This week, we got an update from Duane Forrester. Apparently, mister Forrester is the Bing equivalent of Google’s Matt Cutts. He’s the director of Webmaster Tools instead of Webspam, and his name isn’t as catchy, but they share the spokesman role for their respective search engines. Duane isn’t as active as Matt, but he’s been doing more and more lately. His latest and greatest contribution is a list of 25 ranking factors that either positively or negatively affect your position in search. Let’s check out his list and see how different it is from the traditional Google advice.
So, without further ado, here is the list of things you SHOULD do:
15 things you should pay attention to
- Title tags
- Meta Descriptions
- Clean URLs
- Images and Alt descriptions (also called alt tags)
- H1 tags
- Rel=Canonical
- Robots.txt
- Sitemaps
- Social sharing options
- Unique content
- Depth of content
- Matching content type to visitor expectations (text, images, video, etc.)
- Usability Page load times (to a certain point – faster is great, but not at the expense of usability and usefulness)
- Crawlability (AKA discoverability, so can we actually get to all your content)
- News – if you are actually a new site, submit for inclusion
We have written about all of these issues at one time or another. Rather than repeat myself ad nauseum, I’ve linked each point to the appropriate blog post. the one’s that aren’t linked are pretty straightforward. This way, anything you are unclear on, you can click though and read an entire article dedicate to helping solve that issue.
Now, for the other 10 items, the ones that you SHOULDN’T do:
- Meta Keywords (fill them in if you like, keep it short and relevant, but not a big ranking factor)
- Duplicate URLs
- Overly long URLs (no set number, but you’ve all seen these)
- Cloaking (comes down to your intent, but risky business for sure)
- Link buying
- Selling links
- Link and like farms
- Three way links
- Content duplication content
- Auto following in social media
If you want to know how to deal with these toxic techniques, I suggest you check out our eBook, “10 Toxic SEO Techniques.” It has the reasoning about why all of these factors are bad, and how you can fix them for your site.
Overall a solid outing from Bing’s Duane Forrester. Hopefully he’ll start releasing advice and tips as fast as Google does and give all of us marketing writers more grist for the mill.