Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has a webmaster center to help with search engine optimization. Submitting your XML sitemap is very easy. All you need to do is go to a simple URL like this:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YOURWEBSITE.com/sitemap.xml

and your sitemap will be automatically submitted to Bing’s crawler. You can also use a more traditional form page:

To request that Bing crawl your site, submit your site’s domain to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx.

if you don’t have an XML sitemap.

Also check out Bing’s SEO 101 guide.
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This weekend while looking for a few things I needed around the house I noticed some SEO holes in some major websites:

1. Williams-Sonoma: While searching for a Bread Maker I noticed that they didn’t have a dynamic title for their search results and also they seemed to have a bug in their meta tags.Their title for my search of “bread maker” was “Williams-Sonoma | Search” which is not that great. I’d expect the inclusion of my search term. Maybe “Bread Maker | Williams-Sonoma | Search” as well the page contained no meta name tags or descriptions.
2. Lowe’s Home Improvement: Many Search Results have no information nor meta tags. This hurts SEO rankings as well as user experience. For example search for simple things like hammers (compare to Home Depot’s title of “Hammer, Mallets, & Sledges – Hand Tools – Tools & Hardware at The Home Depot”) or grills and there’s no title tag or meta tags

Sites like Lowes and Williams-Sonoma sell hundreds and thousands of products. Ignoring simple SEO practices most likely hurts them in the rankings. According to most SEO experts the title tag has is generally the most important on-page SEO feature for the past several years and placing the a search query term or phrase in the title tag is extremely important.

Update: 12/15/09 – I double checked both these sites and neither one has taken advantage of optimizing their titles to increase their SEO values. I had contacted them both back in June as well. I guess they don’t like free traffic.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique to increase the ranking of any web page or website on search engines like Google or Yahoo, for a given keyword or keyword phrase search. A higher search rank will produce a higher result in the organic search results and generally more traffic to the web site from search keyword traffic. Organic search traffic is generally high quality and can be more easily converted into repeat visits or product purchases. As well higher rankings give your business and brand more exposure.

Importance of SEO in Internet Marketing

The basic tenant of Web marketing is to increase the traffic and awareness of any web site and their respective products and services on Internet. As well the more traffic you can receive for free from organic search results means you need to spend less on Search Engine Marketing (i.e. buying traffic)

On average Search drives an average of 50-75% of all visits to web sites. Therefore it is very important that search engines direct traffic to your site instead of others. This is where SEO comes into play: generating more traffic for your site.

Site Optimization

Keyword Research: determining what to use keywords is a very important. Make a list of words and phrases that are related to your business and then use tools like Google Trends to determine which are the best for your business.

URL Format: having an easy to read URL structure makes it easier for search engine crawlers to determine how to read your site. It will also make it easier for users to remember subdirectories on your site so that they can go back directly. Ensure that the main keywords of your page are in the page name or URL structure. Also choosing a domain that is related to your business and its main keywords can be helpful.

Titles & Meta Tags: For titles try moving your brand name to the end and start your titles with the main words of your site or page. Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions should also be dynamic and customized to each page.

Content Optimization: Content of the webpage should be carefully written using the selected keywords effectively and should not cross 5-10% density amongst the total content of the webpage. Other factors are: wise usage of Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3), selective usage of bolding, italics, colors and intra-page hyperlinking on keywords and phrases.

Content Generation: Use a blog on your site to generate keyword rich articles about your site’s product or services. Not only will you be providing users with interesting information you will be generating text rich pages that search engine crawlers like to index.

Page structure: Most sites now use CSS or cascade style sheets. Make sure to use alt text for images, using headers and footer links. Consider using image sprites to increase page performance.

Site Map: Submit a site map to the major search engines and keep it updated. A visitor friendly (HTML) version and a machine friendly (XML) version will help search engines know where your pages are. Also be sure to use a robots.txt file to tell search engines what not to crawl.

Google has started showing more and more local listings on non-local searches like Pizza or Plumbers. Google using IP lookups to determine where you are and they serve local content up along with web sites. So if you search for Pizza, Google will show a few Internet websites and then place their Google Maps 10 pack of listings.

So if you have a business, whether that is a web based business or a store with a front door you need to be listed in local search engines like Google Maps, Yahoo Local, MSN Live Local. Its not hard to submit your listings and it only takes a few days for each service to list your business.

Update: 4/30 Rhino Web Services listed on:

• Google Maps
• Yahoo Local – still waiting (6/7 still waiting – pretty lame)
• MSN Live Local – MSN letter received 5/15. The instructions were simple to follow and my business is now confirmed, but not yet in.. Update 6/7 – MSN is now Bing Maps and I am in.

I’ve seen a lot of blog posts and news articles lately about the new DiggBar. First, if you are luck (or shall I say talented) enough to get an articles with a lot of Diggs, you will be getting a lot of free traffic. However the new DiggBar seems to be interfering with PageRanks.

Pros: First the new tool bar adds some features. Users can easily Digg, Tweet, Facebook or eMail a news article or post without having to go back to Digg. Assumed result: More Diggs. Second the DiggBar shows how many users have viewed the page. Third, its a short URL service. There’s a lot of short URL services but this one will allow you to also get Diggs (example my short URL is: http://digg.com/u1lie). Which I automatically generated by typing in http://digg.com/www.rhinowebservices.com into my browser address box.

Cons: On downside, DiggBar is framing you in. The DiggBar generates an iFrame that renders your page. Services like Comscore might not give you credit for the page view. Second, while the bar is not that big, Digg could include advertising on the DiggBar. Perhaps cool if you could somehow get a percentage of that revenue, not so great if you can’t. Third, the DiggBar does not appear to do a 301 redirect according to some (3DoggMedia, Search Engine Land, etc.). Which means Digg keeps the SEO credit for your page. However, Digg’s John Quinn says:

We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.

John Gruber of the Daring Fireball has written a short PHP script to redirect the Diggbar that generates a message to the Digg user.

As well you can use Framekiller JavaScript like we did years ago when Frames were in fashion. So I guess the DiggBar is a Retro Web 1.0 traffic and unique users grabbing scheme to boost to Digg’s own metrics (and to be fair they claim it is boosting Digg featured sites as well:

The preliminary results have been exciting, and we continue to learn and make real-time updates to the DiggBar. We’ve seen a 20% lift in unique visitors and many content providers have experienced similar traffic bumps this past week. Digg continues to have a symbiotic relationship with content publishers, and we anticipate these ongoing improvements will only enhance publisher traffic as more people discover and share content on Digg.

Personally I turned it off, as I didn’t want to use it. I am not sure I would implement a protest counter measure to block the bar from my site though other than just a normal JavaScript framebuster.

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>