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WebSEOAnalytics.com – A Tool Actually Worth Using

Published: October 2, 2009Posted in: All, Beginner

The holy grail for many of us SEO’s is that mythical creature called automation, the idea of having a program take mundane tasks that we perform repeatedly and do them for us. A lot of times this is a task that is a lot harder than it sounds. Any software or tool that can make your SEO projects go faster and reduce production time is something worth looking into.

One tool that has come out in recent months that can perform several tasks for SEO automation is WebSEOAnalytics.com. With their software suite based entirely online, this new startup is focused on making all of the tools regularly used by SEOs automated and centralized in one location.

10 Rules for Writing Good Copy for SEO

Published: July 8, 2009Posted in: Beginner, Intermediate

A new acquaintance asked me the other day if I knew any really good articles on writing copy for websites. I thought about it for a minute and replied no. What I know about writing good copy for websites has come from various sources over the years and I like to think of “good” website copy as more of a science than an art.

Now before you writers out there start getting upset with me for calling the fine art of literature a “science”, remember that this is about writing good copy for SEO. That means writing good, pertinent content that a variety of users will be interested in and searching for. I myself, do not write copy for the websites that I build but I spend a great deal of time editing and modifying copy that professional writers create for me. That being said, here is my list of 10 Rules for Writing Good Copy for SEO.

Language Support and Canonical URLs

Published: July 3, 2009Posted in: All, Beginner, Intermediate

For those of you returning to the site today, many of you may notice that some changes have been made. First, I have decided to change the blog back to a more traditional format. Secondly, I have now added language support (thanks to Davide Pozza’s Global Translator plugin) for over 40 languages. Now, these may sound like fairly minor changes but I am going to show you how much of an impact these two changes can have on SEO.

First, I have never like the traditional blog format much, I have always thought that it provides too much information when all I am going to read is a headline and maybe the first sentence when looking for something specific. I don’t like having to scroll down a page to see all of the important information on it. The truth is that search engines, specifically Bing, might feel differently.

SEO or DEO? What is a Decision Engine?

Published: June 27, 2009Posted in: All, Beginner, Intermediate

With all the new commercials coming out of Redmond recently, people have been wondering what this new search engine Bing is all about and why Microsoft is calling it a “decision engine“. Microsoft has released a series of videos explaining what the big deal is. For those of us who like a more boiled down definition it’s basically a search engine that not only finds you information but also attempts to make it more usable to humans. Microsoft has released an open letter to the public explaining this concept in greater detail.

Some might jump to the conclusion that because Bing is also a search engine then all search engines are “decision engines”. This is not the case. To make it simpler we’ve made the following Venn diagram to illustrate our point:

Venn diagram of search engines

As you can see, a decision engine is a search engine because it has to crawl the web and find information. However, a search engine is not a decision engine unless it helps you make use of the results it displays.

It will definetly be interesting to see how well Bing will be received by everyday users in the next coming months.

So why is this site called Bingseoguide.com instead of Bingdeoguide.com? Well, if you haven’t figured it out yet, DEO basically is SEO. Perhaps we might say that it is a certain kind of SEO. Either way, you’ll notice that if you type Bingdeoguide.com in your browser it takes you to this site as well. Maybe, the term DEO will catch on in the next couple years and we’ll have to change the name of the site. Only time will tell.

SEO 101 for Bing

Published: June 21, 2009Posted in: Beginner

So if you are new to this SEO thing and looking for some good initial advice, or have been living under a rock for the past 5 or so years, the place you should start your quest for optimization is the Bing Webmaster Center.

When I first started building websites about 13 years ago the concept of SEO was a mess. Bear in mind that would be the year 3 b.g. (before Google). Maybe it would be more appropriate to call it 13 b.b. (before Bing). People were stuffing keywords into sites everywhere. You would search for shoe stores and get porn sites. Some sites wold have 6 feet of random text stuffed ad the bottom of every page of their site in hopes of increasing their traffic. The search engines themselves had pop-ups coming out of everywhere (remember that this was before any kind of pop-up blocker was invented). It was the dawn of SEO and it was a mess.

Today things have calmed down considerably. We’ve come a long way between then and now. Back then getting to the top results on a search engine meant doing things that would most likely annoy the user and/or make your site very difficult to use. I remember making a website for my Father’s small business (I was about 13 years old at the time) and I remember being frustrated that when I searched for it on Lycos, and Metacrawler I could never find it. I wished that someone would just tell me how to be found on those stupid things.

Well, now that person exists. He’s called the Bing Webmaster Center. Everything you need to know to get you site crawled by Bing and get on track with their guidelines can be found there. For anyone looking for the very fist place to start with getting their website seen, that is the place.

Worried about being seen on Google and Yahoo as well? Luckily all 3 major search engines have similar webmaster centers where you can login and manage your sites. All of them have their pros and cons which we might discuss later but for now check them out and start getting your site seen.

Bing Webmaster Center

Google Webmaster Tools

Yahoo Site Explorer