Bing SEO is Different than Google SEO

Doug Williams @ 4:45 am

This blog entry was posted on November 29, 2011.

Bing tends to place more emphasis on how well you optimize pages on your website. Google places more emphasis on backlinks from other sites in its algorithm. The best SEO method is to have a rigorous on-page SEO process and a good link popularity in your SEO process.

I have one SEO client in Charlottesville, Virginia. He has a retail business. He built and maintains his own website. When we started work a year ago, his website did not rank in the first 3 pages on any of the search engines. He wanted to make all the actual changes to his own website.

I prepared a SEO plan with instructions for changes. I then worked on the backlinking using keyword rich anchor text. After one year, the website had top rankings on Google, but continued to rank poorly on Yahoo and Bing.

My client admitted that he never implemented the changes to his website. This caused poor results with Bing. The backlinking alone moved his site to top positions on Google. The good news was that he was having his best year ever with his business with many customers now finding him through Google.

This illustrates that what works for Google, doesn’t automatically work on Bing. What are the important factors for Bing optimization?

Title Tags: Use keywords in the first part of your Title Tag and keep them to 65 characters.
Website Structure: Use search engine friendly URLs that include your keywords. Link to all your important pages using text links from your home page. Pay attention to validating HTML code which Bing puts more emphasis on than Google.
Content: Use keywords in the H1 tags. Produce original, quality content. Bing likes a minimum of 300 words of text on a page. Use keyword phrases 1-2 times in your text.
Bing Webmaster Tools: Use Bing’s Webmaster Tools to see traffic stats, indexing and crawl stats. They have some good link analysis tools to help with your Bing SEO work.
Domain: Domain Age is very important to Bing. Using keywords as an exact match is important for Bing.

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Making a Website: Roles of the Project Team

Doug Williams @ 5:56 am

This blog entry was posted on November 25, 2011.

You have been tasked with creating a new website for your organization. You need to assemble the team. Some may be internal staff, others will be outsourced. What are the team members that you need? This will vary based on the complexity of your project.

Website Project Team

Strategist: This person plans the purpose of the website, what produces and services are being marketed the target audience, and how the buying decision is made. They compare the competition and craft the central message for the website. They establish the goals for the website, call to actions on the website. More on website strategist.

Project Manager: They keep the project on track and on schedule. They have the overall responsibility for the successful planning, execution, monitoring and control of the project. They manage all the moving parts and continually steer the team toward completing the website. If left on their own, website projects always seem to stall.

SEO Specialist: Your website needs to attract interested visitors. A skilled search engine optimization person will pick the right keywords, advise on website structure, do page optimization, establish link popularity strategies and set-up metrics to measure success. The SEO person will work closely with the content writer.

Content Writer: The writer is responsible for creating all the website content. The writer takes the message and crafts interesting and exciting text, weaving in the keywords keeping the audience and search engines interested in the website. Creative writing will create the emotional spark that causes visitors to take action.

Site Architect: They organize and categorize the website structure and content. They create the sitemap and wireframes. They work with the strategist to organize the pages into a selling sequence. They are responsible for usability and shape the user experience as they interact with the website.

Graphic Designer: The designer is responsible for the visual appearance with designs that encourage visitors to take action. The design establishes trust and credibility and is more than just “pretty.” A good designer is an artist, understands visitor interaction and is a good marketer.

Developer / Programmer: This person codes the website and adds the interaction functionality to the website. They turn designs into an interactive user experience. Programmers add custom database applications programs that allow your site to sell products and interact with the web visitor.

Many times one person on the team will fill multiple positions. For very large projects, each role may be filled by a team of specialists.

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How to Quality Check Your New Website

Doug Williams @ 5:35 am

This blog entry was posted on November 22, 2011.

You have just received your new website from your web developer. How should you check it over to make sure they did a good job? Here are a series of visual checks and free web tools to do your own quality check.

Visual Checks and Tests

Verify your design is professional and presents your organization as credible and trustworthy. Compare against your competition, does it make you look like a leader?
Manually test every function. Buy something from your store, sign-up for your newsletter. Do you receive all the proper email notifications?
The logo should be at the top left of each page and link back to the home page.
Navigation labels must be text based and be clearly understandable. More on navigation
Website footers should include copyright info and links to primary pages More on footers
Your phone number and physical address should be on every page, not just on the contact page.
Content should be keyword driven and written with a clear message. Cut and paste page text into a Word document and check spelling and grammar.
Does each page have a clear and visible call to action? You have to ask your visitors to do something.

WooRank Report: This is a convenient tool that measures many page attributes. The WooRank report checks a lot of factors all in one step. Some important items to look at are (in order as you scan the report):

Are your keywords being used in both the Title tag and H1 tag on the home page? This is important for SEO.
Under inside analysis, are there different titles and descriptions on each page?
www resolve should show a redirect to either the www or non-www version of your site.
XML Sitemaps should show a sitemap present.
Google Analytics should be present to measure visitor traffic and visitor behavior.
Load time should show your site speed at less than 1 second.

HTML code validation: Verify your pages were built within coding standards. Validate all HTML code with W3C Validation. This helps with cross browser compatibility.

Browser test: Test each page on each of the major browsers. Each browser displays a website differently. Browsershots.org allows you to view pages of your site without having to actually load the different browsers onto your computer.

Broken Link Check: Check all internal links for broken links using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

These tests cover the basics. There are an almost overwhelming number of tools and tests that could be run. The key is to quickly uncover the major issues before you take possession of your new site.

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Website Footer Best Practices

Doug Williams @ 4:45 am

This blog entry was posted on November 18, 2011.

Footer navigation should be placed at the bottom of each web page. These are usually identical on all pages in your site. Website footers act as a macro sitemap to the key pages on your site. Footer links make it easier for visitors to navigate your site without having to scroll back to the top of the page. Including an address in the footer helps visitors and helps establish the location of your company, especially for local search.

Footer links help search engines index your website, particularly if the primary navigation is formed in Flash or JavaScript. It can act as a condensed version of your site map.

Local Search: If yours is a local business seeking local customers, then having your address including city and state in the footer identifies your location for both search engines and visitors. You can even include the communities that you serve.

Usability: Footers should be designed first with usability and visitor experience in mind rather than just the search engines. As a general rule, if it’s good for your visitors it will help your search rankings. If you are forming your footers only around a SEO strategy, you should think long and hard about it.

Pages: Which pages should be included in your footer links? This should include about-us, contact, privacy policy, terms of use, sitemap and links to key services or products. Include your copyright information as well.

Number of links: How many links should be in the footer navigation? Typically up to a dozen. Large scale footers are rarely good for visitors or for SEO. Organizing links into natural categories makes it easier to visually locate an individual page.

Google suggests that any page not exceed 100 links. Having too many footer links may put every page in the site over this suggested limit.

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How to Connect With Your Web Audience

Doug Williams @ 4:50 am

This blog entry was posted on November 15, 2011.

The perception of your business is formed the moment a visitor arrives to your website. To connect with your visitor, you need to completely understand your customer (or potential customer). What is their motivation to seek you out? What problem are they trying to solve? What are they worried about? What interests and inspires your best buyers?

You are building rapport and they become your allies. They need a reason to trust you so you need to make your website trustworthy.

A great connection comes from good communication. Good communication isn’t talking; it comes from a deep understanding. It comes from using a shared language, a shared vocabulary, imagery, symbols and behavior. Content on your site needs to be both useful and aligned with the needs of your visitors.

Connection is more than website text. Make it visual. Use video so they can get to know you. Invest in educating and mentoring your visitors through blogging, ebooks and webinars. Use education based marketing. People respect and trust those that educate and teach them.

Go where your audience is. If you own a restaurant, then your audience will be mobile. Social reviews will be important. Will you offer mobile coupons? Can you automatically provide turn by turn directions from their current physical location? Is your website designed to connect with your customers the way they want to connect?

Your target audience knows what they want and what they are searching for. Optimize your website for the phrases that will bring in the people most interested in what you provide. You will want to think like your customer, not an industry expert. Did you know most realtors instinctively want to be found for “real estate for sale” yet most people actually search for “homes for sale”?

A true connection to your audience comes from a deep understanding of your target market, Then giving tangible value to them in your message.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing

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WWW vs. Non-WWW, Which is correct?

Doug Williams @ 3:48 am

This blog entry was posted on November 11, 2011.

Your website can either be WWW or the non-WWW version. Just make sure it isn’t both. Either form is considered correct. The general public is more comfortable starting a web address with WWW so WWW has become the most popular. But non-WWW is equally correct. Just choose one form and stick to it.

So what’s wrong with having both?

The Problem: Both the WWW or the non-WWW version are treated as completely separate versions of your website. If you have both, they are almost always treated as duplicate content of each other and cause indexing problems with the search engines. This will hurt search rankings.

Each version of your website will attract valuable inbound links. Some links will be to the WWW version and some will be to the non-WWW version. Splitting the inbound links greatly weakens both versions.

How to detect: Do a manual test of your website to make sure a redirect is in place. First go to your website at www.yourdomain.com (in the address bar of your browser). If your website automatically switches to http://yourdomain.com then a redirect is in place and your website is fine. If your website comes up with www.yourdomain.com try switching it to http://yourdomain.com. It should automatically redirect back to www.yourdomain.com.

How to fix: You will want to 301 redirect from the WWW to the non-WWW, or vice versa. This way if the wrong version is entered in, the visitor is automatically taken to the correct URL. A 301 redirect means a permanent change of address. The method for creating a 301 redirect will vary based on your web server. Please see instructions on how to implement a 301 redirect.

Next, in Google’s Webmaster Tools select either the www or non-www version as your preferred form of your domain. (Site configuration >> Settings >> Preferred domain).

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5 Pricing Strategies That You Can Use To Improve Your Bottom Line

Doug Williams @ 5:42 am

This blog entry was posted on November 8, 2011.

Pricing strategies are used to influence buying decisions. Pricing presentation is used to psychologically guide consumers and position products.

Left Digit Effect: Shoppers pay much more attention to the left most digits when comparing and purchasing products. Most people make a choice based on the first digit they see. They tend to not see a difference between $5.99 and $5.00 when making a selection. This is according to a study done by Manning and Sprott.

Decoy Pricing: Clients rarely choose the highest price option and often choose a middle priced option. Increase the sales of your higher priced product by adding an absurdly highly priced similar item to your product lineup. You won’t expect to sell many of these premium priced products, but it will increase the sales of your other products which are a deal by comparison.

Price Format: According to a Cornell University study on menu pricing in restaurants, guests given the numeral-only menu spent significantly more than those who received a menu with prices showing a dollar sign or those whose menus had prices written out in words.

Product Bundling: Buyers will purchase a packaged group of products or services and spend more per transaction than if they had to make individual purchase decisions. Customers assume that bundling goods and services will add value and create economies of scale even if no actual discount exists. Use bundling especially for high margin products such as software or digital products where there is little delivery cost.

Anchor Pricing: The anchor price is the fair price for an item in the mind of the consumer. They then compare prices in making their purchase decision. A store that is pricing a coat at $60 that is marked down from $120 is attempting to set the anchor price at $120. Similarly, a sales person presenting three options to a client will present the most expensive option first to create the higher price as the anchor to compare other products against.

Use pricing as part of your online marketing strategies to increase conversions and increase sales.

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Lead Generation is the Most Important Objective in B2B Web Marketing

Doug Williams @ 5:11 am

This blog entry was posted on November 4, 2011.

Business websites should be designed with a specific purpose. This could be to generate leads, generate sales, build brand awareness or to build an online community through social interaction. Some are only an online brochure and have no designed in actions. It’s always interesting to look at surveys of businesses as to what they are expecting to get from their website.

The results from the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Survey are in. The survey was taken in September 2011 with over 500 marketing professionals being surveyed by Webmarketing123. Respondents were 66.9% B2B and 33.1% B2C. These are a summary of the report findings.

Website Objective: Lead generation and sales were the most important objectives for a business website.

46% of B2B businesses say their most important objective is to generate leads. Generating sales was selected by 22%
40% of B2C companies say generating sales was the most important objective. 23% chose lead generation.

Measure of Success: Website traffic was the most common measurement of success for digital marketing programs.

74% of B2B marketers and 80% of B2C marketers measure the success of their efforts through the amount of website traffic.

Social Media Lead Generation: 68% of marketers have used social media as a way to generate leads. Only 55% said they have actually converted these leads into sales.

47% used Facebook for leads.
35% used LinkedIn for leads.
34% used Twitter for leads.

Most Effective Traffic Source: Organic SEO provided biggest impact on helping companies reach their lead generation goals. This was followed by PPC. Social Media provided the lowest amount of leads.

For B2B companies: SEO (57%), PPC (25%), Social Media (18%)
For B2C companies: SEO (41%), PPC 34% and Social Media (25%)

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How Important Are the Number of Pages in SEO?

Doug Williams @ 6:12 am

This blog entry was posted on November 1, 2011.

Search engine visibility increases with the number of pages. You should always work to increase the text on your website in the interest of SEO. This is as long as these pages are original and not duplicate content.

Earlier this year we saw Google hit hard content farms with its Panda update. This included article syndication sites and scraper sites that dealt almost exclusively with content that was duplicated elsewhere on the web.

In general, a larger website will attract more traffic than a smaller website. As search engines index more content, there are more opportunities to form a match with search phrases. Search engines favor websites with high information content.

How many words of text should be on a page?

Web pages with just a few sentences are less likely to get to the top of the search results. The optimum page size is 400+ words of text. There is no firm number for a maximum number of words. Some will say that the maximum number of words is about 3000 words.

How many pages are enough?

Look at your competition for a phrase. How many pages do the websites in the top 3 positions have? The easiest way to get this number is to use a toolbar such as SEOQuake. You can also do a Google search for site:www.yourdomain.com. The number of results is your number of pages.

To increase the numbers of pages on your site add news, press releases or articles. The articles need to be original and not duplicated anywhere else on the web. A favorite content growth strategy is to add a blog to your website. Each blog posting adds a new page to your website. 2 postings a week adds over 100 pages per year to your site.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies