Bing is a relatively new search engine created by Microsoft and born out of it’s previous MSN search tool. With it’s huge global ad campaign it is picking up momentum quickly. Despite Google being the biggest and most used search engine in the world, there is still good reason to ensure that your website is optimised for Bing.
At present, very little information seems to exist on how to optimise for Bing - everybody is still caught up with trying to rank in Google. But from the sources I have read so far, and from my own experiments, I have managed to compile a small list of tips to consider when trying to rank your website in Bing.
On page content
Where Google values links pointing to a website to determine its ranking, Bing operates slightly differently. Bing looks for keywords on the page, in the web address and in the markup (i.e. alternative text on images). So to maximise your chances of ranking in Bing, you need to ensure that you have a few keywords on the page for which you want to rank. This does NOT mean plugging loads of keywords in there - Bing will know you are trying to game the system, so keep it natural.
Keyword domains
Elaborating on the previous point, Bing seems to regard keywords in the web address quite highly. For example if you wish to rank for the term “dog collars” you will benefit from having these words in the domain. Exact-match domains seem to perform very well.
Domain age
This does not always seem to be the case, but often the older a domain is, the better the site will rank. This can be said for Google as well - search engines seem to consider an aged domain as one that has earned its place - assuming it has been well maintained over the years.
When wanting to rank your website well in the search engines, it all comes down to authority.
But what does this mean?
The level of authority essentially means how highly a website is regarded by Google, and this partly dictates how well it ranks. Have you ever wondered why websites like the BBC or other large organisations do so well in Google? They have achieved their status over time by producing content that thousands of other sources have referenced. This is the essence of authority - if thousands of people link back to you, Google establishes you as a figure that people are probably looking for.
I have a great example of this that I collected recently.
Last month an unfortunate weatherman was caught “flipping the bird” on a live news broadcast. This story was reported on the Guardian’s website here: BBC weatherman’s one-finger handover.
Now in this article there is a link to a website on how to give the finger which you can see from the link “flipping the bird”.
When the article was published I immediately decided to screen grab this page’s Linkscape assessment. Linkscape compiles a number of metrics for any given web page and returns an estimate of how well a page may rank based on it’s authority. These are the results for the page in question before the Guardian article had chance to pass it’s value:
You can see that the page authority was 35/100
A week or so later once the Guardian article had chance to influence this page we can see the results have changed:
Now the page authority is 49/100. The overall domain authority has also risen to 51/100.
What has happened here? In short, because this website is being linked to from the Guardian (a trusted and authoratitive resource), it too has been given extra authority.
These results are not necessarily attributed solely to the mention on the Guardian website, but it’s a very likely possibility. This highlights the importance of website authority and it shows that links from strong websites can do your own website a lot of good indeed.
How can I increase web traffic?
Many business owners wonder why their website traffic plods along, never really increasing and staying largely the same. This in effect means that the online arm of the business is not growing - you would not allow this to happen in the bricks and mortar business, so why let it go stale online?
The above traffic snapshot is from a Hero Digital client (Discount Tile Centre) over roughly a 3 month period. As you can tell, we have grown the website’s traffic by almost 3 times during this period. But how?
The business was already listed in various online directories and was doing quite well in Google for it’s desired keywords.
What we did was boost the overall spread of incoming links to the website as well as creating content that gave added value to the website.
We published a company blog providing fresh content to users
We wrote articles for the company and posted them on various websites
We wrote guest blog entries for relevant websites
We placed banner ads on relevant websites to increase exposure
We used social media tools to shout about all of this
Make no mistake - this is tough. Creating regular content, adding it to sharing websites and creating a buzz around one company is hard work that takes time to pay off. This holistic approach provides sustainability that will see the website’s traffic continue to grow in the future.
Over the course of the next 3 months we expect to see traffic double once again.
If you’d like to see your traffic and sales increase in this way, contact us today.
SEO key ranking sources
Along with many other methods of improving a website’s traffic and search engine rankings, I utilise the following resources on a weekly basis…
Article directory publication
Publishing unique content on article directories an effective way to improve search rankings and drive targeted traffic to your website.
This list could be a lot larger but if you are looking to do some DIY SEO and make a start promoting yourself online, these websites are a great place to start :)
Why ranking for “clothes” could bankrupt you
For many business owners, the thought of ranking number 1 in Google for such ambiguous terms as “cars” or “clothes” or “guitars” is great - it will bring them heaps of traffic and they will see thousands of sales because of it.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case.
Such vague terms tend to bring in more browsing visitors than actual paying customers. This is because there is nothing targeted about these terms.
Imagine for one moment that you sell clothing. You sell a range of skate clothing aimed at males in their teens to their late 20’s. Thus, your key demographic is young men who like alternative music.
Consider these two scenarios:
Jim is looking to buy some new clothes for a party he is attending at the weekend. It’s a university party and that girl from the house down the road is coming, so he wants to impress.
Jim goes to Google and searches “clothes”.
Jim goes to Google and searches “black skate hoody”.
Now given your target demographic, which phrase would you prefer to rank for? Of course, you sell clothes.
But “clothes” could mean anything.
You could spend thousands of pounds over the course of a year to rank on page one for “clothes”, but end up attracting middle aged women to your site who are actually looking for something to wear at an engagement party!
So in reality, you would prefer scenario 2. Why? Because this is exactly what Jim is looking for.
Relevance is key to a successful SEO campaign. There is little point blowing your entire marketing budget on bringing in tonnes of traffic that, for the main part, will not convert.
Content, as they say, remains the king…
Ask anybody who is involved in online marketing or SEO and they will tell you that “content is king”.
It is, and here’s why…
Google, and other search engines, rank your website against a plethora of other websites that are largely the same. There is hardly such thing as a niche any more, so you really have to do whatever it takes to stand out from the hundreds of other websites serving the same content as you.
Imagine you sell branded kitchenware - how are you going to differentiate yourself from your competitors? Of course, every business model is unique to an extent, but real-world motivations such as “operate a loyalty scheme” or “offer outstanding customer service” won’t make you rank higher.
Google needs to see you making a pro-active effort to get people to your website. How does Google know how to order it’s results? What makes one website stand above another? The answer is in the content.
Google’s goal is to please it’s users by serving them the most relevant content to their search phrase. The point of this? If the users are happy with their results, they will keep using Google.
So in spirit of this, you also need to please your users. You cannot simply put a product up on your site and expect it to rank well - you need to offer more. How about trying something like this:
Write a review of the product that is completely unique and has additional information to your competitors
Take your own photography
Open the product up to user-reviews - these are guaranteed to gives users a real life insight into their potential purchase
If the product is worthy, use the wider social spectrum to drum up interest. Think blogging, Twitter and Facebook
But this is not all. Many companies are now offering a blog, but it’s also fair to say that most are not using it correctly (if at all). You want to give both the search engines and users a reason to re-visit your website. If you maintain a blog that offers genuinely interesting content then people will return and even better, may share it’s content with their network (Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Digg friends etc).
So, when promoting a website online, always consider what makes your pages stand out from the rest. The answer is in original, regularly updated content.
Note:I cannot take credit for the epically bad image above, these guys can though :)
Tools that I use for SEO on a daily basis
When approaching an SEO campaign it’s necessary to have a good idea of what you are doing, and there are many (free) tools available to aid you with this.
Link Analysis
There are a couple of market leaders out there, namely Majestic SEO and Linkscape. Both of these tools analyse a websites profile and deliver a reasonably accurate authority rating based on various factors. My preference is Linkscape which gives you a quick (and rough) answer as to whether a website is worthwhile or not.
Another tool I regularly use is the bad neighbourhood checker which does exactly that; it checks all of the outgoing links on the specified website and returns how many (if any) questionable links it finds. Pretty useful if my client is selling designer clothes and their link is found on a page that also links out to viagra websites!
Website Analysis
Another free SEO tool that I sometimes use is the Website Grader. This performs a quick check on any given website for basic page elements like heading tags and the existance (or not) of a blog.
Keyword Analysis
There are hundreds of keyword analysis tools available, probably because they are quite simple to make. There is no reason why I use this one in particular other than that it is in my bookmarks. Essentially it lets me see very quickly the sort of words a page is associated to.
For keyword popularity research I always trust the Google AdWords tool, but I’m guessing you already use that!
Storage & Reporting
If I identify a potential link partner or blog that I like the look of, I sometimes store the information in Evernote for easy access later. This seperates it from my bookmarks and keeps things tidier.
When preparing a report for a client I always rely on trust Microsoft Excel which allows me to report on links gained, ranking changes and other information.
And lastly… my brain!
These tools are useful additions to my SEO campaigns but ultimately, I rely on my common sense and experience to gauge a website and/or links value.
META keywords and description - useful or not?
I get a lot of clients asking me if their META tags are important. For some reason, the matter of META tags seems to be ingrained in the mind of everybody who has ever owned an online business, probably dating back to the late 90’s or early 00’s when META information was much more important. It seems to be a subject that gets raised time after time, and just to clear things up, there is a lot more to modern SEO than these humble little tags!
As you may or may not be aware, META tags can be broken down into two categories - description and keywords. Google has stated on many occasions that it really doesn’t care about the keywords tag. The description, however, is used in it’s search results. If this is left blank, it will take the most appropriate content from the page itself and use that in the listings.
I don’t know if other search engines still look at the META keywords tag but I would hazard a guess that the worthwhile ones probably don’t.
So in short, write a good META description, but don’t worry too much about the keywords.
And if you don’t believe me, here is Matt Cutts from Google explaining just that…
If SEO is getting the horse to water, conversion optimisation is making it drink
