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.

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.

But what about the age of a link?  Does how long a link has been pointing to your site matter?  In my opinion, yes.

I believe (and some may disagree with me) that whenever you get a brand new link from a site, that link is in a “probation period” of sorts.  It might stick around for a while, or it might disappear after a month or two.  Chances are if the link disappears after a few months, it is likely that the link was purchased since most websites that sell links require you to purchase a link for at least a month if not longer.

Sites that link to you of their own accord, that is, like your content and the information you provide, will generally place a link to you from their site and typically it stays there for a good long time.

Like a domain name that gets better with time, so do links.  So if you haven’t already, start working on getting good quality links back to your website that can start to age. And whatever you do, don’t purchase links.

All things being equal, how old your domain name is will generally put you at a higher advantage than your competitors.

The reason for this is that the age of a domain cannot be faked.  That is, unlike links which can be gathered from everywhere online and even purchased (and which also have an age factor assigned to them), the age of a domain is not something that can be manipulated.

So how does someone establish credibility with the age of a domain if they’re just starting out and need a new domain name?

One way is to purchase an older domain.  (The older the better).  However, just because a domain has been established for some time does not mean that you should rush right out and get it.  There are a few factors to take into account first.

1. Does the domain you’re considering have any current links pointing to it?  How long have those links been pointing to the site?  (The age of your links also plays a factor and we’ll talk about that in our next blog post).
2. Just because a domain name has been around and registered for a long time does not mean that it has been indexed for that same amount of time.  It’s important that the domain you’re thinking about purchasing has been indexed in the search engines and established itself already.
3. If a domain has been indexed, you’ll next want to determine if that domain has been penalized in the search engines for any reason.  One simple way to determine this is using the Wayback machine at http://www.archive.org/index.php (this will also help you determine how long pages have been indexed in the search engines as mentioned in #2 above).  Enter in the domain name you’re considering and take a look at the different pages you receive.
   Here’s an example.  In a well-publicized event in early 2006, Google penalized the site http://bmw.de.  If you visit http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://bmw.de and click on the pages for this time frame, you’ll see that some pages are no longer available (as of the time that the Wayback machine viewed them) and that they didn’t show back up for months.  This is in stark comparison to previous years when they were indexed nearly every day and at least once a month.  If you happen to notice something like this for a website you’re considering, it’s best to move on to another domain name opportunity.

The bottom line is, if you want to get a head-start on your website efforts, you might want to consider looking into buying an existing domain especially if you don’t want to have to wait to establish credibility in the search engines.  Just be sure that the domain you’re considering is, and always has been on the up-and-up.

While you can’t prevent this all together, there are some steps that you can take, especially when it comes to your blogs in order to make it more difficult for these scrapers to take your content, or at least if they do, be sure you’re getting a link back to your site.

One of the ways is to add one of a number of free plugins to your blog.  One of these is the feed footer plugin.

This plugin adds an RSS footer to each blog post you make which contains not only a link back to this blog but which also links to the Bonehead SEO product itself.  Whenever an automated scraper makes a visit, and copies any of the content on this blog (or on any other blog that uses this plugin), the footer will automatically be included.  Now this doesn’t mean that the person stealing the content will not remove this information in order to post the content on their site, but it does add an extra step to the mix.

Another one of these plugins is one called Ozh’ Better Feed. This plugin also allows you to add a footer to your RSS feeds.  The copyright plugin also adds information to your feeds but allows for a lot more options.

Lastly, there’s the AntiLeech plugin.  This one is very unique to say the least. This plugin creates fake content for the scraper but still includes links back to your site.  When your content is stolen, it provides the thief with useless content.

So if you were ever concerned that your content was being out and out stolen on your site, or you have a fear that it might come to that in the future, just install a few of these plugins to get your protection started.

Recently Google announced that they now have a format that you can use within your web pages that allow you to specify which URL you prefer to use for your web pages.  This helps to alleviate the duplicate content issue that many site owners and SEOs have been dealing with for years.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say that someone linked to one of your pages using the following URL:

http://www.SomeSite.com/cart.php?item=someitem

But this same item on your site could also be accessed by the following URL as well:

http://www.SomeSite.com/cart.php?item=someitem&category=somecategory

Since both pages contain almost identical information, search engines may consider this duplicate content.

Now, all you need to do is add a line of code within the “<head>” section of your web pages code to specify which URL you prefer your site to use.

Here’s what the code would look like:

This tells Google (as well as Yahoo and Microsoft) the preferred way you want this URL to appear.

Why this is so important is because it will help to make sure that things such as link popularity all are pointing to the page you want them to.

Keep in mind that this code should only be used for pages that are either absolutely identical or so similar to one another that it would cause a duplicate content issue for your site.

Within their post, Google answers a lot of questions about this format but probably the most important answers are:

1. The rel=”canonical” code above CAN be a redirect.
2. It CANNOT be used to link to a completely different domain.
3. This standard can be used by any search engine when they crawl and index your site.

So now that you know how to use it for your website, what about your blog?

Luckily, there’s already been a new plugin developed just for this purpose which you can get here.

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UPDATE

***************

Google engineer Matt Cutts has created a 20-minute video on the canonical link element.  I highly suggest that you watch this video in order to get a great grasp on what the canonical link element is.

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

The Question:
Hello,
I have a burning question and I can’t find an answer in SEO course available.
If you do this search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kurir&btnG=Search

You’ll notice the first result has 8 other links besides the main one (Crna hronika, sport etc.). That must increase the CTR a lot.

The question is: what makes Google do that for one site and not for another one?
What should you do with your site to get such extra links in the results?

Best Regards,
Eko

Here’s an example of what they look like:

These are called “Site Links” and the bottom line is that Google does not tell you exactly how to get these sitelinks for your own site.

However, each website that contains these sitelinks has a few common denominators:

• They’re typically an authority site.
• They have an easy-to-navigate hierarchical structure.  In the case above, there is a section for “Sports”, a section for “Stars” and a section for “Politics” as Eko pointed out.
• They have lots of incoming one-way links from a variety of sources.
• The sites are easy to navigate.
• The age of the site tends to be a defining factor.

If we pick apart the site above, there’s a few things to note about it:

• The site has a PageRank of 6.
• It has over over 100,000 links pointing to the site itself including internal pages.
• Sites such as these generally have been around for years.
• The site has lots of useful information that readers enjoy by clicking through to various pages.

You’ll generally find these sitelinks on major news sites like CNN and highly visited sites such as Oprah’s site at Oprah.com.

So while these sitelinks can be a huge boost for your search engine traffic, they aren’t easy to come by.  Google must deem your site “worthy” enough to receive these sitelinks.

If you use Google Webmaster tools, at http://www.Google.com/webmasters/tools/ and you’ve added your site, you’ll be able to navigate to the section where Google tells you whether or not any sitelinks have been identified on your site as candidates for the Google Search Results page.

The bottom line is that there is no hard and fast rule to getting sitelinks placed on your site aside from some of the factors that are believed to be important as mentioned above.

If you’d like more information about sitelinks, visit:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334&topic=8523

Kristine

The nuts and bolts of SEO is the process of getting your website to the top of a search engine results page for your keywords of choice that can drive targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic being website visitors who are actually interested in your stuff and aren’t just out “browsing”.

Your keywords of choice are those words and phrases that people are typing into a search engine to find information on your website’s topic.

While that sounds pretty cut-and-dried, there are a hundred tiny details that go into getting a website in that prime location.  So let’s talk about what some of these tiny little details are exactly.

First, there’s two parts to SEO; on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the process of using your keywords that you have chosen for one of your web pages in strategic places throughout that page.  Note that I said “one of your web pages” not your “web site”.  Each web page within your entire website is ranked differently.  Each web page should be optimized for one or two keywords specifically related to the website topic.

So for instance if you were a store that sold tools, you would have a page optimized for hammers, another page optimized for saws, another page optimized for nails, and so on. All of the pages being part of the same “Tools” website.

Off-Page Optimization is the process of getting links pointing to your web pages.  A lot of people don’t consider off-page optimization part of SEO.  I completely disagree.  The point of optimizing your website for the search engines encompasses all factors.  What you do on your own site as well as what you do to promote that site since the promotion of that site will help you get better search engine rankings.

This off-page optimization is the most time-consuming task of SEO.  It’s the process of getting links to your site, yes, but they have to be the right kind of links; in the right neighborhoods not to mention those links have to have the ability to be seen by thousands of eyeballs that are interested in the information you’re providing. They must be located on pages related to your niche, they must have the right keyword anchor text and so, so much more.

So for those who were interested in what SEO was exactly, there you have it, in the most condensed form I could come up with.  SEO continues to change on a regular basis.  There’s always new strategies, new ideas, new search engine shakeups.  That’s why SEO is so important to the average website.  It’s an ever-evolving process that continues to change as the Internet grows.

1. Create a Video and submit it to the different video directories. Video will only continue to get more prominent as time goes on.  It’s already estimated that 25% of online users view videos every single day – that’s a huge number.  Plus, the added benefit of video is that the video market is far less saturated than the web page market.  One simple search in Google for the highly competitive phrase of “internet marketing” brings back a whopping 95,000,000 web pages.  However, that same term only produces 13,500 search results in Google video.  Take advantage of this while you can.Make reference to your URL in the video’s description.  A failure to do this will not get a link back to your site.While YouTube does not follow links back to their originating source, Google Video does (which by the way includes videos from YouTube, MetaCafe, Guba and more).  Take advantage of it while you can.
2. Do you use Google Notebook? You should.  Currently Google Notebook’s links are followed and, if you make your notebook public, will be indexed by Google.
3. Answer a question at Yahoo Answers. (http://answers.yahoo.com)People ask all kinds of questions on every topic imaginable here.  Whatever your niche topic is, you’re sure to find someone asking a question about it that you can answer.  Don’t forget to link back to your site as a resource.
4. Create a blog post with a helpful list. People LOVE lists.  And they tend to bookmark them quite frequently.
5. Bookmark your own web pages at places like Delicious.com, Newsvine and Technorati.  You can also use a service such as OnlyWire.com to do this for you.  Don’t worry about the nofollow tags on some of the social bookmarking sites.  Even though the nofollow won’t get you a link back to your site in the search engines, it can still get some eyeballs within the social bookmarking directory itself if you use the right tags in your bookmark.  (Tags = Keywords).
6. Write Articles. Not as effective as it used to be but will still get links pointing to your site however they won’t be the best most authoritative links.
7. Get listed in a niche directory. It’s likely that your business caters to a specific niche; if it doesn’t you need to really consider doing so.  Your niche will also very likely have niche directories that you can add your site to.  Unlike larger directories like Yahoo and Google (who gets their directory results from DMOZ) that are general website directories, there are also niche directories that have less competition.  Do a Google search for “your topic” + directory and see what comes up.  If your niche website would fit well in that directory, and the directory has a decent PageRank and a fair amount of pages indexed, add your site.
8. Link Build With Images. Places like Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) for example, allow you to place photos within their directory, give those photos tags relevant to your niche and use keyword-rich link text within the description.  For example, if I ran a Wedding Cakes business, I could upload photos of “wedding cakes” use keywords related to those wedding cakes to tag my photos and use within my anchor text.
9. GIVE, GIVE, GIVE. Believe it or not, the more you GIVE away, the more people will link to you.  This could be a free report, free ideas, tips, whatever your target market would find helpful and useful.
10. Niche Websites. Does your niche have a website that people visit often?  For example, if you’re a WAHM (work at home Mom) or a WAHD (work at home Dad) there are a wide variety of websites available that talk about this topic.  See if you can’t be a “guest blogger” or contribute an article to them free of charge in exchange for a link back to your site.
11. Talk. Do you like to talk about your topic?  Use places like BlogTalkRadio.com and host your own radio show.  People will find you and subsequently visit your site. This is a great way to get links.
12. Review a Product. Is there a product you’ve used recently that you liked?  Ask the site owner if you can give a testimonial and then see if they’ll link to your website.
13. Make a Google Gadget. One very overlooked way to get potentially thousands of people to your site and linking to you is to create your own Google Gadget – you can read more about how to do this at http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/.  I recommend you take some time to see what the more popular gadgets consist of first – are they funny?  Useful?  Helpful?  Fun?  Incorporate these same ideas into your gadget so that they’ll get viewed (and used).