SEO Hosting Blog

You may be wondering how to syndicate content on your website. Part of having a really cool website is producing useful information for your viewers. I am sure that you’ve heard the saying, “Content is King” and to be honest, I believe that. I believe that in order for a site to stand above the crowd and win against rival competitors, it needs to have a lot of content on it and things users can do. (more…)

Only time will tell whether Bing becomes a major competitor to Google. However, for the time being, thanks to their massive $80-$100 million advertising campaign, there is no denying that for the time being, people are using Bing.

Towards the end of last month, Garry wrote a post that included a link to a blog that is dedicated to sharing information about Bing. While this blog includes some valuable advice about SEO for Bing, I always think that its quite useful to gather information from multiple sources, which is why I want to share this post with you.

On the last day of August, I came across a post in Advertising Age called “After Microsoft-Yahoo Deal, SEO Isn’t Just About Google Anymore.” While the post itself was interesting and is worth reading, what really caught my eye was one of the comments.

The comment was left by Rodney Mason, who is the CMO of Moosylvania (a company that specializes in branding, design, promotions and marketing). Rodney also appears to be an active user of Twitter.

Although I could summarize the thirteen points he made in his comment for you, they were so detailed for a single blog comment that I think it is well worth republishing all thirteen points in their entirety:

Some thoughts for optimizing Bing;

1) Focus on categories presented for your most key search terms. Use Bing’s categories in your key words and in your site navigation.

2) Domain Age is very important. Building micro-sites off your main site vs. independent new sites is key for Bing. Additional findings for Bing thus far.

3) Text Rules
Bing favors pages with at least 300 words of text.

4) Linking Out
Bing favors linking out more than other engines as long as the links are relevant to the overall context of the site and keywords.

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On Sunday, SEOmoz released its biennial search engine ranking factors report. In case you aren’t a regular reader of SEOmoz and haven’t seen this report in years past, I’ll let Rand explain the format to you:

“Every two years, we survey 100 of the industry’s top SEO minds. In 2009, 72 SEOs participated in the data gathering process, answering survey questions that consumed hours of time. The resulting document is an amazing aggregation of data about how search engines rank documents and, at least in my opinion, should be read by anyone serious about practicing search engine optimization.”

As you can see, this is an impressive collection of knowledge from the top minds in the SEO world. As Rand recommends, you should take the time to read and analyze the entire report. However, since it is probably going to take some time for you to get through and digest all five sections (Overview, Ranking Factors, Link Building, Additional SEO Data and Contributors), I thought I would highlight the ten most useful takeaways I have found in the report so far (although they’re numbered 1 to 10, I consider to be all equally important pieces of knowledge):

1. You Currently Can’t Beat Trusted, Keyword Rich, External Links – In 2007, this factor was number three on the list, so the fact that it has moved up to number one shows that even though the web is growing, trusted links are currently still the best way to judge relevance.

2. Don’t Forget the Basics – Although they may seem like mundane details, don’t forget to put your keywords in your title tags! It’s even better if you can write compelling title tags that begin with your keywords and also attract users’ attention.

3. Generic Domain Names are Powerful – While they may cost a little more, having a generic domain name can not only help you with branding, but also with your search engine rankings.

4. Meta Tags are Meaningless – I shouldn’t have to mention this one, but there are still far too many “SEOs” who are still charging clients to add neta tags to their websites (which gives the entire SEO industry a bad reputation when those clients don’t get any results for their money).

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Most conversations about writing AdWords copy begin and end with “targeting the right keywords.” But writing effective AdWords copy involves much more than carefully stuffing keywords. Remember, keywords are the gateway to bringing targeted traffic; compelling copy is what makes potential customers click and buy.

Here are some tips for writing AdWords copy that makes buyers click.

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Since I have been writing for SEO Hosting for quite some time, I have had the opportunity to have discussions with many of the regular readers of this blog. Recently, I was having a discussion with one of the regular SEO Hosting readers, and he asked me a question. I really was interested in the question he asked, and since I spent some time looking into it, I thought it would make a great post.

This reader did not want me to share his identity with our audience, but he did say that he was more than happy for me to use his question as the topic of a post. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at his question, and then I’ll dive into the answer I found.

Question: What’s the best way to efficiently monitor your inbound link counts over a period of time?

The reason that I really liked this question is that I remember seeing others ask the same thing, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing a concrete answer to this question. Obviously, this is something that can be very useful for a SEO to do, so I knew that there had to be a way to efficiently accomplish this task.

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