Published: March 8th, 2010
Best Practice SEO dictates that you need good meta information as it is essential for SEO. Two tags to focus on are title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure they are descriptive and most importantly, relevant to the content on the website.
If you do have duplicate meta descriptions on your website, you will most likely get a warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Take this as a gentle nudge towards getting into the good habit of having a unique description for each page. After all, this is the summary snippet underneath your link on the search engine results page. The rule of thumb is to keep these under 150 characters in order to have the full sentence visible on the SERP.
Published: March 3rd, 2010
It sounds like a good idea – Bing will donate 5p for every 10 qualifying searches to Sport Relief, but isn’t donating money supposed to be easy? Instead of a straightforward process of raising money every time you use Bing to search, Microsoft has disregarded the 64% of users who are browsing the Internet using Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. To participate in this scheme, you must use Internet Explorer, download their “Giving Counter” and then rack up the searches using Bing. It makes the whole affair very much tied in with Microsoft and brings to mind the recent news about offering browser choices.
Published: February 17th, 2010
Yesterday, Jimmy Wales tweeted that Google was donating $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation. The question that then popped up in everyone’s minds is, Why Google would support Wikipedia when they came out with their own (almost) direct competitor, Knol.
Published: October 23rd, 2009
This is a question I often ask myself. As far as I can see, the answer seems to depend upon two factors – the emergence of real time search and how SEO progresses within the marketing mix.
At present it is impossible to see beyond Google when looking into the future. However, the emergence of a viable competitor does not seem as far off as it did a year ago. The merger of the Bing and Yahoo could make an impact – as long as they stop trying to play catch-up and start looking beyond existing search conventions.
One avenue that looks like it could impact upon Google’s quality-weighted algorithm is real-time search. At the moment, real-time search doesn’t offer much in terms of value for businesses. This is because of its current prominence in the social media sector. The failure of businesses to convert social media into revenue means that the connection between real-time search and revenue has not really been made.
Published: August 10th, 2009
Bing has dropped the whole of one my websites over the weekend. The only change I’ve made to it in the last week is to put more copy on a few of the pages (incidentally Google has liked this, with a positive effect on rankings). So why has Bing dropped the whole site out of the top 500 results for all key terms in the past 3 days?
Maybe it’s some kind of backlash to the accusations of the algorithm being domain-name heavy i.e. domain name has a big effect on rankings in Bing. The domain name for my site was aimed at the main key phrase and was ranking quite well in Bing, possibly as a consequence. But no more.
Whatever it is, they best sort it out. If it’s some kind of strange tactic to shift people’s attention onto focusing their SEO efforts on getting into Bing and deflecting attention from Google then it isn’t going to work. I, for one, will just ignore them until I have any evidence that their merger with Yahoo comes to anything worthwhile in terms of market share.
Anyone else had strange goings-on with Bing and do you actually care?
Sergio Indiene: Meta tags play a huge role in ...
Diane Corriette: I also ensure that my page url, title and meta des...
Dena Tasarım: Nice tips. I try to ensure that i don't encounter ...
Bryan Hadaway: I was effected by the change, but I can also under...