Confession. I bleed purple. I have an emotional as well as professional motive for attending this session. I’m also becomming a big Bing fan of late and I’m pretty excited to see what they come up with this year.

2009 – Bing has established itself as the “best converting” search engine.

Cedric, 34MM UU in the UK across MSN Windows Live Messenger etc. IT’s not all about reach for you – it’s about performance. Today we’re looking at product capabilities focusing on Bing.

Launched June 2009 and is apparently the “best converting” search engine.

One question we always get. Why bother in search? A – because we are committed to succeed. 5 yrs ago Steve Ballmer said “we want to be number 2”, now they are so how to take it further.

Context – in ten years we have seen 100,000% growth in content. Everything has changed including consumer behaviour. It’s way more difficult to get around the web – hence the rise of search. More and more people are searching more and more.

Queries are becoming more complex in string length and composition. Many more variables to consider and consumers are voicing their frustrations with the search experience. Consumers have evolved faster than search.

Bing Promise: – A brand new search experience. Rich and engaging search content to help British consumers reach more content more quickly.

Intent – we switch on the internet because we want to switch on the internet. Just like TV. Don’t really have an objective in mind.

Bing – capturing  attention using the UI – the attractive imagery. Intended to be a source of information too, with some rollover features. Images are chosen locally by UK journo.

To the search engine nitty gritty.

Many, many queries are purely navigational – therefore why clutter the SERP with anything other than the desired object. E.g. “William Hill” , you would expect the brand result for William Hill.

Informational searches – delivering the answer in the SERP with the feature “instant answer”. E.g. if you type the ref for your flight “BA74″ in the search box then details of the flight will appear in the SERP, giving an instant answer; such as “BA74 departed LAX at 17:45, on time and is due to land at…”.

In the next few weeks expect to see live sports results in the SERP (done in partnership with in-market content providers). Partners include Sky Sports and Toptable.

UX is at the core. Understanding or catering for intent is key. Hence the left navigation. Categorised search for related query term.

Twitter – Bing were 1^st to market with this integration.

Innovation is a core philosophy. Example – using visual stimulus to search, such as searching premiership players by image. Refine by rollover information on the image or refine criteria in the left-hand links. E.g. “Top Scorers” (This looks awesome).

He quotes John Batelle. “Search engine: the database of intent” (I’ll leave it there.)

Over to Adam, who manages the entertainment and gaming channel. We’re gonna get some stats (whohoo).

Reach – 90% of UK internet base.

Unique functionality and tools. MSN targeting capabilities. Adcentre platform has some sophistocated targetting – including days of the week, age and gender.

3^rd year running NNR reports Bing as best converting search engine in the UK.

Bing searchers 47.4% more engaged than Google searchers.

The remainder is an interesting sales pitch for their various AdCenter tools, with UI screenshots. I’ll leave it there. The tool is called “Mate” and has a lot of deep-dive data, demographics, trends, KW data etc. so look it up.

We start off by debunking a few myths. Ralph goes through them; only high PageRank links are good, all paid links are bad etc. Don’t obsess too much about high PR links. PR can go up as well as down.

Another golden rule – not all links are equal. A good link building strategy needs competitive analysis and expertise. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, as your behaviour needs to look natural. What’s natural about 100 permanent links all a PR5+? Basically; don’t obsess about the “myths” or your behaviour becomes unnatural.

Our MC (conveniently Michael Caselli) asks – Is PR still important?

Ralph – yes. It is indicative of trust. Just don’t obsess and remember the toolbar PR is not the same as the Google internal PR. It’s “for entertainment purposes only”.

Marcus – it can be hard to find sites without paid links so monitoring drops in PR is a good way (when no other factor seems to warrant a penalty), to work out if a source is taking paid links.

Christoph – also be aware of how PR drops can identify linkbuyers. If you have a paid link source and that source drops 2-3PR and you remove the link, you’re identifying yourself to Google – yes, I bought that for the PR. Again Christoph echoes Ralph; don’t obsess about PR and don’t base your strategy on this.

A member of the audience brings up the “bad neighbourhood” term.

Christoph – look at other links on the site linking to you. Are they quality. Are they relevant?

Audience – is there a danger in having links from a site that takes paid links, even if your is not?

Marcus – Yes! (back to bad neighbourhood). Marcus given an analogy “if you’re sat in a bar next to Bob (Rains) and Dave (Naylor) – that’s a bad neighbourhood”. (LOL.)

Christoph – Great links are the ones your competitors can not get easily.

Sebastian – You need to start with analysis, backlink tools, your links, your competitor links. If you believe in white hat only in this industry, then Good Luck! Penalties are over-rated. Too much money in this industry and everyone is buying links. (Basically; they can’t spank the whole industry overnight.)

Ralph goes back to “bad neighbourhood” to give a different perspective – relevancy isn’t too concerning. A bad neighbourhood is more – cheap Viagra, buy Cialis – that sort of stuff. Agrees with Sebastian that this is a highly competitive industry, if you don’t go for black hat, you’re toast.

MC – when is too far?

Ralph – “When you fail” (I love this!)

MC – How many links do I need to get to position one for poker?

Ralph – (I’m paraphrasing) – “How long is a piece of string?” You can have a site with 7000 links in position 1 or a site with 150,000 links in position 1. Remember not all links are equal and your link strategy is just one part of over 200 factors. So many other variables in the mix.

Q from the audience – What is the one “Golden Link”?

Marcus had a great one from W3C. Essentially when they introduced the donation facility on their site, high donors got a link. Marcus was one of the first few – paid his $1k for a year. In his own  words that link was “better than sex”.

Christoph – points out that when such trust is transferred from a link like this, then linking to the next level down the tree is also of great benefit. Being a degree or so removed from that golden source is still worth it. Accumulating such links takes time and also why age/trust are inextricable.

Sebastian – if you develop a new domain, keep it clean, do your press releases. Buy a couple of great paid links; then when the site gets some trust and some traction, then you can really go for it.

Ralph – one of the problems with hunting for that “golden link” is often you can’t tell until after the fact.

MC asks the panel. If you want to rank for the term “Poker”, where is your golden link? Apparently this is a favourite question from Marcus and one he has previously offered money for the right answer for. Marcus thinks this time he could be out of pocket, but it turns out not everybody knows the answer. Which is of course “from the number 1 in the SERP for “poker”. Just ask Google who they trust, and that’s number 1.

Q from the audience – I have a German site and I’m building links from the UK – good or bad?

Sebastian – try to keep a 70/30 rule (70 being the country of origin). Be careful of link brokers here.

Christoph – A link has to pass the smell test. A site in a different country and a different language might make perfect sense; just thing about it logically, naturally and factor relevance.

Q from the audience – How does Google determine relevance? e.g. is “Sportsbook” related to “poker”?

Sebastian – don’t think of Google as a fancy sophisticated bit of .php. Google has been trying for years to emulate human behaviour. Human interpretation of relevance is probably much wider than a machine interpretation.

Ralph – points out that there are linguistic tools available that can assist with this. Also, do bear in mind that text around your anchor text is not ignored. Don’t drop a link with anchor text into a completely irrelevant paragraph.

In summary: Don’t obsess over any one factor in your link-building strategy or you risk losing sight of the whole. Don’t be too timid in this industry or you will sink. Don’t be too rigid or inflexible in your approach or behaviour. Make sure you don’t stink.

If Immanuel Kant was alive today, I think he’d be an SEO on the side. I think the combination of knowledge fuelled by common results of repeated experimentation, combined with the all- too- common Cartesian doubt (did we really drop a place – or did they gain a place) would seriously appeal to him.

So, it is with some sense of compassion that I wanted to reference this hilarious Google result for the search term “Google Ireland”. Have a look at the top ranking results…

Notes on a small Ireland

How good is that?

Maybe someone did a misspell in the meta keywords, cos – like New Zealand is an Ireland, right? Of course the search engines don’t use meta-keywords to inform the ranking algorithm though.

Regardless. My point is that SEO is an inexact science, though we can use learned inferences and experimentation to support our hypotheses, but when all is said and done – even Google can fall foul of their own algorithm.

Diddums.

We can hopefully help you a little further as here we’ve taken the Top 5 Ranking Factors from the SEOmoz report, and explained what they refer to in layman terms.

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links

Anchor text refers to the clickable text part of a hyperlink. Anchor text is thought to be weighted quite highly in search engine algorithms as the linked text is normally highly relevant to the landing page. Thus, the anchor text of a link is an indicator of what the linked page is about and can help search engine spiders understand the subject of the target webpage better.

It is best to try and use anchor text which is similar or identical to the keyword targets for your website. Whether the link is from from an internal or external source, even if you can’t use one of your keyword targets, never, ever use a generic phrase such as ‘click here’.

2. External Link Popularity

External link popularity is a measure of the quality and quantity of external links that point to your website. External link popularity is an off-page factor that is supposedly impartial. The theory is that the more links that point to your website, the more popular it is therefore the more useful the pages should be. Content-rich sites should attract lots of links easily; content-poor websites should find it difficult to attract websites.

However it isn’t just about the quantity of links – it’s also about the quality. Not all incoming links are equal; a link from a well-repsected site from a well-respected page (such as the BBC’s homepage) will be worth far, far more than 10 links from an obscure link directory. Naturally, the more respected the website is, the harder it is to get a backlink therefore the more weight the link will carry.

One-way links are thought to be the best kind of link to have (where Site A => Site B only). Reciprocal linking (where Site A => Site B, and Site B => Site A) is useful, particularly if both websites are well respected, however the link is not thought to carry as much weight as a one-way link. Three way links (Site A => Site B => Site C => Site A) are at attempt by some webmasters to create more ‘natural’ looking links. Three way linking can sometimes be better than normal reciprocal links as each link looks like a one-way link.

3. Diversity of Link Sources

Link diversity refers to the number of different root domains that link to your website. Although link quality and link quantity are important, the variety of links is also a critical factor in the search engine algorithms. Example www.themediaflow.com/about and www.themediaflow.com/contact are two different links but are not diverse as the root domain is the same ‘themediaflow’.

The more domains that link to you, the more trust and authority your site is likely to have. Links from a variety of sites are also likely to create new traffic opportunities as well as giving your site exposure to a larger audience. Linking repeatedly from the same domains also looks slightly artificial – a wider sphere of influence means your site will tend to look more authentic.

Having a wide source of links is also a good insurance policy – if you have links from just one or two websites, what if one of the sites loses all of it’s content? You’ve suddenly lost a whole bunch of links. Or what if the search engines adjust their search engine algorithm? You could be out in the cold.

As a final word on link building, when you are building links for your site, don’t just look for the followed links (when links are created, you can apply an HTML attribute called ‘nofollow’ to the link which tells the search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the SERP. Many blogs, directories and bookmarking sites have ‘nofollow’ applied as standard to any link). OK, ‘nofollow’ links won’t pass your website pages any link juice however it is slightly suspicious to only have full-fat links pointing at your website – it will probably look more natural if you have diversity in your links. Also, link building is not just about the SERP – it’s about traffic. Some of the ‘nofollow’ links may actually drive good (free) traffic at your site – and having a diverse source of traffic is great insurance against search engine algorithm changes.

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag

There are two titles that are worthy of mention: the first is within the metadata and the second is within a link.

Metadata title tags should appear in every page on your website and every page on your site should have unique title tags created for it. Titles should always include the keyword targets for that particular page and it is also a useful place to put in alternate spellings in the hope of ranking well (e.g. customisation vs customization). Always front-load your titles with your keywords, but don’t put too many in as this will ‘water down’ the relevance.

Link titles serve two purposes: to help users predict what will happen if they follow a link and to give more relevance pointers to the search engine spiders. Link titles are usually seen by the user when their mouse pointer hovers over a link. The link title should be descriptive, however they should ideally be less than 60 characters and certainly no more than 80 characters long. The link title should be used for supplementary information and to backup the anchor text of a link.

5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains

The link distance refers to how many hops you are away from a ‘Trusted Domain’. The closer you are to a ‘Trusted Domain’ the more trust/authority you inherit from that link.

So what exactly is a ‘Trusted Domain’? Trusted Domains are domains which search engines believe they can trust. Unfortunately, there is no known public list of trusted domains although places such as brands are likely to be on the list. Once a site is classed as a trusted domain, it is believed that any link published within the site will get a little bit of extra link juice. Even if you can’t get a link directly from a trusted domain, by having a link from another domain which does have a link from the trusted domain, you will probably still see a little extra link juice.

I’d say we’re pretty much in agreement with the SEOmoz Top 5 Ranking factors, though there are a number of other factors that can have both a positive and negative effect on your ranking in the SERPs that are also not to be ignored. Finally; one thing that is worth stressing time and again, is that you need to have a fair amount of good- quality, original content that grows and updates frequently. When it comes to SEO you really can not polish a turd.

To illustrate; imagine I’m a small business in the 1960’s seeking to make the public aware of its existence. I’d have to think about physical, visible signage for my premises and advertise in the classifieds. All of that costs money and would involve hiring specialist professionals to create such signage and ad copy. Fast-forward to today, and a small business director has everything they need to make their business brand known; strong and discoverable, just a few keystrokes away.

Of course this works both ways! So, just as a brand owner has some great tools and resources to reach a wider audience more quickly, so does a brand consumer have numerous outlets to transmit their dissatisfaction or voice their opinion. And rightly so; as it’s a good thing this so-called democratisation of the web allows all of us consumers to voice our opinions in an open and public forum. It can be a headache for brands however, as this unregulated, unofficial content on the web vies for attention with your own material. Now; we’re not about to advocate attempting to bury all negative publicity, it is still publicity. What we are advocating is that you seek to ‘own’ your brand message at least on page 1 of the search engines.

Why Own Page 1 for Your Brand Results?

•    Consistency of message
•    Brand recognition and reinforcement
•    Increase traffic to your owned and operated websites
•    Look like a big deal

How to Own Page 1! (It’s easier than you think).

Get Your Domain Name: Make sure you own your brand domain name. www.whatever.com and the local TLD for each market in which you operate; that is if you don’t already! Your own company website is the easiest way to own your first result.
Join Professional Directories: Add yourself to professional and local directories for your sector, thus controlling profile information and having the knock-on benefit of association.
Write and Distribute Press Releases: Writing specific and tailored news about your company is a great way to inform often, and in an official way. Distributing this news as a press release to your online press and having this covered is absolutely invaluable. Trade press publishers naturally tend to rank well due to the authority of their content.
Create a Social Media Presence: Social media is a fantastic, wide-reaching and cost-effective way of essentially, advertising your brand. Facebook pages, Linkedin profiles and CrunchBase profiles are all good ways to extend your brand message. We looked at a couple of good practise tips to be aware of, when expanding your social media brand in a previous post.
Blog and Comment: Nobody knows your business like you do. So get out there and blog, guest blog, comment on related blogs. Establish your internet credentials by showing exactly how much you do know about integrated circuits, or bridal gown design or whatever it is that you do.

Although we can’t control (nor should we want to control) what is said about our brand, but we can control what we say about our brand; so there’s really no excuse not to.

The HTML format allows for the inclusion of a variety of types of metadata, most commonly keywords and description however it can be expanded to highly-granular information such as the Dublin Core and e-GMS standards.

Metadata is typically hidden from a user when they visit a webpage, however a search engine spider will be able to pick up the metadata. Metadata helps a search engine spider understand what a webpage is about, helps to categorise the webpage, and therefore helps to facilitate search and retrieval (NISO, 2001).

Four Key Reasons Why Metadata Matters

1. Meta data works on image-lead pages
It’s a bit of a cliché but there is some truth in the statement oft-used by search engine optimisation (SEO) experts, that “content is King”. Certainly having a lot of content, that changes and updates regularly is a key criteria in optimising for search engines; however there are many valid situations, web pages and entire websites that are very image-lead. As an example many web designer and artist’ websites would naturally contain a gallery of graphical and image lead work. Ensuring you have detailed meta-data describing the site and page content and the nature of your business ensures that search engines have something to get hold of other than just the image content.

2. Meta data expands on existing content
There is often more than one way to describe something – perhaps there is an incorrect way of describing something or there is a commonly used slang expression. If you want to keep your pages corporate and don’t want to include this alternate content however you’d like to rank in the search engine results page (SERP) for the slang, adding them to your metadata may help you rank well for text which doesn’t actually appear on your on-page content.

3. There’s more than one way to spell
There is sometimes more than one way to spell a particular word, for example English spellings tend to prefer the ‘s’ whereas American spellings prefer ‘z’ (e.g. specialisation vs specialization).

If you want to keep your website consistent, you will want to ensure that you keep your descriptions and spelling conventions consistent throughout all your webpages. However what if you run an international website and you want to rank for the alternative spelling?

Metadata can help by allowing you to add these alternate spellings into your metadata. Effectively this data is hidden from your user when they visit the webpage so there are no consistency issues; however it allows search engine spiders to potentially rank your webpage for a variety of other terms.

4. Good metadata increases click-through rates
Search engines will often use the title and meta descriptions of each webpage when they list the result in the SERP. Pages with good metadata are much more likely to be clicked on than ones with poor metadata for example:

Poor metadata – the title of the page is unhelpful, the description doesn’t say anything about the company.

Better metadata – the title of the page explains what the company does and includes keyword targets, the meta description gives more detail about the company’s services and what’s on the page.

If any of the contents of your metadata match up with the phrase the user has searched for, the keyword terms will be bolded up in the SERP. Research has shown that users are more likely to click on a result the more bolded keywords there are in the listing, thus it is important to plan your metadata carefully and ensure that every page on your website has unique, hand-crafted metadata.

However if you leave your metadata out, it’s not the end of the world – search engines will often try and use some of the on-page content in the SERP if you don’t have a meta description and there are “over 200” factors which influence a web page’s position in the SERP for a given keyphrase (that’s the Google secret sauce) therefore you may still rank well even if you leave this key information out. It does tend to be harder and take a lot longer!

References

Google (nd); Google Basics – Serving results
Available from: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=70897&ctx=sibling
[cited: 25 August 2009]

NISO (2001); Understanding Metadata
Available from: http://www.niso.org/publications/press/UnderstandingMetadata.pdf
[cited: 25 August 2009]

Google Base is an excellent way to advertise your products and if you own an internet based shop, there’s no excuse not to use it. First off – it’s free, and the results often appear on the first page of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) so uploading your feed can be a quick and easy way of winning new customers. The one snag is that just three shopping results tend to appear in the SERPs, although if users click through to the Google Base page they will be able to browse the full listings.

This means it is important to try and get each one of the products that you submit to Google Base into the top three listings to maximise your exposure. The Google Base algorithm is not as sophisticated as the full search algorithm and it relies far more heavily on the relevancy of the product feed than any other factor.

Firstly, you will need to consider your product keyword terms. Many people who are looking to buy online will know the manufacturer and/or product code of the item they would like to buy so try and incorporate not just the broad search term, but also the manufacturer and product code into both the title and description of the ad. Google themselves have said in the past that online shoppers tend to search for product characteristics rather than use generic searches. This means it is important to have not just broad search terms in your ad, but also more product-specific information.

The title should contain both the broad search and the product codes for the product, as well as any generic information you can put in. The description should also include as much relevant information as you can. Product searches are often truncated therefore try and load the front end of your description with as many keywords as possible. Take care not to ‘keyword-stuff’ as this may not only see you penalised by Google, but can also put off prospective purchasers. It is important to be truthful when creating your ad – in particular, prices should always reflect the actual price on your site. Don’t be tempted to put lower prices in as this can result in you being penalised or even banned.

Google Base product feeds can also contain custom attributes so make use of this feature. Adding product characteristics will help increase the relevancy of your listing and therefore hopefully push your product’s listing up the rankings.

The same can be said of taxonomies. Google provides a taxonomy for retailers to use however you can also add your own custom taxonomy into your feed. By picking a strong taxonomy with high relevance, this will again increase the relevance of your products and therefore give your products the best chance of ranking highly.

Images are also useful as there is strong evidence that users are more likely to click on a product listing if a relevant image is attached. Online shoppers like to have a good idea of what it is they are buying so ensure that your images are of the product and are clear and of good quality.

Freshness is also a factor when looking at Google Base feeds. It is advisable to upload your feed on a regular basis to ensure that it is always fresh with the latest prices and stock levels.

Lastly, Google uses seller rating. Although seller ratings won’t impact on your SEO they are a trust factor. If two sellers are offering the same product for the same price and one has a five star average from a large number of buyers whilst one has no history, the user is far more likely to choose to purchase from the first seller as they look trustworthy. Therefore it is important to cultivate as many ratings as reviews from purchasers as possible.

theMediaFlow blog is written by Nichola Stott, who you can follow on Twitter @NicholaStott

1. Ensure your site will load without the ‘www’ prefix.

Ensure your .ht access file captures URL type-ins without the ‘www’. Unless ‘told’ otherwise, any URL entry should resolve to ‘www’ as a matter of course. Failure to make this simple change could result in users thinking that your site is down, broken, or over-capacity – none of which look particularly welcome or professional and mean you may have lost a potential customer.

2. Ensure your logo defaults to ‘home’.

When a function becomes a common convention; such as clicking on the website logo taking you to the homepage, this then feeds audience expectation. So much so, that we often use a website logo to go back to the home page rather than any other navigation convention, as the logo tends to be the biggest, brightest (and therefore quickest) single-click route home. It is essential to adopt this practise, as users may seek to re-orient themselves within your content, starting again from the homepage, if they do not find the content they sought on first attempt.

3. Clear and consistent navigable element

What good is all that excellent content, surrounded by beautiful ad modules if nobody can find it? Even if you get lots of traffic from search engines (have good Search Engine Optimisation) – you won’t be encouraging repeat visits or further tours through your content unless you have a clear primary navigation element which remains in the same place throughout the site. Best-practise sites nearly always have a horizontal primary navigation element, with second and third level navigation being on a left hand side menu. It is not compulsory to have your navigation like everyone else; the most important thing is consistency.

4. Clickable breadcrumb

A breadcrumb trail shows the user their path through your site and content. Many Content Management Systems will automatically generate a breadcrumb for you by picking up the page title and its position in the content hierarchy to display a simple trail. Additionally, if a user has arrived at a content page on your site via an external link or a web search, a quick glance at the breadcrumb gives the user an immediate picture of where they are and may encourage an extended visit if the original content was relevant and of interest.

5. Font size 12pt minimum or scalable

Web accessibility is the practise of making your website as accessible as possible to as many people, including those with physical impairment. Web accessibility is a considerable separate topic in itself, and as well as the legal and ethical obligations to ensure your website is as accessible to all as possible, there are very good business reasons to do so as well. If there is one single accessibility tip for increasing your revenue potential, it is to ensure your content is at least 12pt or can be scaled. According to the RNIB at least 2 million of the UK population are visually impaired, which is a significant consideration as a percentage of your customer base. Ensuring that your primary content is at least 12pt, preferably scaling larger, will ensure that you are not discounting this community.

7. Add a searchbox

Adding a searchbox is one of the single biggest wins for any website seeking to improve incremental revenues. If you are an e-commerce site (regardless of how simple and logical your navigation) users tend to favour a searchbox, rather than a directory, to find the product they seek. If you generate revenues from adverts on your content pages, adding a searchbox will allow you to surface relevant content more often. Again here, providing a free-text entry search box promotes a quicker route from intent, to content and the more relevant the content to the user query, the more relevant any ad or product content should be.

8. Searchbox look and feel

Regardless of whether your search box is a direct source of revenue (search results contain products or ads) or an indirect source of revenue (search results contain content pages with complementary advertising – therefore raising ad impressions), there are a set of look and feel practises to adhere to which promote greater and more successful use of the search facility.

• Make the searchbox a minimum of 26 characters wide (not high) and for e-commerce sites between 26 and 50   characters is optimal. Our Yahoo! experience tells us that bigger is better – as user queries become more sophisticated and ‘query string’ length increases

• Do not put any text (‘search here…’ ‘put your search here’ etc) in the searchbox as when scanning the page for the searchbox we tend to look for the ‘big white space’. Even allowing for the varying levels of user sophistication pre-filling a searchbox is definitely not necessary and may cause confusion

• Position your search box top right, or top and centre (close to primary navigation) both positions are a conventional best-practise and promote greater search engagement through ease of searchbox identification

Making these simple tweaks to your existing site, or ensuring that these usability foundations are an integral part of any new build, will ensure efficient revenue performance. Improving incremental revenue performance is a quick win and if you are lucky enough to attract hundreds of thousands of page impressions a month, such a win could be considerable. If you’re not on this scale yet, ensuring usable and efficient performance of your commercial website is an important part of getting you there!