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.

Their SEO tools include a keyword analyzer, a directory submitter, a SEO analysis tool, and a social media bookmark finder among others. Probably the most interesting feature that they have is a “Multi Datacenter Pagerank” tool which checks a site’s page rank at several of Google’s locations. This is potentially useful if you find that your site is getting decent local traffic but are looking to get more from sources overseas and situations of that nature.

All in all, it’s a very well put together set of tools that you can use for free in a world where most SEO automation tools are being sold for extortionist prices so check it out.

Before I get started I would like to thank everyone I got to meet there and the event promoters for such a great week. I had the chance to meet many of the actual engineers behind the three major search engines as well as some of the top SEOs. Aside from that, I also got to meet other great peole who, like myself, where at the conference to learn and share information with one another. Thanks everyone, you know who you are.

Back Story of Bing

One of the great things about going to these conferences is that you get to hear all of the great gossip from the people that were there. According to the several “Bingers” that I talked to the culmination of what we now know as Bing was quite a stealthy process in the making. Apparently, the vast majority of the team working on this latest installation of MSN Search were not told that Bing was to be the official title of the engine until the day that it launched. On top of that, marketing had been given “several different brands” that the new search engine might be called and were instructed to create branding for all of them. And I thought my clients were difficult.

One of the things that was talked about quite frequently at the conference was Bing’s “Instant Results” feature. Bing is currently trying to make it so that searchers can get as much crucial information as quickly as possible by displaying data for some queries in the SERP’s themselves. To try this out, simply type in the name of a professional athlete or race car driver. Try using the name of the Ultimate Fighter Anderson Silva and you will see that it brings back his basic stats on-page. This feature currently works with only a handful of subjects but Bing is currently working with partners that are using the Search API to add this feature to a variety of subjects.

The Future of Bing

I was able to confirm that I will be able to get a Bing Mobile app for my Android phone by the end of the year. Also, I learned that Bing is doing some interesting tweaking with their on-page advertisements so that they actually display less for users that do not click on them. Users will also find in the next coming months that Bing will be refining their on-page data and further working to provide the data searchers are looking for as accurately as possible.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that their market share continues to climb? Be prepared for this fall/winter as users start to switch to Windows 7 for there to be a spike in Bing traffic. All of the top SEOs will be ready for this.

SES FTW

To finish off I thought I would add a video that I took with my Android phone of a site review session with Google’s own Matt Cutts. I apologize in advance for the poor quality but I thought I might share it nonetheless. The guy in the black shirt in front of me is actually SEO expert Michael Gray who moderated the session and had to lend his laptop to Matt because of technical difficulties.

For those of us in the SEO industry this can be good or bad news. The bad news would be that now that Yahoo’s Algorithm is basically out of the game, all of the time we have spent on getting our sites optimized for it is now somewhat wasted. However, the good news is that if you have been following this Blog then you are probably prepared for Bing SEO and the payoff for your efforts will be about doubled.

One interesting thing to note is that from around 2001-2004 Yahoo started augmenting their search results with another little company’s called Google. Since then, Google has risen to the top and as we all know is in a quite dominant position.

Could this just be another sign of the beginning of Bing’s possible rise to power that I mentioned on this post? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, stay on top of your sites’ SEO and check back here later for more SEO tips and info.

Fall 2009.

Everyone in SEO land should be on their toes this fall as we see the search giants muscle for growth this coming fall/winter. Why you ask? Because two major players in search will all be launching new OS’s in time for holiday sales which in turn means a surge in their search traffic.

The Setup

For those of you who aren’t sure what I’m talking about, I’m referring to the release of Windows 7 in the new retail locations Microsoft is opening this fall and the launch of Google’s new Chrome OS coming to netbooks. Both OS’s are conveniently being launched just before the holiday season in hopes of grabbing large amounts of market share from October through December. With this peak in PC sales we will find most users using the default search provider installed on their machine’s default browser. So, depending on which company gets more users utilizing their OS, search engine usage can change drastically.

Forward Thinking

So, based on the idea that OS directly affects search engine usage, SEO’s that foresee users flocking to one more than the other might want to focus more of their time optimizing for the engine that has more users. Do you catch what I’m getting at yet?

What I’m saying is that Bing’s market share will definitely rise this fall and “forward thinking” SEO’s will be prepared. As of right now we know that Windows 7 is selling quite well as the BBC reports:

“Amazon said that sales of Windows 7 in the first eight hours it was available outstripped those of Windows Vista’s entire 17 week pre-order period.”

Compare that to Google’s release of their new mysterious Chrome OS that is targeted at least initially at netbooks. So far, we are not getting a lot of details on this and the future of “netbooks” is still yet to be seen. Yes, Chrome OS will be free but users are much more likely to switch search engines than OS’s.

Also, let’s not forget Yahoo. With all the new buzz and innovation coming out of Microsoft and Google what is Yahoo doing to keep up? They are changing their homepage. Yes, they are making the logo purple. That’s about it. Will we continue to see more users leave Yahoo for greener pastures? Definitely.

The Pitch

I don’t want anyone to think that I am overly confident in Bing’s ability to come up the ladder as the new nexus of search. I definitely have my doubts. But I am sure that there is genuine innovation going on there and that the marketing is on track to gain serious popularity for the engine. The SEO’s at the top of the game will make sure that as Bing’s reputation grows, their sites will be optimized for it. Will yours be ready?

The Naysayers

First of all, depending on who you talk to, Bing is doing somewhere between pretty good and awesome. Naysayers will note that while Google and Yahoo still maintain their #1 and #2 spots on the Alexa Rankings, Bing is way down at #16. The misleading factor here is that Microsoft’s Search network is still divided between the domains Bing.com and Live.com while it’s competitors have the majority of their domains under one roof (think mail.google.com as GMail, news.yahoo.com for news). However, #16 is not a low number for any site that has only been around for a month. Only time will tell if Microsoft will end up having all of their related sites converted to the Bing branding.

The Bingers

As of yesterday, Bing announced that they have seen significant increases in several specific areas. While areas of specific interest might not interest your average WebDev or SEO Specialist, bear in mind that “areas of interest” or “making decisions within search” are what Bing is all about. Some of their findings are:

“On Bing Shopping, we’ve seen a nearly a 3x increase in site visits and a 5.42% increase in transactions to Bing cashback. Summer is typically not high season for online shopping, so this has been really nice to see.”

“Traffic to Bing Travel has increased by 90% month over month since launch, highlighting a strong reception to some of the great features designed to help travelers make smarter, more informed decisions…”

“We saw 8 percent growth in unique users to Bing.com in June, which is an important indicator that you are trying Bing and the word is spreading.”

While some people find 8 percent to be hardly worth celebrating, others see it as an important milestone. To me what this shows is that Bing might be on the way to a steady, linear, climb for the top search engine spot. TechCrunch wrote an article last month showing how Bing already might have surpassed Yahoo in usage. However, and article was published yesterday on Complete.com that stated that Bing is still under Yahoo in market share but gaining fast.

The Current Trend

While it is too early to tell whether Bing’s growth will continue to climb, I would like to point out that if there is going to be a takeover in the search market, it will most likely start like this. What we know for sure is that to come up with a search engine to rival Google, you need a lot of capital and resources. What company has more of that than Microsoft? What we also know is that search engine wars in the past have been won very gradually. In the days when Google overtook the search giant that was Yahoo, they rarely climbed more than a percentage point or two a month.

Once again, the following months will give us a lot better idea of Bing’s staying power and how much it will affect the SEO industry.

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.

1. Structure Your Copy

This one of the most common mistakes website developers make. Often, when we build websites, we focus on the wrong areas too much and not enough on the areas that potential users are interested in. Your copy and it’s structure should be determined by what users are looking for. Below is an illustration of the more traditional approach to structuring your website and the more modern “Content is King” approach.

As you can see, the most important keywords and highest sitemap priority should still be assigned to the homepage. However, we have found that some pages that are often very prominent in most website’s navigation, such as the “About Us” page, rarely bring search traffic. Therefore, many webmasters are finding that by adding importance to content based pages they can get a much higher amount of search traffic.

2. Write Copy for Humans

Too often does my company hires a freelance writer to create copy for a new website only to receive several word documents full of content that would make reading legal documents seem interesting. Sometimes, we will get copy from an overzealous freelancing grad student that reads like an excerpt from a doctoral thesis. Good copy is readable by everybody. Try to avoid text that is written at a very high reading level or overly keyword dense. Nobody wants to read text like “Come visit us at the Surf Mall Plaza to buy levi capris while you walk by the Newport Nike store on your way to Bed bath and Beyond next to the Seaside Apple Store“.

3. Use the Users’ Lingo

When writing copy it is important to use words and phrases that are in common usage, even if they might be outdated or changed inside your specific industry. For example, I build a lot of websites for lawyers. Lawyers who sue people for hitting their clients with a car while drunk. The problem is that these lawyers don’t call themselves lawyers. They call themselves, “Personal injury attorneys who obtain settlements on behalf of clients against intoxicated drivers in crashworthy DUI lawsuits.” Do you see the difference in wording? Which type of wording do you think a potential client will use when searching for a lawyer? Just because your client may be an expert in the area of business that they practice doesn’t mean that their wording is what potential clients/customers are looking for.

4. Research Keywords

There are several tools out there that can help you figure out what key words or phrases people are looking for in relation to your website. Once you have determined your main keywords these tools will help you identify seconday ones to focus on.

Trellian KeywordDiscovery

goRank Ontology Finder

Google Insights for Search

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

5. Use Key Phrases

Sometimes it is more common for users to type in phrases when searching rather than keywords. These key phrases, or “long-tail” terms can help you establish a niche in what might be a very competitive market. It is possible that more users will search for “Newport Beach Community College” than “Newport College”. Once again, this is where research is most useful.

6. Properly Place Your Keywords

Once you have decided on what keywords and phrases people are searching for in your market, it is important that you use them in all areas of your site. It is not simply enough to make sure that these keywords are used in your site’s copy. they should be present in the header tags, alt attributes, title tags, title attributes, description tags, anchor tags, navigation, and links.

Despite what some SEOs tell you, do not attempt to stuff keywords in the antiquated “keyword” meta tag. This practice has not worked on any major search engine for almost a decade now. That’s about a century in computer years.  Altavista was the last to abandon it in 2001. For some reason many SEOs still insist on it because they read SEO books from 1998.

7. Choose Header Text Wisely

Usually, the text inside your <h1> tag is the same as the text in you <title> tag. This is not a bad thing. The thing to remember here is that Bing only supports so many characters and spaces (about 75) so anything longer than that will get chopped off in your search results (see below). Also, having to long of a title on your page can make your website seem spammy and increase your bounce rate.

8. Allow and Encourage User Input

One of the great things about blogs is that they have always featured areas for user input. This has spurred a new generation of websites (Web 2.0) that not only encourages user input, but thrives on it.  Allowing users to comment on and rate items on a website is a great way for customers to feel “ownership” in the sites. These users are then in turn more likely to link-to, revisit and discuss your site with their friends.

9. Avoid Provoking Controversy

Sometimes it is easy to get a website caught up in something related to it’s topic that might actually hurt it. For example, starting a blog that focuses on SEO topics related to Bing makes it easy to engage in the current debate of which is better: Bing vs Google. However, engaging in such debate is asking for trolls. Just look at the comments under the Mac vs PC YouTube videos.

Engaging users in debates that they feel passionate about is very difficult to achieve online without sending a very negative message overall. Therefore, try to avoid controversy in your copy where there is danger of it disrupting the flow of your site.

10. Follow Trends

It is important to stay up-to-date with the latest trends regarding your website’s product or service. Often, writing about the latest innovations and trends in your site’s area of business can help drive new users to your site. Also, try creating content based on how your product relates to or is being used in current events. Search engines like websites that are constantly being updated. Use current events and trends as an opportunity to add valuable new copy to your site for returning visitors.

So that’s my advice for anyone writing copy for websites as a profession. Remember that good writers don’t necessarily write good copy for websites and good webmasters don’t always write good copy for humans. Follow these guidelines and you will find that not only will users find your site more useful but that search engines will rank them higher as well.

Growing up in the pacific northwest, there was a song written by a group of musicians from the Seattle area that I always associated with this special holiday. I tried out Bing’s video search feature and sure enough I was able to dig a performance of it up for your patriotic enjoyment.

This is “4th of July” as made famous by the band Soundgarden. Have a safe and memorable Independence Day.

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.

The word around the SEO campfire is that the old axiom “content is king” is as true now as ever with Bing. We are finding that Bing is determining pagerank more heavily by the page content than by on-page SEO practices like linking, title tags,  and backlinks. Therefore, I am testing the idea of having more content visible on the homepage by displaying more of the copy from the articles than the layout did previously.

As for the better SEO practices related to translation we need to keep our eye on a few things. Primarily, when you translate a page does the URL change? If the answer is yes, you may run into the problem of search engines indexing duplicate content on your site. In the past this has been a big issue up until several months ago when the three major search engines decided to all agree on what we now call the Canonical tag. You can view this tag by checking the source code of any of the pages on this blog. Mine are generated dynamically by the Wordpress All in One SEO Pack which handles this and few other things for me. There is also another plugin that just does the canonical tag called Canonical URL’s.

If you haven’t read up on the proper usage of canonical tags yet or have questions on their usage, I recommend viewing the the interview below with search expert Matt Cutts or checking out his blog post on the subject.

I finally got a chance to meet with some of the folks at Microsoft up in Redmond this last weekend during “Green and Geekalicious Hackday”. The event, which was was organized by Chris Pirillo, was held at the Microsoft campus and was hosted by members of the Bing team in their new mixer commons. It was a good chance for me to meet some of the Seattle area web industry leaders and some of the Microsoft employees that have been working on projects that we will see rolling out in the next couple of months.

Betsy and Michelle of Microsoft talk with Chris Pirillo of LockerGnome

Besides being your average web-industry tweetup, this was a chance for the Bing team to promote their Will Code for Green competition which is aimed at getting people to use the Bing API to make the world a greener place. They are giving out $10,000 dollars to the team or person that can create the best app and winners will be announced at the Gnomedex Conference in August.

Chris made a video of some of the “geekalicious” items that were being given out at the event which can be viewed below. Follow this link for more information on the Will Code for Green competition.

It seems that from the very beginning one of the main goals of Bing is to try to get features to use some of the more advanced features that their search engine holds. What better way than to provide a new topic, every day, that gets users to demo these features? New users will find that as they click on the various tooltips that pop up as they mouse over the image they are taken to search results for the various subjects clicked – often using features like their video search and maps.

If this sounds familiar that because it is. Occasionally Google has been known change their logo for various holidays and special events such as earth day. Users clicking on these special logos will then be taken to search results for that particular topic.

I find that Bing’s effort in getting users to use their more advanced search features very interesting. I have heard on more than one occasion directly from the mouth of Google employees that the vast majority of their users never touch features such as video or image search. Perhaps this is the beginning of regular search users becoming more advanced searchers?

One thing is for certain: It generates Interest. If you follow recent news on twitter you will find that tweets regarding Bing’s background-du-jour coming out every hour of the day. Also, while your there, be sure to follow us by adding @bingseoguide.

So what does this mean for SEOs like us? Well, quite a bit actually. If users really do start to use more advanced search options like image search, that could potentially mean that we will need to optimize our sites more for those various mediums. Once again we will hear some people crying the death of SEO while the real industry winners will simply adapt with the changes and use them to help their sites even more visibility. It will be interesting to see as Bings’s market share increases what percentage of users take advantage of these features.