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.

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.

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

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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.

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).

Many new website owners are often told that in order to start getting good incoming links, they need to focus on web pages that have high PageRanks first to get those links from.

While a PageRank does come into play in certain circumstances, it is not the be-all-end-all of getting a good incoming link.

First let’s talk about what PageRank is and why it’s become such a sought-after item.

PageRank is the value that Google (not Yahoo!, not MSN) assigns to a web PAGE depending on how important Google believes that page to be.

Google of course doesn’t tell us all of the factors that make a page “important” or “unimportant” but rather leaves it up to the community at large to try and decipher.

That being said, we do know a few things about how web pages do get better PageRanks. One of the most important factors are the incoming links to a web page. Note that I said “web page” and not “web site”. Each web page on your site is ranked differently than all of the other pages on your site.

If you by chance have a web page that has a PageRank of 6 for example, this does not mean that your entire website has a PageRank or PR of 6, it just means that the one page on your site has a PR of 6.

Back to the matter at hand…we know that the more important the links are pointing to your web pages, the more that Google will likely view your page as important thus giving it a better PR. However, the links that point to your web pages are not the only factors that determine whether or not your web pages get a good PR. There are other factors such as how well your site is laid out, what kind of content you have on that web page, if that web page is “information driven” or “money driven”, etc.

So now that we know at least a portion of what gives a web page good PR, let’s talk about how this factors into incoming links.

Many new website owners are led to believe that in order for their web pages to get to the top of a search results page they must have a number of high PR sites linking to them.

Why this can be so detrimental is because the PR you often see listed for a web page is rarely the actual PR of the page. Google updates the PageRanks that you and I see on a very intermittent basis. However, the PR of a web page is constantly moving up or down on Google’s side of things.

While it is rare that a PR of a page would move drastically in one direction or another, it should not be the only factor that you use when determining who to attempt to get links from.

While it can be helpful to have a high PR site linking to you (high PR being 5 or above), you should not simply focus on getting links from sites that have these high PageRanks.

What most people forget is that there is a natural flow of links that come to any one web page. No one site, even those with high PR’s such as Google themselves or CNN.com for example, have all high PR sites linking to them. Website owners all over the internet are linking to these sites because they contain high-quality information that their site visitors would find helpful.

And the links coming to these sites run the gamut from PR0 sites all the way up to high PR sites, those with PR’s of 6 or above.

The bottom line is, it is the number of links, how relevant those links are to the overall theme of your website, what words are contained in the anchor text they’re using (the clickable portion of the text), how many sites are linking to THAT site, and more.

It’s important to note that just because a web page has a high PR does not mean that it will automatically rank well in the search engines, which is what most website owners are after when they first head out and attempt to find links to their own site.

Instead, it’s important to focus on simply getting links to your site rather than focusing on what the PR of those sites are.

One of the first things I tell people when looking to get links to their site is to first determine who is linking to their competition.  If you simply do a Google search for a keyword you’re focusing on, and determine who is listed in the top 10 positions in a Google and then further determine who is linking to them you’ll be at a much greater advantage than just those who simply seek out high PR sites to get links from.

The bottom line is when you’re first working on getting links to your site, the last thing you should concern yourself with is the PR of a site.  Instead, focus on getting links from the same places your competitors are and be absolutely certain that the site you’d like to get a link from is relevant to the content on your own web page.

In a nutshell, Yahoo Cash 4 Idiots is the perfect extension to a section in Bonehead SEO about PPC or Pay-Per-Click marketing.

As an 8-year veteran in the SEO industry I always tell people who come to me for advice on their websites that while they wait for their site to move up in the natural search results listings, they should use PPC.  The downside to PPC is that it can cost a lot of money – especially if you’re using Google.

Yes, Google has the largest PPC network but they aren’t exactly known as the most “advertising friendly” PPC network available.  Oftentimes their rules change at the drop of a hat and oftentimes without warning – and worse yet, without viable explanations as to why it happened.

The bottom line is, Google, while large, has repeatedly become an advertiser’s “big brother”; slowly over the years telling you how to run your business while you end up spending horrendous amounts of money on clicks.  And, what you’ll learn in the Bonehead SEO course is that there are only a select few spots on a Google search results page where ads get attention – and not surprisingly, it’s these spots that typically cost you the most amount of money.

Is it still possible to get low-cost clicks with Google?  Yes but certainly not for a competitive keyword, or even a mildly competitive keyword; the bottom line is, it’s becoming harder and harder to get good rankings in Google’s PPC marketplace while still keeping your costs at a manageable level and make any money in the process to boot.

An alternative that most people don’t take a look at is Yahoo’s PPC program who isn’t nearly as stringent and best of all, most clicks cost far less than Google’s.

There is no doubt that while you wait for your site to slowly move up in the search engine rankings you need to advertise; but why put yourself into a position where the learning curve is horrendous and the costs are outrageous?  I highly suggest that you take a look at Yahoo Cash 4 Idiots and take a refreshing look at PPC without all of the stress that comes with it.

There’s plenty of video proof on the Yahoo Cash 4 Idiots page if you’re skeptical.

Top 5 Tips for Title Tags

It used to be that one of the top reasons web pages were ranked highly was due to their excessive use of stuffing keywords into their meta keywords tag or filling up their web page with the same word or phrase over and over; also referred to as “keyword density”.

As times have changed and as they continue to change there is still one critical element to effective SEO that has remained consistent throughout all search engine time and that is your title tag.

The title tag on your page holds a great amount of weight in the search engines; however, many websites still use their title tag the wrong way.  What follows are the top 5 tips for effective title tag design that you can begin using right away for your on-page SEO strategy.

And just for the record, when we refer to the title tag, we’re referring to the code on your web pages that looks like this:

<title>The Important Page Title Keywords</title>.

Tip #1:  Keep your title tag under 64 characters.  While each of the largest search engines; Google, Yahoo! and MSN each have their own rules when it comes to how many characters they display on their search results page, Google has the most restrictive rule of 64 characters.  Anything longer than this, you run the risk of very important keywords or phrases not showing up in the search engine results page.  This is important because your title tag is the hyperlink that a search visitor would click on to get to your page and if you had included some very important keywords in a text string longer than 64 characters, that title tag would get cut off in Google.

Tip #2: Keep the most important keyword for the web page front and center.  What this means is that whatever main keyword or phrase you’re optimizing for on your web page, make it the very first word within your title tag.  For example, if you were optimizing a page for “gourmet coffee” then you’d place that word at the beginning of your title tag.  <title>Gourmet Coffee Tastes Great</title>

Tip #3: This goes without saying but always, always use a title tag for each and every one of your web pages.  You’d be surprised how many people overlook this simple little thing on their web pages but just to give you an example, visit Google and type in allintitle:”Untitled Document”.  This will return all of those web pages that currently don’t have a title which means that they’re missing out on all of the potential search engine rankings they could be getting.

Tip #4: Remember that you write for a web searcher not a search engine.  What this tip means is that even though you may be following the rule above by placing your main keyword at the beginning of your title tag, it must still read well for a typical web searcher.  This is important because when your site does come up in the search engines results pages, the title tag for your web page is what becomes the clickable link that will take a web searcher to your web site.  Additionally, the keywords that the person searched on are bolded if they’re contained within your title tag; and if you’ve done your job correctly, they will show up bolded within that link.  If you simply can’t make the title to your page sound like a normal person would talk, then simply just use your keywords.

Here’s an example using our “gourmet coffee” keyword.  You know by now that the phrase “gourmet coffee” should show up within your title tag since that’s the word you’re optimizing for.  However, you might mention some gourmet coffee brands on this same web page and be tempted to use them in your title tag like so:

<title>Gourmet Coffee Peets Starbucks Boca Java</title>

This doesn’t necessarily read well to the end user (the web searcher) so if you can’t make it sound like a real person would speak, don’t toss keywords in there just for the sake of using them.  Stick to the simple keyword phrase of “gourmet coffee” like so:

<title>Gourmet Coffee</title>

Tip #5: Keep your company name out!  A very large mistake that many companies make is by placing their company name at the beginning of the title tag like so:

<title>The Coffee Company – Gourmet Coffee</title>

First off, the main keyword phrase isn’t listed near the front of the title tag which is mistake #1 and mistake #2 is that the search engines will believe that the web page they’re indexing is about “The Coffee Company” first and “gourmet coffee” secondarily.

If you’re looking to rank your site for your company name, this is all well and good (although not recommended).  You’re attempting to rank for “gourmet coffee” but instead are giving a higher importance to your company name.

If you absolutely must use your company name in your title tag, then place it at the end – like so:

<title>Gourmet Coffee – The Coffee Company</title>

Whenever possible, keep your title tag simple and to the point.  There’s no need to place an excessive amount of information within the title tag.  Stick to the keywords that you’ve chosen for that page, keep your company name out of it if your boss will let you, and you’ll be thanked by the search engines by being so well-informed.