They focused on 3 areas in the redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools to help you optimize your websites for Bing:

1. Crawl – to provide you with more information on crawl issues (redirects, exclusions, etc.)
2. Index  – browse the Bing index to verify which directories & pages have been indexed
3. Traffic –  ability to analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data

Bing Webmaster Tools is still not as robust as Google Webmaster Tools in the information it provides, but it is a step in the right direction. I look forward to additional features they have in the works in the coming months.

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“It’s going to take how long?” - A classic question when it comes to delivering SEO results. After all, everyone knows results today are far more valuable then results tomorrow. At times, SEO can be a business owner’s worst nightmare. Why? Because a good SEO will not promise results in a specific amount of time because there are too many variables. There are, however, several “tweaks” that can bring immediate results to your site if implemented properly. Below is the low-hanging fruit I always look to first.

#1 – Add Internal, Non-Navigational links In my opinion, too many SEO’s focus on obtaining external links while ignoring the low-hanging fruit on their own site. Google is craving informative, contextual links located within a paragraph of page content. Too many sites rely on only navigational links to inform search engines about their content. Contextual links, in contrast with a navigational link appearing on every single page, tells Google you’re linking to a relevant, specific piece of information. If your site has a blog or articles, make sure to sprinkle a few keyword rich links within their content.

#2 – Add a Keyword Phrase(s) to the Title Tag I cringe every time I stumble upon a site with only “Company Name, Inc.” in the title tag. For pages on your site that are already ranking well and have PageRank, adding an additional keyword to the title tag can yield first page ranking for that phrase instantly, assuming the title tag isn’t already too overloaded with keywords. Of course there’s other factors to be considered here, including whether or not your title tag will be readable in the SERPs with this additional phrase.

#3- Remove Keyword Phrase(s) from Title Tags On the other hand, sites with very little incoming link equity will benefit by removing extraneous keywords from an overloaded title tag, focusing only on the phrases that matter most. If your Title tag has 20 keywords in it, ask yourself how many are actually relevant to that page. Then ask yourself how many of these phrases are supported by the page itself, in other words they occur somewhere on the page besides the Title. If they are not supported elsewhere, remove them and create a different page.

#4 – Indented Listing If you already have a page ranking for an important keyword phrase, snagging a second, indented Google listing can effectively double your SERP real estate. How do you get an indented listing? Here’s a 3 step process that works for me.

#5 – Narrow your Focus on Broad Keywords Let’s suppose you’ve done your SEO well, and you’ve landed a first page result for “laptops bags.” You also sell leather laptop bags, and want to rank for this phrase as well. By simply sprinkling the word “leather” into your page content, meta description, and image alt tags, you can leverage your ranking for leather bags, and likely place yourself in a decent position, sometimes without needing the term in the title tag.

Strategical, long term SEO is more complicated than this post suggests. But fortunately, there are always “quick fixes” out there, like the 5 tips listed above. Let’s hear from you. If you had only 3 hours to SEO a website, what tactics would you use?

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Example:
You are going on vacation to a cold climate (let’s say the North Pole). You know you need to buy something to keep yourself warm, but you’re not sure exactly what options are out there because you live in a year round warm climate. So you do a search on the keyword phrase extreme cold weather coats. You end up at a website by clicking on a paid search ad that appeared when you typed in the phrase and notice that they have a section for cold climate coats and even list the temperatures they can withstand.  You think to yourself, wow this is great, now I have a better idea of what’s available and I kind of like Brand X Model 4567, but I am not going on the vacation for another 4 months so I am not going to purchase anything today because I don’t have the extra money. Forty-five days later you win $200 on a scratch-off ticket that you found and decide that you are ready to purchase a coat with your extra money, you do a search on Brand X Model 4567 since you knew the exact coat you wanted to buy now and end up back on the same website as before and purchase the coat.

The difficulty in measuring the value of these Upper Funnel Keywords is that they don’t produce single visit conversions -you can’t see the whole picture of entrance to conversion in your analytics data in a linear fashion.

For instance, a single visit conversion would show start to finish in one visit from entering your site to making the purchase. Here you easily have the whole picture from the PPC keyword that triggered the ad that they clicked on to enter your website and their entire path to the purchase.

With Upper Funnel Keywords, a typical scenario would be that the visitor arrives at your site from these keywords or phrases,  looks around, leaves, comes back another time reads more information, exits your site again, then finally comes back a 3^rd time and makes a purchase.

Most only know how to measure the keywords that produce single visit conversions and thus deem these Upper Funnel Keywords more or less valueless because their value isn’t easily seen in a typically known fashion. The ROI isn’t easily visible.

In the example given earlier, the keyword phrase you searched on first, extreme cold weather coats, was the Upper Funnel Keyword phrase. You didn’t purchase during that visit of your initial search, but you did eventually go back and purchase based on the information you learned during that first visit. Had another website come up with a different but possibly similar featured coat that you liked, you would have purchased from there and a different coat. So there was definite value in that first search as it gave you the information you needed to make a decision, but you just didn’t purchase then. Now imagine if you were only looking at single session conversions, you would only be able to confirm that Brand X Model 4567 was a valuable keyword because a sale was associated with it. But in reality, without having a presence in paid search for extreme cold weather coats a sale wouldn’t have been made – thus showing the importance of being able to look at multi-session conversions to contribute back value (and ROI) to the Upper Funnel Keywords.

Avinash Kaushik on his Occam’s Razor blog this week made a powerful and very instructionally clear post on how to measure the success of Upper Funnel Keywords and I suggest you read his post for the details on how to do so.

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Like clockwork as you do every Monday morning at 10am (after you third cup of coffee and a morning snack) you log into your analytics account to view how much organic traffic is being driven in to your eCommerce website. You’re extremely excited when you see that the number of visits from organic search is growing steadily from last week’s numbers, and the week before, and even the week before that.  Your hard work optimizing your pages for the SERPs is starting to see results and your boss is going to be thrilled.

But wait, although organic traffic is climbing up, up, and away, week over week, you cross-reference your sales data again and notice that you aren’t getting any more orders with all this new organic traffic that you have been receiving. How can this be? What could be going on?

Investigation Scenario Tip #1: What keywords are they arriving on?

It’s really important to make sure that you are driving the right search engine traffic to your website. Extract from your analytics account what keywords are driving this newly acquired search engine traffic that you are receiving. To oversimplify, if you’re selling toothpaste and your recent boost of traffic is from searches on arts and crafts paste, you’re driving more traffic, but it’s not the right traffic. 

Investigation Scenario Tip #2: What pages are they landing on?

If you notice that many of the keywords that are sending organic traffic in to your site are in fact relevant to what you are selling, then you must dig deeper into your analytics and see what pages visitors are landing on when they are searching on those keywords or phrases. Let’s use the toothpaste example again; you sell toothpaste and your visitors are searching on Google with the end goal of purchasing toothpaste.  You notice that they are landing on the page about how toothpaste is manufactured. A closer look and you notice that the bounce rate is high and reviewing your page there is no obvious way to know that you actually are selling toothpaste on that page.

In this situation you are getting the visitors that you want to sell to (those searching for a product that you do indeed sell), and they are searching for keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business – but you are not giving the visitor what they are looking for or a clear way to get to what they are looking for when they land on your page.

In Closing

If either of these two scenarios is happening to you then you will need to work on the optimization of your pages from both an SEO perspective of getting the right traffic, and getting the right traffic to the right pages and from a conversion perspective of keeping them in the continuity of continuing on for what they came in to potential purchase with the least amount of effort and friction.

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SeoQuake

SeoQuake is an very useful Free SEO toolbar for both Firefox and Internet Explorer that allows you to gather useful information about your (or your competitors) webpages and websites for SEO purposes.

 Some of the information that you can gather from SeoQuake besides setting your own parameters for custom information is:

• Google PR – Google PageRank of the current page you are on
• Google Index – Number of indexed pages in Google
• Google link – Number of external links pointing to the current page.
• Google cachedate – Date of current Google cache.
• Yahoo Index – Number of indexed pages in Yahoo
• Yahoo link – Number of external links pointing to the current page.
• Yahoo Linkdomain (LD) – Number of external links pointing to your domain

You can also gather this same type of information for Live/MSN as well.

Plus you’ll have access to other useful information to help you in optimization or competitive research such as:

• Keyword Density information
• Alexa Rank
• Del.icio.us, Digg, and Technorati links to the current page you are on
• IP Lookup
• Whois link
• Page Source Code
• Check robots.txt
• List of all internal links and external links to page

There are many more options and information available with SeoQuake and because you can set your own parameters you can easily add new aspects to this toolbar to customize it for the information that you need.

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