SEO Advice from Bing

[vangogh]

Might as well get your information directly from the source. The Bing Webmaster Center blog posted 18 things you need to know about SEO. Makes sense to listen if you're interested in ranking better in Bing's results.

From the post:

This list is not meant to cover everything, but to focus in on some of the more important aspects you should look at addressing.

The 18 things fall into 3 groups. First are some general headings, each with a paragraph of details

• Crawlability
• Site Structure
• Content Hierarchy
• On-Page Factors
• Content Production
• Link Building

Next are several things under the heading Things we love also with a paragraph of description. What's in between the parenthesis is added by me.

• RSS feeds (blogging is good)
• Mark it up (semantic html and microdata)
• Wonderful UX (user experience)
• Social love (spread the word)

Finally are some things to avoid without extra description. Just say no.

• cloaking
• link buying
• like farms
• link farms
• three-way linking
• duplicating content
• auto-follows in social media
• the thin content approach

Two additional points. Just because a search engine tells you to do something doesn't make it the gospel of seo. Search engines will sometimes tell you to do what they want you to do as opposed to what actually works. However Bing has been pretty honest about what works for their search results and so far what they've said is usually what works as well.

Also note that while this is advice from Bing for Bing results, it's also good advice for ranking in Google. Google has said pretty much the same thing about each of the above as Bing is saying. The difference is that one engine might weight some of these more than the others.

I highly recommend reading the article in full.

[seolman]

Good article - thanks for sharing. All the major engines are definitely going the way of RDFa (microformats). I know you've already seen this VG but for those who haven't:

About RDFa - Webmaster Tools Help

Thankfully my job is being made easier via a native RDFa layer in Drupal 7 core - otherwise it's really a lot to keep up with for hand coding :P

A cursory search showed there is an RDFa plugin also available for Wordpress (as of July) but I confess ignorance of such WP issues and leave such to the master with one ear.

[vangogh]

I'd actually go with microdata over RDFa at this point. Google, Bing, and Yahoo are all behind microdata and set up a site at Schema.org. Same basic idea to markup content. Microdata uses html attributes and there's already a large vocabulary. I wrote a post a couple weeks back about why and how to use microdata.

Google will still support RDFa as well as microformats, but all 3 engines are supporting microdata and it seems like the best choice in the future because of that support.

[seolman]

Currently all of Schema.org can be used with the RDFa 1.1 syntax as is, but yes - no telling how microdata will morph over time. I was just making the point that "so far" it matches so I have the tools in place. I expect Drupal will be building in microdata support as well....I hope.

As a final note, one can definitely see the huge potential impact this could have on SEO results.

[vangogh]

Oh yeah. I think all three microdata, RDFa, and microformats have pretty good support. And the search engines support all of them to one degree or another. I'm thinking that since they've all suggested microdata it's probably going to be the one that ultimately has the most support. We'll see though. The more important aspect is to structure your data in some way to communicate additional semantic meaning.

I also see the impact on seo as well as other things. There are more and more machines capable of reading and parsing html. The more we can structure our data in ways they can understand, the more we can communicate and the more our information can travel.

[alphadore]

I can see that the writer from Bing put emphasis on social networking. I still cant seem to understand why social media is so important for search engines. If it is so important, why most social media sites are no follow? And if most of them have nofollow attributes, how are the search engines tracking the backlinks?

[vangogh]

It's not so much for the value of the specific link. When Google first opened with their PageRank algorithm the idea was that a link would equal a vote. They were taking the concept from scientific papers, which are valued based on how often they get cited in other papers. More citations means more votes by fellow scientists who should be able to better judge the merits of the paper.

If you take the concept to social networks then people sharing and resharing content is a similar form of voting. It's letting people judge which content is best based on how often they share it with friends and the public. The thinking is an article that's shared by 1,000 people on a social network is more important than one shared by 2 people. At the very least it should be a signal for what people want.

With social they can not only look at how often something is being shared but who's sharing it. Something shared by a person with 10,000 followers might be deemed more important than something shared by someone with 10 followers. It's similar to how some links are more important than others.

Naturally none of these signals is perfect. Any signal on its own can be manipulated. Links have been manipulated as has social sharing as has everything else known to affect search results. Google's algorithms look at hundreds of different signals though, and they have ways to spot patterns of manipulation. The more signals the harder it becomes to manipulate the overall.

Social signals are yet another set of signals to look at. How much weight they have overall in the combined algorithms is unknown, but the signs are pointing toward it carrying more and more weight as the data gets better and now that it has its own network Google is going to get better and cleaner data to use and spot patterns.

[alphadore]

It's not so much for the value of the specific link. When Google first opened with their PageRank algorithm the idea was that a link would equal a vote. They were taking the concept from scientific papers, which are valued based on how often they get cited in other papers. More citations means more votes by fellow scientists who should be able to better judge the merits of the paper.

If you take the concept to social networks then people sharing and resharing content is a similar form of voting. It's letting people judge which content is best based on how often they share it with friends and the public. The thinking is an article that's shared by 1,000 people on a social network is more important than one shared by 2 people. At the very least it should be a signal for what people want.

With social they can not only look at how often something is being shared but who's sharing it. Something shared by a person with 10,000 followers might be deemed more important than something shared by someone with 10 followers. It's similar to how some links are more important than others.

Naturally none of these signals is perfect. Any signal on its own can be manipulated. Links have been manipulated as has social sharing as has everything else known to affect search results. Google's algorithms look at hundreds of different signals though, and they have ways to spot patterns of manipulation. The more signals the harder it becomes to manipulate the overall.

Social signals are yet another set of signals to look at. How much weight they have overall in the combined algorithms is unknown, but the signs are pointing toward it carrying more and more weight as the data gets better and now that it has its own network Google is going to get better and cleaner data to use and spot patterns.

Thanks a lot VG. It is clearer for me now. It also made a lot of sense that a link from a person who has 10000 followers carries a higher value from a person with 1 follower.

[vangogh]

Glad to help. Try to think of seo in a holistic way. If you try to chase after the magic place to put the magic word you've already lost. The details of seo can get confusing, but most people never need to worry about the details.

1. Figure out what people are searching for related to your business. You need to use keyword tools to find what words people really use
2. Create the best content you can for the people searching above
3. Make sure your site is developed in a way that helps search engines find and understand your content
4. Give your content a push by promoting it in some way
5. Use analytics to measure everything and iterate over the 4 steps above

There's certainly more to seo than the above, but without the above the rest won't matter.