Bing recently released their SEO Toolkit (currently still in beta) and I took some time to run through the toolkit to see what kinds of information it gave me.

The first thing you should know is installing it is less than a breeze.

First, you need to be using a PC – no surprise there.

In order to install the toolkit, you need to jump through a bunch of hoops first.

1. You need a PC running Vista, Windows Server, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. It won’t work on XP (which is a shame).  Most of you reading this (if you’re not using a Mac) will have Windows Vista on your computer.
2. If you do have Windows Vista, you need to be sure that youalso have installed Windows Vista SP1 (service pack 1) or higher. Most of you will also already have this if your computer updates itself regularly.
3. You also need IIS 7 running on your computer. Unless you’ve worked on a server team, the typical webmaster probably won’t understand what this means (huge problem!). Click here to view the Microsoft installation guide and get IIS 7.
   UPDATE: Note that on the Microsoft site – this link points to a topic that is “No Longer Available”.  After checking Microsoft’s own post about this installation guide, I receive the same message.  Hopefully they’ll have it fixed soon.
4. Next, you need to enable IIS 7 before you can install the SEO Toolkit. To do this…
   1. Click Start.
   2. Click Control Panel.
   3. Click Programs.
   4. Select “Turn Windows features on or off”.
   5. When the window opens, select the “Internet Information Services” check box.
   6. Click the plus sign (+) to expand the directory (they call them nodes), expand “world wide web services” and then expand “Application Development Features”.  Finally, check the box next to .net Extensibility.
   7. Click “OK” and then wait…a long time…while your computer updates.

Now, you next have to determine if you’re running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows.

(By now, I’ll bet that a vast majority of people have already said “This is WAY too much trouble – forget it!).  And I wouldn’t blame you.  As much as Microsoft search has evolved, it seems that the rest of the company has not.

To do this…

1. Click Start
2. Right click “Computer” and then choose “Properties”
3. In the “system group” the System Type will tell you what kind you’re running; 32-bit or 64-bit.
4. FINALLY, install the right version.  (Note that these links will download the SEO Toolkit to your computer – they’re directly from Microsoft. If you’d rather view the Microsoft page itself, click here.):
   1. IIS SEO Toolkit for 32-bit Windows
   2. IIS SEO Toolkit for 64-bit Windows
5. NOW, you’re ready to install and use the SEO Toolkit (and it’s probably time for a quick break).  I don’t know about you but my head hurts!

Once you have the SEO Toolkit installed, you’ll need to open the program.  But like most programs that you install, where you expect to see them in your Start menu, this one’s a little tricky.

1. Click the Start icon on your Windows Vista computer.
2. In the Start Search box, type “IIS”.
3. IIS manager should pop up in the window. I suggest that you move this to your desktop in an easier-to-find location.
4. Double click the program.
5. Once it loads in the main menu section scroll down to “Search Engine Optimization” and double click on “Site Analysis”.
6. Next, on the right, click “New Analysis”.
7. Give it a name.
8. Enter in the URL of your website and make your additional choices from here (which aren’t many).
9. Finally click “OK”.

Now the program will traverse your website and find issues (if any) that relate to SEO (as Bing sees it).

There’s various categories that Bing looks at such as SEO, Content, Standards and Performance.

Now, while this was a hassle to install it does give you a great deal of on-page SEO information.

For instance it found multiple spots where I had missed giving an image an alt tag attribute.

It also found a few spots where my description was too long and where I had a few broken hyperlinks – many of these attributed to a bookmarking service that I had included on my web pages.

If you double-click on any of the pages that had issues within the SEO Toolkit, you’ll get a very detailed analysis of that web page (this is definitely a plus).  Things like:

• A Word Analysis which shows you…
  • The counts for any specific word or phrase up to three word phrases.
  • The character count on the page.
  • The links referenced on the page along with their anchor text.
  • The links pointing TO the page.
  • The links coming FROM the page.
    • As well as what the linking status is, is it OK or not found, the linking title, the linked URL the type of link and the anchor text.  All invaluable information to have.

Now, all this being said, I will tell you of one very large (and frustrating) issue that I had.  After I ran through the steps and set up everything exactly as explained, I could NOT get to any of my websites that I had set up in the SEO Toolkit.

I could get anywhere else (so I knew it wasn’t my internet connection) but just not to my own sites.  Obviously very frustrating.

Now, my husband who is a VoIP engineer and who works with this kind of thing on a daily basis couldn’t even figure out what the issue was.  And we together tried multiple things…all to no avail.

Until…for the heck of it, I unplugged my DSL modem, plugged it back in and all was fine (Occam’s Razor).  So in the event you follow through this process, and have the same issues, just try rebooting your modem.  I can’t guarantee it will work for you, but it worked for me.  (You’ve just received a 5-hour-time-saving tip).

All in all, I think that the SEO Toolkit provides great information, so long as you’re willing to put up with the installation of it.  And best of all it’s free!

View this walkthrough at Bing (complete with screenshots) by clicking here.

Ever since Microsoft came out with their new search engine Bing, there have been lots of buzzing about it.  And good buzz at that…not what people expected to see which was just a name change from “Live.com” to “Bing.com” and nothing more.

But Bing has taken a lot of people by surprise and now that Yahoo! has agreed to use Bing’s search results as their own search engine (thus taking the number of major search engines down to 2), it’s a very big deal and has great potential to be a big competitor for Google.

Just for the record, the use of Bing’s search results at Yahoo.com probably won’t come to light until sometime in 2010 or beyond, but it is something to start taking notice of right now.

Because we know that this change is coming, we can be fully prepared for it.  And that means doing a few things to be sure that our websites are on top of these changes starting today.

I’ll be covering Bing in sections during the upcoming newsletters but for now, I want to focus on one of the more crucial elements of getting listed well in Bing and this is where your linking strategy comes into play.

Unlike Google who tends to keep information on ranking well in their search engine pretty close to the hip, only divulging just enough information, Bing seems to be moving in the opposite direction.  While not full-disclosure by any means, Bing does give you a lot of tips and ideas when it comes to ranking well with them.

So let’s take a look at what Bing considers to be important where linking strategies are concerned.

The do’s and the don’ts.

While some of the do’s and don’ts of link building will seem familiar to you if you’ve engaged in link building where Google is concerned, some of the advice through Bing is easier to understand… and truly gives a “no bones about it” kind of approach.

So, let’s cover what these do’s and don’ts are.

DO – Link TO (that is from your own site) other websites that your site visitors would find helpful and useful. When you link to another site you are telling your site visitor that you “endorse” that site, so be sure that you actually do.  Don’t link to a website just because it’s your Mom’s or you promised a friend you would link to them.  If it isn’t helpful and complimentary to your own, skip it.

Do – Link to other sites that are relevant to your own. A wedding cake website linking to a tuxedo rental website would be relevant.  A local coffee shop linking to a PPC marketing product would not be relevant.  The same holds true for those links that point to you – granted you can’t control who links to you, you can influence this to an extent.  IF you are engaging in a link-building campaign where you ask other site owners to link to you, be sure that those sites are relevant to your own.

Do attempt to get high-quality links pointing to you. Quantity is NOT the same thing as quality.  This also holds true for Google.  Just because you have thousands of incoming links to your site does not mean that you’ll rank well.  What matters is the quality of those links.  A thousand poor low-quality links cannot equal the ranking power of one high-quality link.

Do not participate in site-wide linking strategies from “bad neighborhoods”. Search engines know what a bad neighborhood is because the bad neighborhoods give off certain signals.  Bad neighborhoods often consist of families of websites that all link to one another, have little to no content in and of themselves and often cover every kind of topic under the sun.

You want links from authority sites – those sites that are older (and thus “more reliable” as stated by Bing), have had consistent content on them over time and have high quality links pointing to their site as well as away from their site.

You can use this tool – http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm to help you determine if a neighborhood is “bad” or not.

Do use proper canonicalization. This means that you use one style of URL for every link within your site.  If you remember in a past blog post I had talked about how the search engines view different variations of your URL as different domains all-together.

This means that http://YourSite.com and http://www.YourSite.com are viewed as two separate URLs.  Why this is detrimental to you as the site owner, is because the importance of your websites are then spread across two domains instead of one – thus reducing the importance of your website in the search engines eyes.

Now, as you’ve probably guessed, you can’t control how others link to you and they will use a vast number of ways to point to your URL which the search engines will all consider different UNLESS you set up a 301 redirect on each of the subsequent domain names.

So for instance if you wanted http://YourSite.com to be your primary URL that you referred people to and that you used consistently as absolute links on your own site, then…

• www.YourSite.com
• YourSite.com/
• www.YourSite.com/
• YourSite.com/index.html
• www.YourSite.com/index.html
• etc.

All need to have a 301 redirect set up on them that point to the URL you want to be your “main” URL.  In this case, YourSite.com.  Whenever you link within your own site, always, ALWAYS use the YourSite.com or whatever URL you have determined to be your primary URL.

Additionally use absolute links everywhere on your site.  An absolute link means that you actually place the “http://www…whatever your site is.

For example, if you had a page on your site named “espresso-beans.html” and you linked to this page from any other page on your site, it should look like this:  <a href=”http://www.YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html“> Espresso beans</a> and NOT <a href=”espresso-beans.html”> Espresso Beans </a>.

This is referred to as an “absolute URL” and as Bing states “The use of absolute links reinforces the use of your full URL and, like canonicalization, focuses the link juice to that URL.”

When linking to your home page within your own site, use the trailing slash and omit the “index.html” or “default.html” whatever the name of your default home page is.  For example:

http://www.YourSite.com/ and not http://www.YourSite.com (notice the lack of the trailing slash.)

Bing also suggests that you use the title attribute within your internal links. For example:

<a href=”http://YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html” title=”keyword or key phrase describing the page you’re linking to“>Anchor text link (also the keyword or keyword phrase) </a>.

For sites that use dynamic linking (in other words pull descriptions and item numbers from a database), you know that the URL to those pages can get quite long.  Do a search on Amazon.com for any book title and then take a look at the URL in your address bar.  As you can imagine, these kinds of links can make a search engines job quite difficult.

In order to help the search engines use a more user-friendly version of that URL so that they don’t have to do a lot of hard work understanding the link, add some special code into the head section of your web page that will tell the search engines which canonical URL to use.

Ex:  <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://YourSite.com/products.php?item=espressobeans” />  And be absolutely certain that this link actually points to the page you want it to go to and that it WORKS.

Bing suggests to use the nofollow tag on your links if you don’t want them to follow that link.  However, if you want to block an entire page of links from being crawled, instead use the meta robots tag to block access to that content or use a robots.txt file.

What a nofollow tag looks like:

<a href=”http://YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html” rel=”nofollow”> Espresso beans </a>.

What a meta robots tag looks like:

<meta content=”noindex, nofollow”>  (this tells the search engines to NOT index nor follow all of the links on the page this is located on.

You can also use:

<meta content=”index, nofollow”>  which means that the search engines will still index your web page but they won’t follow any links on the page itself.

In summary, we know that the merger of search results between Bing and Yahoo! will be a significant step in the right direction where the search engines are concerned.  And we’re also aware that Bing is starting to get lots of great feedback.

Since Bing is new, relatively speaking, they are handing you outright information that can help you rank better with them.  Use these suggestions for your own site’s benefits.  All of these suggestions will work well with Google as well…rarely do we see a big change of what’s allowed and what’s not where the search engines are concerned.  But, Bing is a little more forthright with their information … which is something we haven’t seen in a long time with Google.

1. Your Website Design

One neglected factor to be sure that the search engines rank your site well is the overall design and layout of your website.  Using basic text-based navigation rather than images, restricting the use of JavaScript and Flash on your site in addition to having an orderly navigation with categories that help to organize your website will all help push your site in the right direction.

2.  The Keywords

Each and every last one of your web pages on your site needs to have it’s own unique keyword phrase that it’s being optimized for.  When you’re exploring keywords for use on your site, you’ll want to begin with those keywords that are easy to rank well for.  These are commonly those keywords that don’t have a lot of searches done on them but also don’t have much competition in the search engines.  The goal is to start  and slowly build up to the more competitive terms.

3.  The Title of Your Web Page

Every web page on your website should be centered on a specific keyword.  That is, a word or phrase you want that web page to turn up for in the search engines.  The title of your web page tells the search engines exactly what that web page is about and what it can expect to find within the rest of the content on that page.  Always use the keyword or keyword phrase that you would like to rank well for in the title of your web page and keep it contained within the <TITLE> </TITLE> tags of your HTML code.  Additionally, refrain from using your business name in the title.  Doing this will only dilute the importance of the keywords you’re trying to rank well for.

4.  Your Meta Description Tag

While many meta tags, such as the meta keywords tag, are rarely used by the major search engines anymore to determine what’s contained within your web page, the meta description tag is one of them that is used.  The description is what shows as the text just below the link to your site in a search engine results page or SERP.  While it won’t provide a huge hike in rankings, it will help your possible site visitors to make that all-important decision to click your link over your competitions.  Use your keywords within the meta description tag, but also make it enticing to your would-be site visitors by offering an incentive to visit you such as a free report or free tips.

5.  Keywords in a Header

You can think of a heading on your web page like a headline in a newspaper.  The headline generally gives basic information about what’s contained within the rest of the article.  The heading on a web page works much the same way as a newspaper article only within the web page, the heading contains the keywords you’re optimizing that page for.  When you write the heading, incorporate the keywords you’ve chosen for that page.  The heading doesn’t have to contain ONLY the keywords but it should work them into a clear format.

Additionally, not all headings are created equal.  Headings range from <H1> header tags all the way to <H6> header tags with <H1> being the most important, <H2> the second most authoritative and so on.  So always make certain you’re using the <H1> tag when writing a heading for your web page.

6. Keywords in the Content

When you begin to write the content of your web page you’ll want to incorporate the keyword phrase you’ve chosen for that page where it would fit naturally.  Whatever you do, forget keyword density; put differently, using your keywords a certain percentage of time throughout your content.  Instead, concentrate on using your keyword phrase naturally while also using words and phrases related to the keyword itself.  You can generally see what Google believes to be similar terms to your keyword phrase by simply using Google’s free keyword tool which you can find by doing a Google search, entering in your keyword phrase and then scrolling down to the section “Additional keywords to Consider”.

7.  Linking Your Pages

Links are very important to search engines.  Especially Google and this not only means links coming to your website but how you link up your own website’s pages.  When you link to another page on your site, be sure you’re using the keywords of the page you are linking to within the anchor text.  In other words, the “clickable” portion of the link.

8.  Using Images

Images are very important to add to a web page because they add to the visual appeal.  However, when you do use images on your web pages its important that you do two things with that image.  First, give the image a description within the <alt> tag.  This means that if you’re writing a web page on “dog training tips” that you’d have an image on your page associated with that topic and that the alt tag of that image contains a description of that image.  Second, add a caption underneath the image again describing the image.  Whatever you do don’t make the mistake of stuffing keywords within these areas; in other words using the keywords you’re optimizing your page for time and time again within the alt tag or the caption of the image.  Instead just use a brief message depicting the image.

All of these on-page SEO techniques will work to your favor if you simply use them with each and every web page.  Although for a one-man or woman operation it can get very time-consuming so if possible, outsource these simple tasks to someone willing to do the work for you.  This will allow you to focus on building incoming links to your website from outside sources which is a very large contributing factor as to how well you rank for all of your keywords including those more competitive keywords that you’ll eventually begin working with on your site.

But, in this post I want to bring to your attention something that some unsavvy folks might decide to do to your local listing especially since now the local listings are becoming more prominent.   It’s something called MapSpam and even though you may not have heard of it, it’s extremely important that you understand what it is and how it works to prevent your own listing from being hi-jacked.

I made a video about this issue around six months ago when the floral industry was the victim:

Here’s what’s important to understand:

• If you do not claim your local listing, it can be hi-jacked.
• This issue may become more prevalent since Google is now showing local listings for more competitive terms.
• If you’ve never claimed your listing, you wouldn’t be notified.
• If you attempted to later claim it you have to jump through hoops to do so proving you are the original business owner.
• To claim (or add) your local listing visit https://www.Google.com/local/add/

A lot of people it seems are very confused about how LSI fits into their overall SEO plan or even what it is.

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and while a very large and complicated phrase, it really means nothing more than using “related words and phrases” throughout your content.

Let’s take an example.

Let’s say that you were writing a web page on the topic of “iPhones”.  As you’re writing this content, you might naturally use related words and phrases such as “Mac”, “Apple”, “computer”, “cell phone”, etc.

That’s where LSI comes into play.  All of those related words, those semantically related words relate to the overall topic of that web page.  It is not the same thing as the plural of a word, LSI means the “semantically” related word or phrase plurals are simply “more than one”.

And Google knows this.

There’s a wonderful report that you should take time to read called “Patterns in Unstructured Data” provided by the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education or NITLE which gives a fantastic explanation of how LSI works .

If you do a search on “Tiger Woods” or “Apple”, Google is smart enough to detect a few things about these terms such as the fact that Tiger Woods is a golfer, and that Apple is a company that has iPhones.

This would mean that if you created a web page about iPhones another likely word you might include on your page would be “Apple”.

Here’s a screen shot from Google when searching on the term “Apple”.  Notice in all of the initial 10 listings are occurrences of the computer company not the actual fruit.  And at the bottom of the page are still even more related words to “Apple”.

The same holds true for any words and phrases.  And Google makes it easy for us to spot what it believes are related words to virtually any term you decide to create a web page on.

While at Google.com place the tilde symbol ~ directly in front of each word you intend on using within your content.  Google will return to you what it believes to be semantically related words for each term you placed after that symbol.

Let’s take the example of the word “soap”.  Soap is a pretty generic term, it could mean the soap you wash with, a “Soap Opera” or even the protocol “SOAP” which stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.  How Google determines the relevance of the word you’re writing about is by also taking a look at the semantically related words you use within that content.

So if you were writing about the kind of soap you wash with, you might use terms like:

• spa
• body
• candle
• scented
• bar
• massage

On the other hand if you were writing about a soap opera you might use terms like:

• Guiding Light
• The Young and the Restless
• The Bold and the Beautiful

The fact is, Google knows that if it finds the word “soap” in the same document as “body”, “candle” or “spa” you are most likely referring to bath soap and it will rank you accordingly.

This is why semantically related terms or LSI is so important.  It is using words and phrases throughout your content that all relate to the overall word or phrase of the content itself.

This is also why plurals are not helpful.  Plurals are not semantically related terms.  They are simply, plurals.  As an example, if you used the words “soap” and “soaps” on a web page, Google would have no idea what to do with that content because there are no additional semantically related terms on the page.

The bottom line is, when writing your content you do want to use semantically related terms within that content so that the search engines understand what that web page is about. This will help the search engines understand and rank your web pages accordingly.

For example, if I type in the one word of “spa” within Google, I now get local listings of all the spas located in my area.  See below.

Google will show you local listings relevant to the search you just performed based upon your IP address.

Why this is so great for local businesses is because now, it appears that regardless of what keyword you place in the search box, you’re likely to get local listings instead of depending upon the user making a reference to their location.

Just consider the possibilities for local businesses here for a moment.  Previously if I wanted to locate a spa in my location of Des Moines, IA, I would have had to tell Google that I was looking for a spa in my city.  So I’d submit a query such as “spa des moines, ia”.

Now, all someone has to do is enter in a generic term (which is near to impossible to rank well for on a quick basis) and if your local business has set up a listing with Google and you’ve included keywords relevant to that listing, then your business would show up regardless of whether or not you specified a location.

If you have not yet set up a local listing for your business, I highly suggest that you do so by visiting Google Local and specifying your local business details.  It’s completely free but you do need a Google account in order to do so.

On the flip side of these new listings showing up, you might wonder where the rest of the listings are heading.

The good news is, that even with the local listings showing up for more competitive terms, there are still the typical 10 web page listings on the initial page.  The local listings (and any news listings or videos), are only placed within the actual search results as an “addition” not as a “replacement to” the current listings.

That being said, it’s interesting to note that even though some local listings might be more relevant to me as someone who is searching for a spa, I receive a couple of web page listings first and then receive my local listings.  However, the map for the local listings certainly draws the eye which may tend to make someone overlook a single blue link on the page.

The moral of the story is that if you do have a local business and you want to get it appearing in search results for those within your location, get that listing up on Google Local as soon as possible.

The link operator allows you to see who is linking to you in Google’s eyes as well as who may be linking to your competition.  The way that you use Google’s link operator, is to just go to Google, enter in the word link and then a colon and then the URL of the site.  Like so:

The biggest gripe that people have had with the link operator is that it doesn’t show you a true count of links pointing to a website.  Matt’s explanation for this is that the reason Google doesn’t show all of the backlinks is that “spammers or competitors could use that to reverse someone’s ranking.”

Thank goodness there’s still tools available like Yahoo’s site explorer tool to get numbers of backlinks to any one site.

As it stands, even using Yahoo’s tool will only locate up to 1,000 backlinks for any domain, which still doesn’t touch the tip of the iceberg when you’re up against a highly competitive site.  Take for example, CNN.com who easily has hundreds of thousands of incoming links to their site.

But, even so, the Site Explorer tool will give you plenty of data to start working on your own link-building campaign for your site.

I can’t say I see eye-to-eye on Google about this restriction simply because the Internet is “The Internet”.  If our websites were meant to be private then we’d password protect directories, exclude directories and pages within our robots.txt files, and more which many sites already do.

My take on the explanation is that Google just doesn’t “want” to show you all of the backlinks because you would in fact be able to reverse-engineer how Google ranks sites.  And since the data that you receive from Yahoo! is based on information contained at Yahoo! then you still aren’t able to reverse engineer any data from Google.

He does however go on to say that if you want to see all of your backlinks for your site, that all you need to do is sign up and use Google’s webmaster central which is helpful to see more information about your own sites.  But as far as not showing all backlinks to any one given site, well, I could probably write an entire opinion piece on how Google tracks nearly every move you make but when it comes to information that should be available to the general public it closes up shop.

You’re an intelligent person, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Until March 23rd, 2009, you have the chance to win $1,000 just by creating your own Knol at Google.

Google has partnered with Dummies.com, the same people who publish the Dummies series of books.

All you need to do is simply create a Knol at Google to be in the running. Even new Knol’s are eligible. The top 5 finalists will be featured on Dummies.com (just imagine the traffic that this can bring in for you), and of these top 5 one will be chosen to win $1,000.

Now, while the money is great incentive, what you should take away from this is the fact that with a great high-quality Knol on the subject of your choice, you could end up getting massive amounts of traffic to your site to top it off.

If you’re interested, visit the contest page here: http://www.google.com/landing/knolfordummies/

The Google Analytics program also allows you to track conversions and find out which of your web pages offer the highest returns.

There is a lot of information for the website owner on the Analytics website which can sometimes be intimidating.  That’s why I’m glad they’ve finally offered training for each section of their site.  These are short easy-to-understand videos and you can simply take it at your own stride.

To visit the free training for Google Analytics, visit http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/.

It’s a brand new free report that I’ve just released entitled Bonehead SEO’s Quick Traffic Guide and it will show you (with proof included) how you can get your website, your product, your blog, whatever it is, listed in Google in under an hour!

Now, even though there’s plenty of proof included in the report I obviously can’t *guarantee* that the same will happen to you but on the tests that I’ve run so far, it’s never failed.

You can get this free 18-page report at http://BoneheadSEO.com/freeSEO/

Enjoy it, use it, and if you’ve had the kind of success using this same method yourself, let me know about it by posting your success stories here!

Who said Friday the 13th was bad luck?

- Kristine