What’s Wrong with HTML 5, Microdata and Schema.org?

After reading the article, here are the main points Keery Dean makes against HTML 5 microdata tags using Schema.org vocabulary on your website.  People can simply go overboard and tag every possible thing on a webpage. This would cause code bloat and eventually nullify the effectiveness granted by search engines due to overuse.

Well, here’s the thing.  Overusing any type of tag is basically SPAM.

As website SEO professionals, we have to be sensible, practical and strategic.  Every SEO consultant should be able to spout off the known types of on-page SEO SPAM.  The oldest forms of SPAM mainly boil down to excessive use of keywords, A.K.A keyword stuffing.  The goal of over optimization of a website, being to game the search engine algorithm, tends to create poor user experience.  This is contrary to the search engine goal, which is to provide high quality user experience search results.  With the emergence of new technology, it is in our best interest to apply the principles of SEO best practices.  Microdata is a tool.  Use it when it makes sense.  Use it strategically, when needed.  Otherwise, as Kerry Dean points out, it becomes useless code bloat.

Strategic Use of Microdata and Schema.org for SEO

So far, my use of schema.org for website SEO and development has only been two fold:

1. an effort to label and specify something that I can’t get into Google otherwise
2. to create rich snippets based on what Google already includes in its Webmaster Guidelines

Local SEO

I made an attempt to get about a couple dozen Caribbean resorts accurately located in Google maps.  The problem is you can’t verify them, because Google doesn’t support business owner verification in those countries yet.  None of the feed providers like Localeze or Acxiom support these countries either. For the most part, the resorts in the Caribbean don’t even have street addresses.  They just have PO boxes.  Based on PO boxes, Google Maps tends to place the locations on the post office – which is generally inland, not on the beach where the resort is located.  So I set up unverified locations where you can recognize the buildings and resort logos in the pools from satellite view.  However, other Google map users would edit things and change what I put in, even though I know my information is correct because it came straight from the owner (or rather corporate or hotel managers on location).  The funny thing is, after fighting a little with the tide of other Google users moving things around, I noticed that Google Maps takes its cues for the location more from other online resources than from where Google Map Maker users place it.  Moving forward, my strategy is to use microdata tags with schema.org vocabulary, including longitude and latitude coordinates to indicate the resort location on the homepage for each resort.

Rich Snippets

My other use of schema.org vocabulary purely overlaps with what Google already was supporting in the way of rich snippets.  Except now, if Google guidelines give a choice between microformats, search monkey, Hcard, etc and microdata… I go with microdata.  My goal for this is purely conversion.  Make the existing listing and big and full as possible.  It stands to reason, if you take up more visual space with your listing on the Google result page, you’ll get more clicks.  Just because it’s bigger.   I’m also in the process of experimenting with getting bullet point lists inserted in Google SERPs.

Google Panda Filter Strategy

I enjoy giving free SEO consultation and advice.  The following conversation string is copied out of emails between myself and the www.rocknrolltv.net website owner who filled out the BlendSEO contact form because she abruptly lost rankings for her blog.  Per the website owner’s request, I have omitted her name throughout the conversation.

The unifying theme you can learn from this conversation is that rich, unique content is essential for organic search engine visibility.  Content is what the search engines rank.  If you have content, optimization is a matter of finessing and organizing the content.  As you read below, the ranking problem is due to her website being caught by the PANDA filter.  After comparing competitors and with an understanding of what  degree of thin or duplicate content trips the PANDA filter, the proposed solution is based on content.  There are some great SEO tips in there as well.

Website Owner:

Hello.

I’m interested in possibly hiring your services to help me with our site. We seem to be hitting some penalties with Google. Our site is a music news video show with affiliates. The affiliates give us coupon codes which we have to push. Several of the promo code pages have slipped drastically in the Google rankings and I’m not sure why. I used to be #6 or #7 for “4inkjets coupon code” .. now I am down around #80 or so. This has happened with a few important keywords to me and my income! Please let me know how you work and if you think this is fixable.

Thanks.

Greg at BlendSEO:

Hello [website owner]

You may have either been penalized by the Panda filter, or other competitive coupon websites may have popped up around you crowding you out of top rankings.  Do you have access to ranking and/or traffic data?  I see you have the Google Analytics code on your site.  Did you lose rankings and organic search traffic on a single day or gradually over time?  If on a single day, what date?  Panda filters were run in January and then approximately every 3-7 weeks afterward.  We are currently due for another one any day now.

My first impression is that you have a WordPress blog where the main theme of the content is centered around celebrity news.  The coupon code appears to be “thin” content compared to the news content.  The other sites ranking on page 1 of Google are completely themed about coupons/promo codes. One initiative of the Panda filter is to rank websites where the site as a whole is a quality resource for the search query.  You may have read that one goal for the Panda filter is to eliminate affiliate websites with “thin” content.  You don’t really fall in the category of a site with thin content, except in the area of coupon codes.  For example, there is a link in you navigation to a “Promo Codes” page that has no content (http://www.rocknrolltv.net/promo-codes). There is not a real strong connection between printer ink, coupon codes and celebrities, but you may be able to gain back some rankings if you start blogging about coupon codes and building out that area of content.

Website Owner:

Hello Greg,

Wow. This is VERY informative. Thank you! I am formulating a plan of attack and repair now.

Yes, the loss in rankings happened suddenly. It happened twice which I thought was odd. My competitors with video shows and affiliates have also dropped so what you are saying in regards to thin content is making sense. Although these guys seem to be holding up better than the rest of us: www.emmaandpete.com

But all of us have dropped from the top ten as there used to be a little gang of us battling it out. LOL. (all content producers for the same network!)

Good point on the promo codes page. I shall remedy that.

I do have another site or two that I could use just for the coupon codes. www.thesecouponswork.com It is a little out of date but I could update all of the codes on there and build out the pages etc. And then blog regularly on it to keep things rolling etc etc.

Would you agree that the coupon site would be a better approach and in the meantime, remove dupe content and maybe… start blogging about coupons on the rock n roll tv site? Sort of a two pronged approach?

I appreciate your time with this and if you have time to answer. Great. If not, that’s cool too. It’s hard to figure this stuff out when you’re a video producer/musician first and trying to do SEO the best I can … second! ha ha!

Greg at BlendSEO:

I think the strategy looks good.

Emmaandpete.com has a good amount of content related to the coupons as “Emma’s Blog” (http://www.emmaandpete.com/emma) seems to focus on it completely.  Also, “Pete’s blog” has tons of really long posts with tons of copy about whatever he seems to be interested in…as well as “Cooper Acres” also has tons of text about it.  All this text content makes for very rich content.  Videos are great for users who watch them, though they only provide as much search engine friendly content as an image.  Those sections of Emmaandpete.com appear to be categories that get pulled into the blog loop on the homepage.  With all that on-topic content mixed with other rich content, I’m not surprised they did NOT get penalized for thin content.

SEO Tip

A good rule of thumb for length of text on a post is 200 words.

Also, I notice each of your posts has a smattering of content about several different unrelated affiliates.  You might have better luck if each post only talks about one affiliate, and goes a little more in depth talking about that affiliate within the post.  Working the subject matter of one affiliate into a post should give that post a more unified and stronger theme of its subject matter.  Using a couple links from that tighter themed post back to your affiliate landing page will carry more weight than one link from a loosely related post that also links to several other unrelated landing pages.

Part of the Panda filter penalizes sites that have too many advertisements on one page.  I would suggest removing the horizontal banner below each post:

and the one midway down the homepage:

If you do this, and narrow your post content to one affiliate per post, I would not be surprised if you bounce back up the next time the Panda filter is run (it has been run about every 4-5 weeks).

Increase Relevance to Improve SEO

You can take the themes a step further by coming up with a way of categorizing your content so that only certain affiliates are pushed with certain types of rockers.  For example if you only push diamond promo codes in articles that mention Aerosmith.  Or if you don’t write about Aerosmith frequently you could choose some other way of categorizing the rockers like old school rockers, younger pop stars, older pop stars, etc. Then divide up the affiliates and assign them each to one of these categories.  When a post falls into a category, only mention those affiliates assigned to that category.  If you consistently associate affiliate content with a type of rocker content, Google will see the pattern and associate them together.  As long as you use a logical way to categorize the rockers, Google has probably seen that association before among all the web content in the world.

Another way of building an association between the affiliate content and the rocker content might be to take a literal connection.  For example, pushing the 4inkjets in a post about a rocker who has a lot of tattoos, pushing ice/diamonds in a post about a rocker that mentions their jewelry, push match.com in an article that discusses someone’s dating life, etc.

The more consistent you are in presenting the information, the more likely Google is to recognize a pattern in your content.  This will strengthen the relevance of your content around your rockers and affiliate related content.  Google’s goal is to serve up relevant content for search queries.  So keeping the affiliate keywords relevant to your main content will help your rank better for your affiliate content.

Attract Relevant Inbound Links

This consistency between your affiliate content and main content will also help leverage your inbound links.  My guess is that your posts naturally receive links because of the video content and rocker news content.  The strongest inbound links have meaningful anchor text related to your post content…and those links come from pages that are related to your post content.  Aligning your affiliate content with your rocker post content also aligns it with your most powerful inbound links.

Website Owner:

This is incredibly helpful, Greg.

WOW! Thank you so much for answering in great detail. You obviously know what you’re doing and everything you have written makes  alot of sense!

I will remove those ads.

What about the 4×4 squares on the side. Do you think maybe keeping two of them is okay? Does it matter if they link offsite to a ‘conversion’ page rather than in the site?

Greg at BlendSEO:

I see you removed 2 of them.  It is fine if they link off site, but you need to have rel=”nofollow” in the link code.  Not a huge deal, but Google can devalue your links if you allow ads to pass PageRank by not using the nofollow.  This is what you have….

<a href=”http://www.budget.com/roll”><img src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/budget-coupon-code-125×125.gif” alt=”Ad” /></a>

<a href=”http://www.avis.com/roll”><img src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/avis-promo-code-125×125.gif” alt=”Ad” /></a>

It should look like this….

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.budget.com/roll”><img src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/budget-coupon-code-125×125.gif” alt=”Ad” /></a>

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.avis.com/roll”><img src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/avis-promo-code-125×125.gif” alt=”Ad” /></a>

Website Owner:

My only other question for you is this.

Posts should be 200 words. Should I simply use my video script as the post so it is all the rock news? This would provide a post that is very appropriate for the site in terms of searchable terms and be over 200 words at the same time. Then… do what you said and align one affiliate with one rocker type thing and write about that as well.

Greg at BlendSEO:

Using the video script is a great way to do this.

Wow. This is really incredible. Thank you so much.

Okay. I was wrong. One last question. I assume I should not ‘go back’ and make changes to previous posts?

Greg at BlendSEO:

There’s nothing negative for SEO. It’s just your preference. I didn’t want to assume.

Another plan is to puff up the FAQ pages and other personal pages so Google knows we are ‘legit’. (I read that can help?)

Greg at BlendSEO:
Your FAQ, About Us and Contact Us look pretty thorough already, but more content can only help.

Thanks for the brilliant idea. I will implement it today and find a way to redo my categories to align them with affiliates. Very cool!

SEO Tools, Strategies and Upcoming SEO Research

SEOmoz president Gillian Muessig, affectionately known as SEOmom, presented at the Online Marketing Summit July 19th, 2011.  The event was held in Alpharetta, GA at a venue called Roam Atlanta, in the metro Atlanta area, about 20 minutes north of midtown Atlanta, where Blend SEO consultancy is located.   Gillian Muessig revealed a glance at impressive and practical capabilities of SEOmoz software.  Gillian’s prepared presentation hit all the SEO strategy essentials.  She also gave insight on research performed by SEOmoz, keyword optimization strategies and answered questions about Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines.  After her presentation, Gillian Muessig caught me up on some of the current social marketing and SEO research her son Rand Fishkin is up to.

Here’s the question most failed internet businesses never asked.

Gillian Muessig, president of SEOmoz (an SEO software tools company), began her 2011 Online Marketing Summit presentation talking about this question.  Before investing in a website, a logo, website hosting, or even a business plan, you must research this question.  How hard will it be to rank on Google page 1 for my product/service? A sure way to failure is to jump into the game without researching your online competition…your would be competitors in search results.  Your competitors for search engine traffic may not be the same direct competitors with which your are familiar.  Whether considering a new website or just a new product line or service, competitive keyword research will help predict your level of success given your level of resources. For a glimpse of keyword competitors, SEOmoz offers the Keyword Difficulty Tool.

The Keyword Difficulty Tool is an SEO research tool that displays in depth results about your keyword phrases.  For each keyword phrase, it displays:

• A Keyword Difficulty score
• Google AdWords search volume
  • local
  • global
  • broad match
  • exact match
• Top 10 ranking pages with data for each
  • page authority
  • domain authority
  • PageRank
  • number of linking root domains
  • number of root domains linking to the root domain

These results are a brief overview of the more in depth information collected via the original SEOmoz Linkscape tool, which is currently provided within the more in depth Open Site Explorer SEO tool.

SEO Research for Keyword Strategies

Next, Gillian Muessig discussed keyword strategies.  For every single keyword, there are variations of phrases that contain that keyword.  To help narrow the focus on what keyword phrases to target, Gillian provided statistics on the length of keyword phrases.  She pulled out the Search Demand Curve chart, which may be old news to some, but a good basic strategy to keep in mind. Realistically speaking, Gillian explains it is impossible to optimize your content specifically for each of the various the long tail terms.  Therefore, target on the “Chunky Middle”.  These are the medium length phrases that may include a core keyword with a few popular modifiers.

To further support targeting the “chunky middle” keyword phrases, Gillian pulled out this chart. It supports targeting the 3 and 4 word phrases, because those are the ones that convert.  4 word keyword phrases are the most converting.

Before talking about blogging, SEOmoz president Gillian Muessig answered various questions, such as why Bing and Yahoo search results mirror each other so closely.  Her answer was that Bing purchased Yahoo’s search technology.

Blogging Fresh Content for SEO

As Gillian put it, freshness is the frequency at which content changes.  Gillian also through out this factoid many people don’t know.  PageRank is named after Google c0-founder Larry Page.  It determines how frequently a webpage is crawled.  Part of the factor for Google to decide how frequently to crawl your webpage depends on how frequently the content changes.  Ways to provide rich new content include blogging on your website, allowing commenting and user reviews.

Hot topics for your business blogging that get picked up and shared by other online resources include:

• money
• health
• family
• infographics
• video

She also suggests to comment on other articles using intelligent conversation invoking comments that link back to your pertinent content.  She warns to avoid making comment spam, comments of little value, or engaging in personal attacks.

Upcoming SEO Research from Rand Fishkin & SEOmoz

After the presentation, I had a chance to chat with Gillian Muessig and find out what Rand and the ‘Moz team will be working on next.  Gillian noted that as social media signals continue to increase in importance, SEOmoz is focusing more on integrating information about social media metrics into SEOmoz toolset.

For example, SEOmoz recently tested whether a page with lots of tweets and just one link was likely to rank better than that same page with plenty of good links from a variety of sources (in other words, following best practices) and just a couple of tweets.  the page with lots of tweets outranked the page with plenty of links.  (A link to these results coming soon)

SEOmoz is also working on helping marketers understand the various kinds of social media metrics and their relative value, including…

• the value of different twitterers
• the value of tweets
• keywords in tweets
• blog mentions

and other citations across social media platforms.  You can expect to see a variety of new work in the social arena from the mozPlex in the coming months.

How does web hosting affect SEO?

Avoid SEO web hosting issues.  See Blend SEO top 3 picks for hosting.

Web Hosting and SEO

SEO should be addressed during the planning stages of a website or blog.  A wrong decision on website design, server platform and hosting company can handicap your SEO efforts.  Many SEO hosting web design companies offer turn-key, all-in-one, one-stop-shop, too-good-to-be-true solutions for SEO, hosting and web design.  Many of these companies started out in one area and respond to customer demand in other areas by putting together a package to serve them all.

• Don’t expect SEO from a hosting company to be a full service, all encompassing SEO solution.
• Likewise, don’t expect an SEO or web design firm to provide top notch hosting.
• More likely they are reselling server space from a hosting company or else maintain an on-site local server.

My top 3 choices for web hosting…

Web hosting and web design affect SEO.  Plan to build and design your website on a Linux – Apache server environment.  The most common alternative to this is Windows IIs.  Windows web servers are innately problematic for SEO.

• They give flexibility in URL capitalization that allows for an infinite duplicate content issues.  These issues must later be addressed with canonicals, redirects or rewrites – depending on how the site is built.
• Some ASP applications that often run on Widnows IIs servers use forms and generate unnecessarily large web pages.
• If you are already on a Windows IIs machine, your SEO may be handicapped without you knowing it.

Search engines are evolving to adapt to variations in web server technology.  However, if starting out fresh, its a safe bet to choose a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) web hosting environment.

Which Web Hosting Company is Best for SEO?

The main concerns in website hosting for SEO are reliability and speed.  And most importantly, speed.  Google uses webpage load speed as a ranking signal.  A hosting company that cannot serve your website quickly during high traffic hours, generally west coast afternoon to evening, can hamper your search engine rankings.

If your website is served with good speed, but goes down for an hour, half a day or even a day… as long as the search engine comes back the next day and finds everything back to normal, you won’t see any change in rankings.  This of course is relative – if you’re competing in a news space or social space where up to the second updates are critical, you better be sure your hosting does not fail you.  But for the majority of blogs, company websites, product line websites, etc, as long as your hosting company can for the most part keep your website up, you should be fine.

The better hosting companies have become very reliable and very good and keeping things running.  Hosting server maintenance is performed in ways that eliminates down time.  A good way to know if a hosting company is reliable is if you are able to call late at night and get intelligent answers and quick resolution for problems.

Top 3 Web Hosting Companies for SEO

GoDaddy.com

GoDaddy is the biggest player in hosting and domain name management.  Infrastructure behind this large company must lend to its reliability.  I have been using GoDaddy for domain names and hosting since 2002, however they have been doing it since 1997.  I use one deluxe web hosting account to handle a handful of moderate traffic websites.  Around 2009, I migrated my websites to their cloud hosting environment.  Load balancing in the cloud provides more reliable, faster hosting.  The customer login area where you find the control panels can be confusing. However, GoDaddy has always provided surprisingly great phone customer service even in the late, late night hours.  Just call them up, and ask them to walk you through whatever you are trying to do.

Bluehost.com

Bluehost only deals with hosting, and has been around since 1996, a little longer than GoDaddy.  Bluehost provides a C-Panel type of control panel – the preferred, most robust control panel for hosting.  Bluehost provides a cloud environment, appropriate for blogs and medium traffic websites.  Reliability is great – 24-7 phone customer service on par with GoDaddy.

Rackspace.com

Rackspace is another hosting-only company with a little more presence than Bluehost, though has been around since 1998.  The control panel is Plesk, which is very easy to use.  Rackspace also provides a cloud environment and 24-7 phone customer service.

I’ve had bad experiences with newer, smaller hosting companies.  The three hosting companies above have proved themselves over years and have the infrastructure to support reliable, fast up-time.  I confidently affiliate Blend SEO with GoDaddy, Bluehost and Rackspace.

Does our website pass for a mobile website?

…since it looks the same on my Blackberry as it does on a PC?

We were discussing local search marketing, which overlaps with mobile search marketing.  I gave a pretty quick response since we were whispering under other people, but here are the main questions to answer when deciding if you need to invest in mobile website design…

• Does your website use Flash?
  • Flash does not render on iphones or ipad.  If your website degrades nicely with an image replacing a flash banner, that will pass for a mobile device.  If you turn off Flash in your  browser and it looks like crap, you probably need a mobile version.
• Can you read and navigate the website on a mobile phone?
  • His website showed everything, but you had to zoom in and pan around to read anything.
  • Are the buttons and points of action easy to read and use?

Mobile Website Verses Mobile Friendly Website

Think less about rendering technicalities and more about if the interface is mobile friendly.  A mobile friendly website will generally have less text and big buttons for the main points of action, in a horizontal row that you can scroll through – no zooming/panning needed.  Points of action (phone number, address, button for map/directions, etc) are all laid out on separate lines with enough space to put a finger on each one.

Example:  look at a Wikipedia article on your phone.  You’ll see a paragraph of intro text followed by buttons to read more from the various areas.  You don’t just scroll through the whole article in one page.  Content for background, history, resources, etc is replaced by a big button for each.

You can create a free mobile website using the tools in Bing Business Portal.  It is a template based mobile website, branded with Bing where you control the colors and content.  However the options are pretty limited.  At least it gives a basic start for a mobile website.

Mobile Website SEO Technical Issues

JavaScript can be used to detect the browser. If it is a mobile browser, JavaScript can redirect to the mobile website.  A link/button can also be provided for the user to switch between mobile and standard website.  We can avoid duplicate content by using canonical tags on the mobile site pointing to the standard site.  If you use a sub-domain, like http://mobile.website.com, search engines are working on eliminating duplicate content issues between mobile and standard.

Paid Directories for SEO

Our M.B. SEO link builder was submitting a client website to directories and put together a registration document for paid directory submission so that the client can approve the costs before submission.  The SEO client (whose name has been removed) had these questions:

I am not familiar with site directory registration and optimization and have a question about the [client] document for approval.  Can you tell me why Bing and Google are not included on the directory listing?  Is it because they rely on these other directory/paid engines?

The question reveals the SEO client has some confusion between directories and search engines and how one affects the other.  Also, with the recent news about paid link penalties, other clients have been asking how paid directories are viewed by search engines.

The Difference Between Directories and Search Engines.

An internet directory, like a phone directory, simply provides a listing of websites with some information about each one.  Like a phone book, a user can browse a directory by categories to find different websites.Search engines, unlike directories crawl the world wide web to create a searchable list of all websites.  Directories rely on a person to submit the websites listed.  Search engines will crawl directories to find websites.  Listing your website in a directory is one way to help search engines find it.

Why are Bing and Google Not Listed Among the Directories?

The Yahoo directory is actually separate from the Yahoo search engine.  Neither Bing nor Google have a paid directory, like Yahoo does.  Google and Bing are search engines only. However, Bing, Google and Yahoo all have a searchable index of local business listings where you can submit your business, but that’s a different Blend-ER SEO Blog post.

Effect of Paid Directory Submission on Search Engines

These paid directories where we submit your website provide a valuable link to your website.  The directory listing and the link help verify the authenticity of your website to search engines.  The payment is for the directory to perform a manual review of your website to decide if it passes quality guidelines.  Search engines give more credit to listings in these directories than others that accept all submissions without a review process.  Matt Cutts, the head of Google Spam team describes this valuable distinction of selective paid link directories compared to paid text links in his blog.

Free Mobile Website and Local Listings from Bing Business Portal

The tools for local search marketing are changing quickly as mobile search explodes and overlaps with social media marketing.  Smart phone, Android phone, iPhone, tablet PC, and iPad popularity is growing the market for local search.

Throughout this article, I explain the new features of the Bing Business Portal compared to Google and Yahoo products along with SEO tips to maximize its benefits. The big WOW about the new Bing Business Portal is that it not only gives merchants an easy place to list local business locations (enabling exposure to local and map search), the new product area helps you create a free mobile website, mirroring the products you load into the Bing shopping engine and your local listing information.  This mobile website has its own shortened URL you can share in Facebook, and a Facebook Like button built in (later in this article, I’ll share an SEO secret about Facebook likes).  You can even generate your mobile website’s QR code to download and print onto a window sticker or distribute throughout your area.  Using a few tricks to detect the browser and redirect, or just a simple link, this mobile website provided by Bing can be integrated into your main desktop website – or stand alone if it is your initial entry into internet marketing.

Bing Business Portal - mobile search marketing

Bing Local Business Listings Compared to Google and Yahoo

Bing has combined some really convenient features of Google and Yahoo that simplify your business’s launch into mobile search marketing, starting from square one.  You don’t need a website or a physical storefront (though you likely have one or the other), yet you can end up with a Facebook friendly mobile website, local map listings so you appear in map search results and product listings so you can appear in Bing shopping results.

Details

The Listings section starts with straight forward business Details tab similar to the Local Listing Center that was replaced, with a nice new interface.

Local Business Listing Details

Like Yahoo, you have a choice whether or not to display your business address.  This is great news for internet only businesses run from a private home or location without a storefront.  Like Google’s local listing process, you must first search for your business by phone number.  Either choose an existing listing to take over or create a new one.  Either way, you must verify ownership by phone or mail.

SEO TIP: This may not surprise you, but use keywords in the business name and in any other fields whenever possible.  Fill out as many fields as possible. Bing even tells you straight out in their Learn more infographic “…the more information you have added to your listing, the easier it will be to find your business online.”

Profile

Next tab is the Profile.  Like Google and Yahoo, you may choose categories (called Specialties in Bing) under which your business can be listed.  Bing lets you choose up to 5 specialties.  Unique to Bing, you may then use interactive sliders to prioritize the different areas. 

SEO TIP: if you don’t fit into 5 categories, try to find 5 that at least are related, especially if they contain any form of your core keywords.

Mobile

QR Code

Mobile, the next tab under Listings produces your FREE mobile website, as well as a QR Code.  The QR code is a bar code that people can scan with their mobile phone that will take them right to your mobile website.  It’s sort of like plastering your domain name on a sign, except there’s no need to remember the URL and type it into a browser.  The only downside to QR codes is that you can’t integrate a recognizable brand into it, like you do with a domain name.  Its an unrecognizable pattern of black and white boxes.  Now that would be something if you can customize your QR code to include your logo.  Let me know if you find out how to do that.  The upside for the QR code and its whole reason for existence is NO TYPING – one of the great enablers of mobile search.  On your way into a store, scan the QR code in the storefront window with your mobile device and the website pops right up.

You can start listing your categories and products here under the Mobile tab of the Listings section, but its probably easier to wait until you get to the Products section where you will fill out all the details.

Photos

Unlike Yahoo, you can upload up to 9 photos for your listing for free.  Yahoo used to let you upload 2 photos free and more for the paid listing.  Now, Yahoo reserves all photos for the paid listing.  Bing gives you 9 photos for your listing. 

SEO TIP: Use all 9 photos and don’t upload them.  Instead use the link option.  This lets you use photos hosted on your main website domain.  These each act as a link from an authority website (Bing).  They are not as powerful as anchor text links, but they are links from Bing.com nonetheless.

More Details

Bing Local Listing Details Influence SEO

The More Details tab lets you further optimize and fill in additional information using forms that you would recognize from Google local listings.  These include year established, company tagline, business description, languages spoken, hours of operation, payment types accepted, parking options, brands carried, professional associations and your marker location on the map. 

SEO TIP: Bing encourages users to fill out as many details as possible, since this is a way of optimizing your listing so that it can be accurately indexed in search results.

Publish

The last tab, Publish, gives you a preview of your local listing, links to your mobile site and a download for your QR code window sticker.  Also in this tab are tools to design the look of your mobile website.  The default colors are determined by the logo.  From there you can customize the colors and background texture.

Get Products in Bing Shopping Search Engine

The Products area is not as easy as you might expect.  Unlike Google Merchant there is currently no option for an RSS feed or spreadsheet.  Its up to you to painstakingly input each product and description into the fields.  Also, don’t get confused by what is intended as product categories and actual products.  The first step is to list your menu items or product categories, followed by sub-categories.  And be careful, this is still in BETA – I was not able to delete unused menu items.  Therefore I suggest editing the default menu items before creating new ones.  Once you fill in the title and description for the first menu item, it will be updated in the left column, where you can select that menu item to start adding its sub menu item, and then products for the sub menu item.  The point of entering this hierarchy is to create your navigable mobile website.

Free Mobile Website

Hands down the most exciting part of the Bing Business Portal, over Google or Yahoo is the promise of a free mobile website and its QR Code, compatible with Facebook, complete with like button.

SEO TIP: I’ve noticed a correlation between Facebook likes and rankings in Bing web search results.  Also, if your customers use the Facebook like function with location enabled, it creates a location specific search signal similar to the reviews you may see listed in your Google maps place page that are pulled from various websites that list your business name and address with associated reviews. Encourage your customers to Facebook like you.  Keep the QR code handy so they can scan it and hit the like button.  This could be as simple as a sign next to the register or tip jar: We accept and appreciate Facebook likes – just scan the bar code and hit the like button.

Why Buys

Bing Why Buys for SEO

Once you get past the product categories and into the products, you find name, price, description, photos and Why Buys.   In the Learn More area, Bing suggests using the Why Buys for search engine optimization (SEO).  Bing explains (in not these exact terms) that Why Buys are conversion messages about your product that help it appear in search results.  In a nutshell this is where you list your product benefits.

SEO TIP: In the WHY BUYS list the problems your potential customers are searching online to solve, as well as the variations of the product name or application.  This is the perfect example of combined conversion and SEO that must be compressed into ten concise statements.

As you build your product categories, products, descriptions and why buys, you are actually building the mobile website.  The seemingly unnecessary hierarchy  you are forced to provide for each product builds the categories and subcategories in your mobile website, allowing the user to drill down different areas to read more.  The mobile interface is limited to menu lists where you can select one item from a list of categories to see the sub categories, followed by  the list of products.  Select a product to see the name, description, price, photo and up to 10 reasons to buy.

Deals

Bing Local Listing Deals for SEO

Once you have the workings of an online store in mobile website format, you can set up deals.  The Deals area seems self explanatory.  List your sales.  A similar free feature like this is also available in Google places.  This is not the same thing as running a mobile pay per click ad.  The deals do not directly give you more prominence, however, this is an opportunity to grow your variety of keyword stemming to further optimize your listing.

People

The People tab is an area where you can manage account users for your Bing Business Portal.  Similar to the account management abilities in Google products.  Here you can add users and set their level of access, allowing your team members to input products, business locations, etc.

SEO and Marketing Conclusions about the New Bing Business Portal

Bing obviously wants to gain traffic.  Without going head to head with Google’s web search, Bing makes a move into mobile search as the Decision Engine.  Of course all these products still affect general web search performed at a desktop or laptop.  However, mobile and local signals not only influence web search results, but are often injected directly into web search results.  Bing put together some really great free tools that have otherwise been paid tools from Bing and Yahoo.  Certainly we can assume Bing is providing these free tools to merchants to encourage more use of the Bing online properties.  However that does not take away from the value they provide.  Admittedly by Bing, these new local SEO tools will help you in other search engines besides just Bing.  Your mobile site is created and branded by Bing, however it is still searchable in Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc.  The content you create in your local listing, the reviews you get, the Facebook likes and the mobile website are all crawled and followed by Google.  What’s good for one search engine is often good for them all.

Google, Bing and Yahoo cracked down hard on duplicate content starting December 2010.  Penalties hit hardest on February 24, 2011 in the Google Panda algorithm update.  Bing and Yahoo rankings followed suite.

How To: The SEO Tools and Process to Address Duplicate Content

Comparison SEO Tool

An SEO services client with which we work has developed multiple websites for different brands, but the client recycled the content.  Instead of writing 100% unique text for each website, paragraphs and sometimes whole pages were used universally across multiple websites.  They were getting away without noticeable revenue loss, so despite existing duplicate content penalties (though not actual penalties – more accurately wasting crawl budget and possibly dividing link juice) on interior entry pages, the client decided it was not a big enough priority to rewrite all the content … until now.

February search engine algorithm updates penalized entire websites that have pages similar to any other site that the search engine credits as the originator. Even if words are rearranged and the brand name is switched out, the Google algorithm is not fooled.  Google chooses one website as the originator and penalizes the others.

In late 2010, various rankings started to slip.  On February 24th, clients with duplicate or similar content across different websites saw a total drop off for #1 ranked keyword phrases.   Google guidelines for duplicate content indicate that the algorithm perceives these similar pages as  “deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic“.

By the way, these guidelines were [initially] updated March 20, 2011, less than a month after the [first] Panda algorithm update.

Systematic Process of Identifying and Addressing Duplicate Pages

If you are intimately familiar with your websites, like this search engine optimization consultant is, you already know which pages are similar and possibly causing duplicate content penalties. If you are an SEO agency taking on a new client with duplicate content issues, leaving it up to you to figure out where the duplicates are within their online properties, then you may need a few SEO tools to help identify possible duplicate pages.

8/11/2011 UPDATE: Google Panda Filter Dates

• Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
• Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about  4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.51: October 9 (minor filter update about 2 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.52: October 13 (minor filter update)
• Panda Update 2.6: November…

To determine if your website fell victim to a Panda filter, check your traffic.  Panda “penalizes” your website by dropping your rankings, not just on pages with duplicate or thin content, but universally across your website – including your homepage.  If you were hit by the Panda Filter, you will see a significant traffic drop on one of the dates above.  Subsequently, if you address the issue, your traffic should be adjusted the next time the Panda filter runs.  Each time the filter runs, it updates the Google index.

Identify Duplicate Content

This paid tool makes your process simple, but costs money. Copyscape is a tool for finding copyright and plagiarism offenders.  Since Google generally penalizes the copier and not the original author, plagiarism is not an SEO issue.  For this reason CopyScape is not a regular part of the SEO arsenal of tools.  Don’t ask me why as an SEO I even know about it, but I’ve known about it for years (guess that’s part of the multidisciplinary Blend SEO approach).

The process to identifying duplicate pages is, using the paid version called CopySentry, you can feed it your non-penalized website and let it find the duplicate content out there amidst your penalized websites.

Using free tools takes a little more time and effort.  Download and install A1 Sitemap Generator, a great sitemap generator program with a fully functional free 30 day trial.

1. Run a scan of your penalized website.  It will generate a list of pages of the website, ignoring those blocked by robots.txt, following any redirects or canonical tags – meaning you have a list of webpages that spiders crawl.
2. Among the sitemap output choices, you can create a text file list of page URLs with each URL on a separate line.
3. Paste this list into excel and start your search for duplicate content.  Use your intuition and Google to check blocks of text.  If a different website ranks number one for any block of text, that website is credited as the originator.  Mark this URL and the originator URL.

Test or Check Duplicate Content

Once you have a list of pages from your penalized website and their counterpart on the originator website, you will want to check their similarity.  Are they similar enough to require a rewrite?  Run the URLs through a webpage comparison or duplicate content checker tool.  After you go through several pages between two sites, you will eventually get a feel for where the cut-off is for rewrite verses no rewrite.  Any pages with similarity higher than your cut-off require a writer to take a look for the duplicate or similar language.  Similar content on the penalized website must be completely rewritten.

This first similarity tool is my favorite.  Some only give a single percentage, letting you wonder how much of that similarity is due to non-visible code.  This tool tells you, without inundating you with too much information.  There’s no captcha, so checking through your list is quick.  I embedded the form below, so you can try it here.

This next tool, embedded below simply gives you a single percentage.  Depending on the template between your penalized and originator websites, the number you get will seem pretty low.  My cut-off with this tool was about 10%.  Anything over 10%, required a copywriter to rewrite the page or at least a section of the page.

This comparison SEO tool by SEO Book compares the page titles, meta information, and common phrases occurring on different pages.

Here are several more alternatives you can try.

http://www.webseoanalytics.com/free/seo-tools/duplicate-content-checker.php

http://utext.rikuz.com/en/

http://www.seomastering.com/duplicate-page-finder.php

http://www.seomastering.com/site-comparison.php

http://www.seomastering.com/similar-text-checker.php

Blend starts with the end in mind.  A blended skill set of design and marketing contributes to SEO for a stronger, unified result.  Blend is SEO (search engine optimization) infused with design and marketing.  Our blog, the BlendER (ER = Everything Relevant), breaks down problems that are hard to chew into easily digestible servings.

Meaning Behind the Cute Words and Symbols?

The new business name and logo represent a blended approach to an end result.  A bit more organic than the old GLiD logo, Blend reveals aspects of synergy and growth.  The internet of yesterday, well, more like a few years ago…was pretty cut and dry.  If you got past the technical barriers, you were in.  Moving forward to the internet of yesterday – we were all captivated by web 2.0, and the community element. Blogs for individuals, blogs for companies, BLOGs for Everyone!  Search engine optimization became more organic as content provided by the community grew and search engines evolved.  Today, the elements of design and marketing are obviously essential components.  Technical internet expertise is required to keep up with quickly moving, influential search engines.  In addition, community involvement has blossomed into a mixture of social media.  Mobile web devices, local search and multinational internet presence demand focus to be divided and narrowed to human behavior at a single location.  With all this in mind, it starts with the marketing end goal.

GLiD has long been a solo act.  Since 1997, growth transformed Greg Lee I.D. through industrial design, identity, intelligent design, …and now the expansion involving collaboration with others behind the scenes coupled with intense SEO research and development pushes GLiD forward into Blend.  GLiD SEO and design services are now Blend SEO.

Google Office in Atlanta

Google invited 150 search marketing professionals along with Bing, Yahoo, Razorfish and 360i into the Atlanta Google office for a mobile search marketing event.  Each of the major search engines sat side by side along with Razorfish to speak on upcoming trends in mobile search and to answer our questions from search engine optimization consultants, internet marketing companies, web designers, creative agencies and any company providing SEM and SEO services among the 150 first people to make it through the door in Atlanta.

I was one of those 150 people.

The event was simulcast from Google Atlanta to offices in New York and Boston.  Limited audiences were invited to attend the event in New York and Boston.  A live feed from each office was projected on the wall in the Atlanta office alongside the speaker presentation screen.  The speakers responded to questions from all three locations.

The mobile search marketing speaker panel consisted of:

• Bing: Director of Bing Mobile Product Management – Andy Chu
• Yahoo: Senior Director, Mobile Sales Strategies – Paul Cushman
• Google: Senior Account Executive (Mobile Ads Team) – Elliott Nix
• Razorfish: VP of Mobile – Paul Gelb

I showed up a little early to make sure I had plenty of time to explore the Google office.  The office in Atlanta is a satellite office for Google, and as you might imagine looks like a small version of the California office descriptions, decorated with big red, yellow, green and blue circles in the carpet, carved into the walls, in the ceiling and repeated playfully throughout the decor.

After networking for about an hour with other SEM and SEO agency, marketing and designer SEMPO Atlanta members we settled down for the presentations.  After introductions by various sponsors and SEMPO officials we got to the speaker presentations.  Razorfish went first, followed by Yahoo, Bing, then Google.

Whether intended or not, the reoccurring theme behind was how human behavior drives mobile search. Here’s a synopsis of their presentations.

Paul Gelb, Vice President of Mobile for Razorfish opened with entertaining examples of mobile search niches based on available search apps.  Search apps are catered to every behavior: shopping, finding restaurants, finding directions and even finding public restrooms (complete with user reviews and ratings on cleanliness), one of which provided by Charmin, the toilet paper brand. Paul Gelb relates that particular search apps are used based on human behaviors.

Yahoo Mobile Search Presenter

Next Paul Cushman, Senior Director of Mobile Sales Strategies for Yahoo presented.  Paul presented some fresh demographic information from Yahoo and insights on how to predict mobile search trends.

• The overall age is a younger demographic engaged in mobile search.
• The average number of keywords in a mobile query is shorter than on desktop.
• Day parting is shifted as mobile search volume starts earlier in the day and lasts longer into the night.
• iPads and entertainment related search increased as people search on iPads during TV watching

Paul Cushman presented a study of search volume during 2010 Academy Awards.  TV commercial breaks were tracked against mobile web user traffic.  Results show tendencies of “co-browsing”: spikes in mobile search traffic during commercial breaks.

An audience member asked how to persuade mobile paid search programs to prospects who are still new to the idea of mobile search.   Paul pointed out how search behaviors for mobile, unlike desktop, follow common sense.  In other words, think about how you search on your phone and the trends pretty much match.

• People search while in the bathroom, instead of using a magazine.
• People grab their phone before getting out of bed and search.
• People search products to read reviews while at store locations before making buying decisions.

These search trends are pretty easy to explain to customers, however it is new and if someone is not ready to shift funds into a new platform, than its probably not right for them yet.

Bing Mobile Search Presenter

Andy Chu, Director of Bing Mobile Product Management spoke next.  Andy provided data and case studies illustrating further opportunities in mobile search marketing.  Andy through out a few user statistics, skipping over those covered by Paul Cushman’s Yahoo presentation.  He did however mention the 18-20 year old demographic is growing fastest, up 65%.

Andy explores two types of search activity: task centric and local centric.

Task Centric Search:
Bing, a Microsoft brand maintains its market differentiators for search as visually organized, following task centric needs.  Task centric search sessions may last an hour.

Local Centric Search:
Local centric searches are geographic related and usually are infotainment related – learn about restaurants or movies in order to make a decision and find a location.

• It takes 21 steps to choose a restaurant
• Mobile searches have 1.5 times more typos than desktop
• 60% of adults rate alternate input as lead enabling experiences
• 70% of tasks are completed within 1 hour

Bing studies on money saving tasks indicate:

• 56% iPhone users compare prices
• 5.3% consumers reddem mobile coupons
• 39% of businesses intend to use mobile coupons

Bing opinion on search apps verses browsers:

Distribution of apps is a challenge.  Regardless of the platform, users are provided hundreds of apps to scroll through.  Most app descriptions lack meaningful content (hello, optimize your apps anyone?). Therefore the apps are not effectively searchable.

Question from the audience:

What are the values of a mobile site verses desktop site?  Do you really need a mobile site?

Answer from Andy Chu of Bing:

Yes. Mobile sites have more interaction and click through.

Google Mobile Search Presenter

Elliot Nix, Senior Account Executive  of Google’s Mobile Ads Team presented last.

• 35% of Android search is via voice
• A study in Japan showed a mobile device is always within 3 feet
• Mobile search occurs in the bathroom
• 1 in 5 adults check their mobile device before leaving bed in the morning
• 79% of retailers do not have a mobile site
• Google Analytics can track mobile app activity after the app is downloaded

The process for a mobile search strategy

1. Create a mobile site
2. Think mobile
3. Be discovered
4. Track (mobile independently)
5. Iterate

Audience Question: Does a slate or iPad device render desktop websites or is a 3rd version required after mobile?

Panel Answer: Most websites render fine on iPad, however flash is a problem.

Audience Question: How does +1 (plus one) affect search results?

Google Answer: +1 is a personal consumer tool, so it may affect organic search for that individual searching while logged into the account where +1 was used.

The original presentation can be found here:

• Paul Cushman, Yahoo:
  http://www.slideshare.net/sempoatlanta/sempo-mobile-yahoo
• Andy Chu, Bing:
  http://www.slideshare.net/sempoatlanta/sempo-mobile-bing
• Paul Gelb: Razorfish:
  http://www.slideshare.net/sempoatlanta/sempo-mobile-razorfish
• Google’s presentation is not available online, but they have provided the link below.
  http://www.google.com/events/thinkmobile2011/livestream.html

Links courtesy of Benjamin Rudolf, President SEMPO Atlanta.