Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Chris Crum of WebProNews.com recently explained bing’s link building policies. It’s a nice summary of bing’s “dos” and “don’ts.”

What stands out to me is that this lists mirrors the best practices we currently follow for optimizing site pages for Google. Best practices should be universal, so it appears your efforts, whether for bing or Google, won’t hurt the other. As Crum states, “Most of the stuff [bing's Rick] DeJarnette shared is nothing any savvy search marketer is not already aware of.”

If you are new to optimization, print Crum’s article and hang it on your wall. If you’re currently link building, you may still learn something new to help you correct your course.

– Stacey Morgan Smith

Tuesday’s sessions at SMXEast in New York continued with “Ask the Search Engines: Best Practices Edition.” Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land moderated, and notes from the presentations and Q&A with Google, Yahoo!, and Bing include:

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc.

• If you need to bring your site offline for temporary maintenance, what’s the best way to do it? Return a 503 with a helpful message. Google will later recrawl the URL. Google will not index the content of the 503 (the preexisting content will be available in search results).
• How do you help bots crawl your site more efficiently with if-modified-since? Respond when appropriate with 304 “Not modified.”
• Which file(s) might be good to disallow from crawlers? individual login pages and calendars
• What action(s) can reduce load time (and thus increase user happiness)? order the external scripts and CSS on your pages efficiently (external scripts load serially – all other loading is blocked -  **stylesheets above external scripts allow parallel loading – much faster)** compress images
• What is the possible result of this implementation of “other-language” versions of a page using rel=”canonical”? This can be a problem if a french searcher is searching for a site. She’ll still see english version.

Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing, Microsoft

• Secure Your Website – no one talks about it. Everyone takes it for granted.
• Spammers target spiky queries that follow popular events and capitalize on the popularity to make money. They hack popular sites, use the link, and then spam the queries that target those queries.
• Blogs and forums are user-generated content, which makes them nonsecure and vulnerable if not secured/monitored regularly.
• Links on hacked pages may lead to a fake malware page which actually loads viruses if you click for the antivirus.
• Forums and blogs are spam magnets.

Q&A with Maile, Sasi, and Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo! Inc.

• Using javascript to fool the search engines is a recipe for disaster.
• Safest to use text links.
• In bing, linking out is NOT part of the algorithm.
• Google and bing never supported the keywords tag. Yahoo, within last 3 months, doesn’t support keywords tag. They were NEVER a major ranking factor of the search engines.
• Good ranking factors: GOOD TEXT, informative and unique, content should make sense. KEYWORDS in the title tag, in the page itself (body copy), (in past – higher on the page was helpful), presence of the words in the links or near the links that lead to your page.
• How to move a website to a new domain without affecting its rankings: webmaster central blog – best practices for moving your site, webmaster tools – change of address; 301s
• Javascript & ability to executive has been a long time coming and they are treading lightly to ensure no negative side effects. only certain types of events are found to be safe.
• Canonical tag transferrs all link properties — it’s true.
• Whatever the 301 will do for you, the canonical will do for you.
• If you change hosting, it doesn’t matter – it won’t affect your rankings unless your hoster is slow. It doesn’t matter what your backend is if your structure is the same.
• Display none by itself isn’t blackhat, but it’s walking a thin line.
• Anytime that money is changing hands, you’re safest using nofollow.

I think it’s great that reps from the big-3 search engines took the time to come answer questions from Internet marketers. It makes it easier to play by the rules when you get additional opportunity to learn what the rules are!

– Stacey Morgan Smith

Last week bing released Visual Search, a new feature of its relatively new search engine. Instead of traditional query searches, where you type in a term to find information, with Visual Search, you look at pictures to find information.

Visual Search allows you to browse such categories as “dog breeds,” “NFL players,” and “Film Legends.” The categories can be further broken down by the subcategories on the left of the page.

During a couple of trials, it took a second or two for all of the images to load, and in many cases, not all pictures loaded, but this is an interesting way to browse information, especially if you don’t know, in words, what you need but can recognize it in pictures. Note that you need Silverlight to use bing’s Visual Search.

“Top Songs” took me to a list of album covers, “Popular TV Shows” to a page of head & cast shots, and “US States” showed me a page of landmarks. “Dog Breeds” showed me pictures of selected breeds of dogs. I found this useful when trying to figure out the breed of my mutt Jack. Hovering over a breed fills the query box with the name of the breed. Clicking to search brought up a results page identical to the results of a keyword search in bing.

Browsing by images is definitely not traditional searching, which fits with bing’s branding as a “decision engine” instead of a search engine. I’ll probably use Visual Search when I’m “fun searching,” like trying to find Jack’s breed — who I’ve decided is a Border Mutt — but when I know what I”m looking for, I’ll most likely stick with query or keyword searching. After all, the second step of bing’s visual search still relies on the query.

– Stacey Morgan Smith

It’s the simple things in life we sometimes take for granted. For example, the view from my desk of the Occoquan Marina in Northern Virginia is lovely, even on rainy days. Without question it puts me into a better frame of mind for writing. No matter how many times I see a bald eagle swoop through the sky, it never fails to give me a thrill! My poor husband works from a windowless cubicle deep within the Pentagon. How can I forget how fortunate we are at NetStrategies to see such beauty while working?

Likewise, I seldom give a second thought to the great tools at my disposal for work like Google Reader and HootSuite.

I use Google Reader for reputation management, brand and keyword monitoring, and blog consolidation. It is really a wonderful application that helps with efficiency. As an added bonus, Google, a company that never sits on its laurels, continues to improve and expand its features.

These are a few ways to use Google Reader for business:
1. Set up Google Alerts (another great tool not yet available in Bing as of this posting) and feed into Google Reader. I follow a number of alerts including NetStrategies staff members, our company name, and terms like Internet marketing. If someone mentions our company name, I can follow the link and see the context. It allows me to stay on top of discussions involving our company, staff, product lines, etc.

2. Send all RSS feeds you follow to Google Reader. For example, I follow several blogs and scan them through Reader. This is the simplest way to breeze through the many blogs I follow and open ones that really pique my interest.

3. Google Reader shows me any Tweets mentioning words I set as search terms in Twitter. This is a quick way to monitor Twitter talk, retweets, and replies.

4. You can now share posts through social media platforms right from Google Reader through the new “Send to” feature. Simply open the settings page and enable the services you want to use. If your favorite service isn’t listed you can create your own “Send to” link with a URL template.

HootSuite Makes Twittering Much Easier
HootSuite makes my job of managing multiple Twitter accounts a snap. Log into HootSuite using your Twitter account email and password, then add to your profile any additional Twitter accounts you use. I manage my own profile lauriedunlop as well as NetStrategies and InternetMktgTV. The Hootsuite dashboard (newly improved) lets me toggle between the different accounts and see retweets, replies, direct messages, Twitter stream, and more. I like that I can schedule Tweets through HootSuite, too. You can also track Twitter statistics.

What tools or programs do you use to simplify your workflow? Leave a comment and share your favorites!

• The deal is still a long way from closing, in fact the complete bing/Yahoo! search engine is at least two years away. The process of approval alone will likely take the rest of 2009.
• Microsoft’s adCenter platform will replace Yahoo!’s Panama platform. This means that ads placed in Yahoo! will be managed through MSN adCenter’s interface. This will take additional transition time after the deal is approved by regulators.
• Cost Per Click (CPC) prices will be set by adCenter’s automated auction process. With an increase in advertisers coming to bing from Yahoo!, it will be interesting to see what happens with CPCs. Like anything in the PPC medium, industry verticals will obviously play a large role.

One of the primary shortcomings of Microsoft’s adCenter was lack of volume. It simply does not generate as much traffic as Google or Yahoo! This is one of the most intriguing parts to this partnership. In the words of a press release from www.choicevalueinnovation.com:

“With the addition of Yahoo!’s search volume, Microsoft will achieve the size and scale required to unleash competition and innovation in the market, for consumers as well as advertisers.”

Overall, the general consensus among the PPC community is that this partnership is a good thing for the PPC industry. It will give Google increased competition and also will give Microsoft the search volume it needs to accelerate the learning from its own marketplace and improve its adCenter platform more quickly. I’m looking forward to any improvements Microsoft can make to its adCenter management interface. At the moment, AdWords provides the most advanced campaign management tools, so it will be interesting to see what improvements Microsoft can make with the increased search volume and insight from Yahoo!.

Sources: ad Age, Choice. Value. Innovation., and SEW

You may have read this week that Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. will create a new partnership. If you’re like many of our customers, you’re probably wondering how that will affect your Search Engine Optimization.

The two companies seem to be working together to step up their efforts toward challenging the big player in the game: Google. This isn’t the first time they have discussed working together (in one form or another). Microsoft Corp. attempted to purchase Yahoo in the past. Google even previously expressed interest in working with Yahoo, but it fell through, partially due to antitrust concerns.

As for search, Yahoo!, which was never REALLY a search engine (Yahoo! is technically a directory), will begin to provide search results powered by bing, Microsoft’s new search engine (though they call it a decision engine).

This “union” will significantly increase the number of searches conducted through bing. In June, Google had a 65% share of total US Searches. Yahoo! and bing followed at 20.1 and 8%, respectively. After bing begins providing Yahoo!’s search, bing’s market share could be around 28%.

So how will this affect SEO?

Your rankings will most likely change. If you’re 10th in bing, you’ll probably also be 10th in Yahoo!

Your number of site visitors will also likely change. Being on the first page helps, whether you’re reaching 8% or 28% of searchers, but if you were on page 1 with Yahoo and you’re on page 3 with bing, customers will have a harder time finding you.

You only need to worry about two different engines’ search algorithms instead of three. Each engine values optimization elements differently: titles, links, content, anchor text.

Should you change your SEO plan?

The basics of your SEO efforts shouldn’t change because your goal is still the same – reach your target audience and give them what they need.

How do you do that? The same way you always have:

• have quality, relevant content on your site that answers your audience’s questions;
• follow best practices in site structure, hosting, etc.,
• gain smart links that make it easier to find you.

Following SEO basics will ensure steady site improvement, whether you’re dealing with two search engines or twenty.

sources: AdAge, Yahoo! Finance, and comScore

– Stacey Morgan Smith