Bing Discloses Secret SEO Recipe
Duane Forrester, Bing's Senior Product Manager for Webmaster Tools, posted an enticing article titled The Secret Sauce of SEO August 10th to the Bing Webmaster Blog. Before you get all excited, there is no secret meta tag, or other trick of the week that Duane chose to share with SEOs, instead he quickly reviews the main ingredients to high ranking.
Instead of a really cool secret method, Duane reminds us there is no shortcut to high rankings (what a buzz kill). Good SEO takes time and effort and the rewards are not permanent because the algorithm does indeed change. No matter how well you do your job, this is a moving target you must hit in order to rank highly.
There were some specific tips he shared that are good to know:
- Avoid Auto-Follow tools and tricks to quickly gain social followers. Bing believes that in order for your Twitter account to be an authority, you should have more followers than accounts you follow. While this goes against the idea of Twitter, it's a signal that they use to determine who is important. In all fairness, let's just hope Bing has some method to detect those that have lots of fake followers, such as politicians and celebrities recently disclosed in the news having over 70% of their followers being fake.
- Avoid generic product photos that everyone else uses in their stores. Instead, provide unique images, videos, and in-depth information not available elsewhere to make your product pages more compelling.
- Limit Syndicated Content - This little tidbit is probably a very good idea as syndicated content can be at times hard to distinguish who is the original source of the content.
- Social signals are indeed part of ranking, Duane specifically mentions that participation alone doesn't impact ranking. He reveals "How users click on your results can impact rankings and when we show cues like your Facebook friends with results, click rates can be impacted". There are times we are reviewing Bing results and believe we see some evidence to the co...
