
* noarchive: prevents Google/Bing from showing the Cached link for a page.
* unavailable_after:[date]: lets you specify the exact time and date you want to stop crawling and indexing of this page.
* nosnippet: prevents a snippet from being shown in the search results

Bing Video Search vs. Google video: wow!

2009-06-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

Wow. I've been checking the video indexing in Bing that is been also commented in Search Engine Land and looks amazing.

I got to say: Bing Video much better than Google video. And I have to say it again... much better!!
Not only the interface but also the search and the filters you can apply to it are really really good. So... Let's compare!

This is Bing Video Search:

As you can see is pretty cool. U can sort the videos, first of all by chosing best match or most recent in the top right corner.

In the left we have a complete menu of filters from lenght of the video, or source. So if you just want to see all the videos related to a search coming from the mtv website is as easy as clicking on the mtv link.
And what is even better... you can get a preview of the video without clicking on it, just put the mouse over the thumbnail of the video for a few secs and there you go!

What I'm missing in best match is the basic info about the video like the date of the upload. However we can switch to the list view (besides the best match/more recent link) and get all the basic info we want. Although, personally I'd like to have the info in the grid video too.

And this is Google Video search:

As you can see, less visual and intuitive than Bing. The results are different but not that much but the format is completely different. The good thing about Google is that you get more information about the video at a glance but actually that's the only advantage with Bing.

And what about getting your video indexed? I'll dedicate my next post to that.

Adding correct metatags

2009-06-10T11:14:00.000-07:00

And the eternal questions... adding meta tags? Is it going to help? Is it "mandatory" to get a good ranking?

Let's start saying that Meta tags are one of the best ways for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. Meta tags are valid for any search engine. The only difference is that each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest. Meta tags are added to the section of your HTML page and generally look like this:

/!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"

html

head

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: £9.24, Length: 784 pages"

META http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"

META NAME="verify-v1" CONTENT="+nxGUDJ4QpAZ5l9Bsjdi102tLVC21AIh5d1Nl23908vVuFHs34="

title>Example Books - high-quality used books for children

META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow"/

We can divide this text into parts like this:

"meta name="description" content="A description of the page" : This tag provides a short description of the page. Very often, this description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results. To show sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") the bots read the site, a function that is completely automated, and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. As we all know the content of our sites is changing all the time, so the best way to get some control or influence our website description, it's to make sure that our webpages effectively deliver the information you want in the search results and follow these strategies when you design your content:

* Place descriptive content near the top of each webpage.
* Make sure that each webpage has a clear topic and purpose.
* Add a website description to a Description tag. For example:

"META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Sample text - describe your website here."

And as I have to go just now... I'll continue later on!

Product Tour of Bing

2009-06-08T02:21:00.000-07:00

And as always, a video of presentation is the best way to introduce something. In this case, Microsoft brings us this introductory video for Bing.

,

Terms you should know (part 1)

2009-06-07T04:11:00.000-07:00

And just after publishing some content guidelines... I'd like to have a refresher of concepts:

- MsnBot: The Bing web crawler, a program that scans websites and indexes their content, such as text, documents, images, and links, for searching.

- GoogleBot: the program created by Google to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

- Sitemap: is a list of the pages on your website. We can say that there are 2 types:
· sitemap: a HTML page listing the pages of your site—often by section—and is meant to help users find the information they need. It's like the index of the site.
· Sitemap: the one I was talking about before. XML file with all the URL we can find in your site, including information that a crawler could have difficulties reading.
The good things about Sitemaps is that you can have one that is valid for all search engines if you adopt the standards of sitemaps.org

First step: design and content guidelines

2009-06-07T03:20:00.000-07:00

If you want to appear in a Search Engine and in a good position, after setting up your website there's a key questions you should ask to yourself:

Do I have a page with relevant content?
As you know the content is the key for search engines. Don't worry that much about the visual format of your website. That's something you can change with the time. A Search Engine is not going to worry about the fonts you're using. A search engine is going to index your content.

Keep this in mind: The best way to attract people to your website, and keep them coming back, is to fill your webpages with valuable content in which your target audience is interested.
So with this purpose, you have to continue asking...

a. What do I want to offer in my website?
b. Do I have all the content necessary?
c. If it's something I'm going to update frequently, like a blog, is the content so far related to the topic I want to talk about in my page?

And going a bit more technical and gathering all the info about Design and Guidelines for Bing and Google in their Webmasters Tools, we should pay attention to:

• In the visible webpage text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your website.

• Limit all webpages to a reasonable size. Bing recommends covering one topic per webpage. An HTML webpage with no images should be under 150 KB.

• Make sure that each webpage is accessible by at least one static text link.

• Don't put the text that you want indexed within images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it isn't displayed only inside an image of your company logo.

• Add a sitemap, which helps MSNBot/GoogleBot to find all of your webpages. Links that are embedded in menus, list boxes, and similar elements aren't accessible to web crawlers unless they appear in your sitemap.

• Also, offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site.

• Keep your website hierarchy fairly flat. That is, each webpage should only be from one to three clicks away from the default webpage, and every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The crawlers don't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

• Make sure that your "title" elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

• Check for broken links and correct HTML.

• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

• Not too many links per page. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100). Take into account that too many links in a single page can be confusing for the users of your site.

First step: knowing Bing

2009-06-07T02:01:00.000-07:00

As you may know, the market can count on a new player: Bing.

This new search engine hast just begun and it's quite promising. I have to say that I'm a Google fan but I really want to see a real competitor. Bing seems to be one after so much time waiting for it.

I'm working in SEO and SEM so Bing is pretty interesting in both senses. What I'm going to do in this blog is discuss about Bing and the possibilities it has.