On July 29 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced a deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced with Microsoft’s Bing technology. The deal is expected to be finalized sometime early next year.
What does this mean for your website and its SEO?
Bing now instantly has over 22% market share of search engine traffic. Therefore business owners who want to stay ahead in the game should optimize their websites for Bing as well as Google.
The good news is that Bing isn’t very different from Google – most good SEO practice is universal among all search engines. However, here are a few tips to give you extra points on Bing search results:
Domain Age
Bing gives precedence to older domain names. So if you are just starting out a business, it might be worth it to buy a pre-owned domain name.
Length of Content Text
The amount of words in your content matters to Bing more than it does to Google. You get points on Bing if your content is at least 300 words long. Also, Bing is able to scrape Flash content (Google ignores Flash), but they only do so if no other content is present. Therefore Flash designers might want to start putting more content into their Flash files rather than just fancy graphics and animations.
Keywords in URL
Bing gives a lot more weight to keywords in the URL than Google does. A study showed that Bing’s search results contained 15% more sites with the keyword in the URL than Google did. Therefore using tools like mod_rewrite for Apache will help your rankings for Bing more than it does for Google.
Page Titles
Some people claim that Bing places more emphasis on the title tag than Google does, while others have rebuked this claim. Whatever the case may be, the fact remains that title tags are one of the most important things to consider for good SEO. With a relevant and keyword rich title, both Google and Bing will be very happy… one may be happier than the other.
Today I noticed that my Alexander Ovechkin video has reached 274,000 hits – and that YouTube will no longer track hits in real time. Yay for me!
If you haven’t seen it yet, here is my Ovechkin montage, with clips and highlights from Ovechkin’s rookie season (2005-06). The background song is Bliss, by the British band Muse.
Many Windows users still don’t realize that you can rename all files in a folder in one shot. Even computer savvy people are renaming their digital pictures one by one after downloading them from their camera.
Renaming all files in one shot is simple:
press CTRL+A to select all files in the directory
right-click on the first file in the list, and click “Rename”
enter the new name for the file, and hit ENTER.
Now all your files have magically been renamed to the name you entered. Hopefully this little tip will save you hours of tedious work.
Have you ever typed in the wrong password? Did you ever try 3 or 4 times before getting it right? Did that frustrate you?
Usability guru Jakob Neilson is recommending that web designers stop using the password input box as it presents a common usability problem, without really increasing security.
More importantly, there’s usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in to a website. It’s just you, sitting all alone in your office, suffering reduced usability to protect against a non-issue.
Neilson’s argument is valid: password boxes do reduce usability. However, typing your password in clear text may present somewhat of a culture shock for most web users. I once typed my password in the “user id” field of Gmail’s login screen, and got worried for a moment, even though there was no one around. Even though passwords masks may not increase security, it represents security for many people.
Neilson suggests that the designer may add a “hide my password” checkbox option on the login screen for highly sensitive applications such as bank accounts. However, I think it would be more apt to add it to all login screens which show passwords in clear text – at least for now, and until we (web users) break the association of security and password masks.
A few clever designers have come up with semi-solutions to the password mask usability problem.
Chroma Hash by Matt Thompson allows you to determine if two password are the same (password and confirm password fields) by displaying a colored code beside each field.
Stefan Ullrich’s iPhone-like password input allows you to see a typed character for a split second before masking itself.
I was working with a client today whose site is hosted at easyhosting.com. We wanted to download all the files of the website, but could not find the ftp information anywhere on their web interface. Their online file manager only allowed us to download one file at a time. We called their help center and tried to explained the problem – but the guy on the other end of the line was a complete dunce! It took him 10 minutes to get our domain name right. We must have repeated it letter by letter 15 times. Then it took us like 20 minutes to explain the problem. The funniest part was when he asked us “are you sure your ftp is on?” Hello! YOU are hosting the site… it’s YOUR ftp we’re trying to connect to!
In the end, we asked to speak to his manager, who gave us the correct ftp info, and we were connected in no time.
