Whiteboard Takeover - Branded SEO for Page 1 Domination

Posted: 21 Oct 2011 03:43 AM PDT

Posted by Koozai

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

The Koozai team are taking over the SEOmoz Whiteboard today with Mike Essex and Samantha Stratton presenting on effective techniques for controlling branded term searches. So if you want to stop negative press, counterfeit goods and bad reviews appearing for your product or brand name searches we will show you how. So for more sales with Page One Domination, watch on:

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Today's video is brought to you by the Koozai team, and we're taking over the SEOmoz whiteboard to show you how to make more money for brand term searches. Now, we're calling this presentation Page One Domination because that's effectively what it is.

You want to dominate your brand when people search for it online in order to make more sales. You don't want people to see negative reviews, bad comments like, "I hate this product." You don't want to see affiliates on there taking money or a cut off your sales, and you don't want to see counterfeit goods on there taking money away and misleading your customers.

Bad PR, as well, if that's on there for your brand term search, you're going to damage customers' perception of your brand.

Now typical SEO, we will optimise for short tail and long tail keywords to get people to our website initially, which works really well. But the problem is that if they've never heard of your website before, they're going to go back and research you by putting your brand in the search engine.

What they see at that stage is a little bit out of your hands, or at least it's thought to be. But what we've seen is that by having strong profiles registered on other properties that are optimised for your brand terms, you can inject extra content into here to push these negative entries down.

In this video, we're going to show you how to do that and how the top brands in the world do it as well. What we've done is research the top hundred companies to see how they have positive page ones. We've drawn up a list of ten different strategies that you can use that I'm going to go through now in order.

At the bottom we've got videos. Now these are really at the bottom of the list because they're used less frequently, not necessarily because they aren't as good as what is to come next. There is definitely a time investment here, but videos are fantastic for when the search engines want to show multimedia content and results.

When people search for your brand, Google doesn't just want to show them text links. In fact, for any search now Google wants to show a nice mixture of content. So if you can have a video entry in here, it will make your brand look more interesting for the people searching for you, and it's better content for the search engines to show. Videos are absolutely worth doing, and it doesn't just have to be a boring corporate advert. You can also show people using your product to help demonstrate the effectiveness of it, or you can have fun videos as well, educational videos about what you do or that help your industry niche.

Videos are the first step. Then we've got industry profiles. Industry directories would be a great example of this or local directories as well for people searching in your local area. Registering them as well allows you to have a nice bit of corporate information about your brand that you control as well. So they're nice, safe profiles that brand well.

Then we've got voucher websites. Now people always want a bargain. It doesn't matter what the product is or how cheap it is or how expensive it is, if I can find a website that will save me money, I'm always going to search for brand name plus vouchers in the search results. What you want to do is make sure that it's your website that appears for that type of search. If you register your brand name plus the word vouchers, that's a good way to be there every time. Also, you can give vouchers away to other voucher websites that are out there in the industry. So see where your competitors have got them or just see extra voucher websites that rank well for the term "vouchers."

If you don't feel that you want to give people any money off your product, the voucher could literally just be free postage and packaging or a 30-day trial. Something that you probably offer already could just be repackaged as a voucher.

Then we've got niche websites. These are things like bloggers talking about your product. Your typical blogger engagement here is to go out and find the bloggers who are talking about people and things in your niche, then give them your product to review. Give them your information about your product as well so they can post it on their sites. Keep them informed in what you're doing, and the more times they reference your brand, the more chance they've got of appearing in this set of results for your products.

Next up we've got social profiles. We've got Twitter, we've got Facebook and there's LinkedIn. I've grouped them all together here because it seems to be a little bit random what Google will show. The nice thing about social profiles is you control the content. Also, if people search for your brand and they see a social profile with a company that's engaging with their customers and it's got a lot of fans, that helps build trust in the research stage and will help them come back to your website to make that all important sale.

Then we've got our customers. We mentioned earlier that customers can actually be a bad thing. Customers can write bad things about you and they can damage your brand. They can also write good things about you as well. They're the type of entries that we want to seek out. We want to search for our brand name, find people who are saying nice things about us, and then optimise those profiles so they rank higher, and that's what Sam is going to show you in the next step of this video.

Number four, we've got financial information. This is something I rarely see companies doing, but which is really, really effective, which is why it's so high. If you're a limited company or you've been trading for a while you've already got publicly available financial information, so just provide it to the likes of The Financial Times and other financial websites to track things like share prices and company profits. It'll rank well, and also if your company is performing well, that will help add extra customer confidence when they search for you.

News is another one which can be bad for you, but which can be good as well. One thing I always recommend is to always have a press release in reserve that is positive. Write up a press release that isn't time- specific, that could go out any time of year or maybe even in a years' time. Then if someone publishes a bad piece of news about you, you just submit your good piece of news through PR services. It gets picked up over the Internet, and then because it's fresher than the other news stories, a lot of the time it will outrank them straightaway and you can push that bad news down before it's even been read.

Number two, we've got Wikipedia. If you search for most one-word, two-word generic phrases, a Wikipedia page is what will appear. This is the same concept. It's a very generic term even though it's a brand name. So Wikipedia entries appear almost all the time when you search for big brands. They are hard to get, but it's really worth trying to get one, asking people to create one for you, adding citations, maybe even doing things for charity so your company seems a bit more worthwhile to appear on Wikipedia will help. Fundamentally, it's the second most important step on here. So try, try, try to get a Wikipedia page whenever you can.

The number one tip, register more domains. I really can't emphasise the importance of this one. We've seen exact-matched domains rank really well for generic terms, and they also rank really well for brand. Why do you think your brand website appears and ranks so well? It's because of the exact match relevance of the term. So buy extra domains with your brand name in there and a little bit of extra information. We talked earlier about brand name vouchers. That would be a fantastic example of something to register and put here. But you could also just take a section off your website, put it on another domain, and just link to it from your main website. That's got a very high chance, the number one chance in fact, of ranking on here for your brand name searches. Whatever you do don't copy content off your website. Either pull content and paste it over here or write entirely new content, but don't have two identical sections, because you could get your main website penalised, which really isn't what we're trying to do.

These are the steps that I recommend you take. Register these profiles, and the next step that we need to do is to optimise them so that they start to appear in the SERPs, because this isn't enough in isolation. What I'm going to do now is hand you over to Samantha Stratton, who has been instrumental in a lot of these projects here at Koozai, and she'll run you through just that.

Samantha Stratton

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Thanks for the introduction Mike. What I want to talk to you about now is what you can do to gain domination for your branded searches so that if your potential customers or clients or suppliers are doing a bit of research about your brand, they're going to come across all these nice, positive things for you.

There are six points to gaining domination. I'm going to talk through the first four points here, and then I'm going to move over to this part of the whiteboard where I'm going to show you exactly what you need to be doing to gain that domination.

First up is research. This is probably one of the most important stages of this process. You need to start researching your branded searches as well as your, say two, three, four competitors that you want to look at. By doing this you're going to be looking at pages one to three of Google, so putting in your brand and then also doing exactly the same thing for your competition, and start making a list of all of those positive mentions that you've already got and also do exactly the same thing for your competitors.

What you'll end up with is a spreadsheet of URLs that you're seeing already ranked for your branded searches and those that your competitors are also ranking for. From this, your profiles that you've uncovered that are positive, you need to go through all of them and update them with unique, compelling content, talking about your brands, talking about what your brand offers as a company. You may even have mentions of all your employees, anything that is going to make that profile credible and more authoritative to highlight that as being something associated to your brand.

You can include things like images, whether it's your company logo, images of your employees, shopfronts, services, any of the products that you own, any sort of events that you do with your company, any kind of images that you can get to give that page more authority, add those on there. You want to include a URL. So again, that's going to help you with your main SEO for your main site because you've got all these links coming back from various profiles into your main domain. But it's also going to allow anybody that finds these profiles, whether it's your potential customers or the search engines, it gives them another opportunity of a quick route back into your main domain.

Finally, you want to go back to your competitor research and register any profiles that you haven't already got. This is where you're going to go through all your competitor listings and look at the ones you don't have, register them, and update them in the same way that you've done with your other profiles& before.

Thirdly, Mike talked earlier about the importance of domains and how well they can rank. They're the top thing in all of the items that we've researched. So if you can get your hands on an additional domain, an exact match domain, these can really help you rank. Whether it's something like 'brand'jobs.com or 'brand'careers.com or 'brand'store.com, any type of permutation of your brand plus an additional domain there can help rank for your brand. The importance here is do not copy what you've done on your main site. They need to be standalone sites with unique content throughout them. Otherwise this is not going to work.

Fourth on the list is you need to start creating unique content that you can use later on in the process to start link building through to these various profiles. You want to start writing articles. You want to start writing hubs lenses. If there are any press releases, any news is good news, whether you've got a new employee that started, any promotions, a new store opening. Any news that you can write about and you're happy to get out there in the public domain, get press releases written so that you've got stuff there ready to publish out on the Internet and build up these profiles.

Now I want to talk to you about link building. What we now need to do if we move over to this area of the board is look at building up the authority of all of these different profiles that we've registered and updated. Back up here, we went out and we registered all of the different profiles and updated our existing ones.

Now what we want to do is build the authority around them. We're going to use the content that we've written at stage four to go and build up these profiles. First take Wikipedia. So you've managed to get a Wikipedia page for your site. You might want to link to that from a press release that you've written, because obviously Wikipedia is a really good source of information and it's a very authoritative domain that's going to be talking about your own website.

You might also have a hub page that's pointing through to here. The third thing you might want to do is use some of your social profiles. So you might have your Facebook page linking through to your Wikipedia page. So here we're using content and we're also using social to boost your Wikipedia profile.

Now down here, your domain, if you've been able to secure a domain that's relevant and appropriate for your brand, you might link that from your press releases. You could have an article coming into that. You may also have directories. There are so many people out there that think oh, directories, boring, not very good, they're not going to work. But we have done a number of projects where we've only used directories to gain page one domination for a brand.

Over here you've got your different social platforms. There are over 300 social platforms available. Any of those that you can get out there and register, you've got all these profiles then that have got the potential of getting onto page one for your brand. The beauty of social is that it's not uncommon to use social to link to social.

Say this is your YouTube page that you've created for your brand. You can link to that from your Facebook page. You might also link to it from your Twitter account and any other social profiles that you've got. Again, you might also use your articles to drive links into here. You might even talk about using deep link directories in this instance.

Here you've got your press releases. You might want to link to your press release from your own website. You've got some great news out there. So linking to that from your own site, as an authoritative site already, that can then drive additional links into your press release. Again, here you might have an article that you want to drive into it, and you might see it fit to link it from your Twitter account.

Essentially, what we're doing here is rather than just focusing on SEO-ing to your main site, you're going to be SEO-ing your various other profiles that you've registered and all that nice content that you've got, and you're going to be link building to all of them and using all these different methods that we've spoken about here.

Coming back over to point six, this is the final point, and this is by far the most important point if you're going to take anything away from this presentation here. You want to be talking about tracking. There is no point starting a project like this if you're not going to have the time or the resource to actually track it.

Creating spreadsheets like we have at the start here at the research stage, you've got a list of all your profiles there. Then you can start to register and track what you're actually driving links into for each of the profiles. That's point number one. At the start of the project, the first thing that you should be doing is taking screen shots of pages one to three for your branded searches. Doing this on a weekly basis will allow you to benchmark against what you started off with, so seeing which profiles are moving quickly. Looking at this on a month-by-month basis you can then compare starting point to month one. If you do see certain profiles moving up the rankings a lot faster than others, these are the ones that you want to focus your priority on first because you're seeing the movement there and you know that the search engines are receptive to those profiles.

Then, coming back, once you start seeing movement in those ones, you then start to go back over the profiles that you haven't seen as much movement in and start link building a bit more to those. Is there any way you can add some more content? Start then focusing on those profiles that you haven't seen the movement in.

This is an ongoing sort of project here. You can't get to the end of month four and think, oh, done, I've got the whole page in page one domination because moving on from there other people can start to creep into that marketplace as well. Constantly looking at new ways of creating new profiles, creating unique content, and just getting the mentions out there for your brand is going to overall help you gain domination for your branded searches.

If you do need any more information, please visit our website, which is Koozai.com, and thank you very much for your time.

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Pump Up The Bing - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 02:04 PM PDT

Posted by caseyhen

This week Rand is joined by Duane Forrester of Bing to talk about all things Bing. Rand and Duane will be talking about the shut down of Yahoo Site Explorer, the early stages of social search, the return of the meta keyword tag as a spam signal, and some new features in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Speaking of Bing, there are a few great posts that came out this week talking about Bing. First, Slingshot SEO released a study on Google & Bing click-through rates which revealed some interesting information and is worth a read. Second, Yahoo announced that they have completed the algorithmic transition to Bing in all global markets.

Enjoy and of course we look forward to hearing from you in the comments!

Video Transcription

Rand: Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm joined by my friend from Bing, Duane Forester. Duane, thank you for coming.

Duane: Always a pleasure and thanks guys for your time. We'll try to use it wisely.

Rand: We'll see about that. I've been known to spin all sorts of things. So, Duane, thrilled to have you back.

Duane: Thank you.

Rand: Thrilled to be talking about Bing. Some exciting news coming out of Bing. The first thing we're coving on our list, Bing now bigger than Italy?

Duane: Yes, bigger than Italy. Bigger than Italy.

Rand: Describe this for me. Bing, obviously, has way, way more users than 59 million, but you're talking about the pure ecosystem of Bing being of this particular size.

Duane: Yeah. So, the actual ecosystem within Bing, the Yahoo and Bing ecosystem, essentially, we serve about 59 million people, 57 million, somewhere in that range of people. Now, what's important about these people is not that they comprise a group that is larger than Italy. That's kind of nice. Right? And it looks really good. But the reality is that these almost 60 million people only interact with the Bing ecosystem. They do not interact with any other search ecosystem.

Rand: Interesting. So this is more of the exclusive. These are the Bing exclusive people.

Duane: Exactly. Now, I'll through a couple more stats out there for you. 4% higher spend rate than other search engines. 23% more likely to make an online purchase.

Rand: Okay. We've seen those stats previously.

Duane: Exactly. So when you actually look at the value of those users, those 59 million people of that ecosystem, that has a net positive effect for a lot of businesses. So it really is something folks need to pay attention to. I mean, the search engine, we're 30% plus market share now.

Rand: Yeah.

Duane: I mean, I still meet people every day that are like, "Oh, well, really? I didn't know." I'm like, "You're doing your business a disservice. You have to pay attention."

Rand: So what we should say to SEOs is, go tell all your competitors not to use Bing, so that you can use it and take advantage of the great customer base that they've got.

Duane: And the higher conversion rates. Who doesn't want more money? I mean really? Who's got your back? Bing's got your back.

Rand: And speaking of Bing having your back, Bing Webmaster Tools has some cool new stuff.

Duane: Yes.

Rand: You guys just completed this email alert integration over the last few months.

Duane: We do. We have, right now, some integrated email alerts coming out for malware alerts. So, if we hit your website and find out that there's a problem, the net effect for the website is we block that in the search results and we alert the searcher that there's a problem there. They shouldn't go there, obviously. If it's an overt problem, we remove it completely from the index, so that somebody won't get hurt by going to the website. We also alert you in the Webmaster Tools. And, more importantly, now we're starting to send out email alerts to you. So you may not come into the tools today, but we'll get you an email alerting you that today we found a problem. Now that, that technology we're using is actually going to expand, and we're going to include other types of alerts. So, if there's a particular data point that you're looking at or information that we think is important to you -crawler went to an area, it's blocked, we can't get in, we think there's something valuable - maybe we'll send you an email and tell you, "Hey, open that up for us."

Rand: You can't call your own product database anymore. Interesting

Duane: Exactly. Exactly. So, if there are things that you guys, data that you see inside Bing Webmaster Tools, and you think is really highly valuable and you want to get an update on it, get a hold of me. Okay? Ping us. Talk to us here through SEOmoz. Hit me up.

Rand: @DuaneForester.

Duane: @DuaneForester on Twitter. I am a real person. I'm only a bot half the time. The rest of the time it's me. I swear. And get that conversation going. Let us know what matters.

Rand: Cool. And you guys have been trying to improve Webmaster Tools, as well, through some survey feedback.

Duane: Absolutely.

Rand: What are the early results from that? What are we going to see?

Duane: I'm really impressed with it. First off, I want to say a thank you to everyone who took the time and was involved with the webmaster survey. I know that some of you guys watching out there, they will have been involved with this, and they would have given us our feedback. Thank you so much. I'm in the middle of going through it all right now. Right? So, I went through about almost 600 individual suggestions yesterday, of people saying, "I want this tool. You need to do this. This feature needs a better UX on it." These kinds of things. And we're seeing everything, a broad range, from people saying, "We want an organic keyword research tool," right down to some confusing things like people asking for a "SERP view tool," which I'm not entirely sure how to interpret that. So, if you sent that in, ring-a-ding-ding, because I need a little more info.

But, yeah. So, we're digging down on that. This week I'm pulling together the deck at work that actually informs our engineering team what we need to invest in. We go through triaging. We get to a stage where we do some cutting on it, so that we can actually fit it into the amount of work time we have available. Probably in the next two months or so we'll hit the green light stage. Then after that, it's build, build, build, and roll out new features.

Rand: I really appreciate this about Bing, about what you guys are doing, that you not only take the time to collect feedback, but then you have a process. You'll tell us what that process is, and here's how the process goes. And then we'll get features out of Bing.

Duane: Absolutely.

Rand: Some of the crawling stuff and the linked data stuff that we requested, now it's in there. Some of the other stuff is out.

Duane: Exactly.

Rand: UX is better.

Duane: Yup.

Rand: It's very nice.

Duane: This is kind of one of the benefits of having an SEO inside helping with this. I kind of know how to interpret what folks are looking for, but I'm only one mind. So we need this survey data to help me understand what's important now to businesses who are online, what they need. In fact, we're going to be running this survey again in another six months. To get included in it, open up a Bing Webmaster Tools account. That live ID you have, we capture those, and that's the email list that we send out to.

Rand: Very cool.

Duane: You get the benefit of the tools, and you're also included automatically.

Rand: That's great. A bunch of reasons to sign up for that.

Duane: Yes.

Rand: So one of the things that I also appreciate about you guys is right now Google, in fact, this morning announced this change, so we're filming this a little earlier. But basically, right now, if I go to the Google search box, which I'm drawing in red for some reason . . .

Duane: Primary color.

Rand: . . . and type in a keyword like "Duane from Bing," and I want to find you. I'm looking maybe for your Twitter account. If this goes to your personal website and I am logged into my account, so it will say RandFish@gmail logged in, which I actually don't check that account, so don't email me there. Rand@SEOmoz. But, if I'm logged into this account, Google will stop this keyword data from passing any information through the referral string, meaning that Google Analytics, Webtrends, whatever you're using, AW Stats, it doesn't matter the service you're using or your log files, you will not be able to capture the information that's being sent, that's passing in the search referrer's string. Is Bing also making this change?

Duane: No.

Rand: No.

Duane: That's not on our radar at the moment.

Rand: Bless you, sir. Bless you all.

Duane: I'll be honest. I was surprised as everybody else when I heard about this. I was like, not really what I want, but I'm sure there's a good reason. I'm certain there is.

Rand: I mean there's the top line reason given by Google, which I think is the privacy, user privacy is to get more personalization. But I think you guys do a great job with privacy and still pass this information.

Duane: We're very keen on privacy. Absolutely.

Rand: Certainly this hasn't come up as a problem in the past. I think the other, of course, there are folks on the Twitter suggesting that this is a change that could help boost AdWords' revenue, because people will be unable to see the organic search traffic and think. The only way that you can get this data is if someone clicks on the "Search ads."

Duane: Paid search ads.

Rand: Right. The paid ads on the right or on the top. Even if I'm logged in, the paid search ads will still pass through.

Duane: Shows up in AdWords and there are your metrics for it.

Rand: Yeah. That's sad.

Duane: I have no comment other than to say we're status quo right now. Bing's in here.

Rand: Cool. Very cool. We appreciate that. Speaking of things that are not going to be status quo, we saw the announcements publicly that Yahoo Site Explorer is formally going away.

Duane: Yes, it is.

Rand: Do we have any more news on when exactly that's happening?

Duane: We don't have a definitive deadline on it. But what people should be taking from this is, if this is the sort of thing that you have a high reliance on, now's the time to start finding another data source. Now, part of that data source will come through Webmaster Tools. We do consume part of the fee that comes directly from the Yahoo Site Explorer team, and the link data that we show inside Webmaster Tools is partially fueled by that data.

Rand: Gotcha. So you're taking essentially Bing data and Yahoo index data, and then sort of combining those, and that's what I see in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Duane: Exactly. Now, it's not a complete replacement. All right? I'm not going to lie to you guys. It is not a complete replacement. A big part of the reasons it's not a complete replacement is we believe in the one on one partnership that we have with webmasters, which essentially precludes us from sharing competitive data. So, I will tell you about what I have about your website, and you can have hundreds of websites and I'll tell you about all of those individually through the tool set. But I won't give you the facility to simply enter another domain of your choosing and get similar data back.

Rand: So does this mean that even after Yahoo Site Explorer's demise, we should not plan on being able to go to Bing, either Webmaster Tools or another tool, and seeing competitive link data from you?

Duane: Immediately, yes, but you guys get a vote in this. These surveys, contacting me, talking to me at the conferences, all of that data goes to inform how we build out tools. We may run into a wall, and I'm going to include myself with you guys in wanting that kind of data. Right? I run my own websites. I know what the value of this stuff is. But if we actually have a large enough voice, then I can take that, put my Bing hat back on, walk down the hall and go, "Look guys. Here's why it matters. It is important. Here's how people are using it. This is what it allows them to do. So, how do we get them their competitive intelligence without giving away the farm, or creating other problems?" We could hit a wall, and the answer is it's simply not possible.

Rand: Okay.

Duane: Or we may end up with some kind of split view that allows competitive information. So, for example, we feel these websites are related to you in some way, same topic, they rank near you, these kinds of things. We won't tell you the domains, but we will tell you the links that are pointing at them.

Rand: Oh, interesting. That would be very useful. So something like, "Here's links that point to sites like yours."

Duane: Right. Exactly. And, ultimately, that's the type of competitive stuff that you're kind of after.

Rand: Yeah, that would be very interesting to see, even anonymous. So let's move on to this other topic. You and I were exchanging some information about how you believe it's still very early in this transition from social data making its way into organic search and into SEO, and how Bing is trying to provide all of the relevancy involved in collecting multiple data sources and putting them together, with none of the creepy.

Duane: Exactly.

Rand: I appreciate that. I like a good slogan as much as the next guy.

Duane: Yup. More relevancy, less creepy. This is a very real thing, because when you get into the social graph and pulling that information in, there's a lot of personalization that's happening. That's the whole reason for it. The story that I use, and this is a real story, I want new tires for my truck. I need the search engine to understand who I am in context of this search. So I have to be willing to explain more about myself, share who I am socially, what my interests are, what my hobbies are, so that the engine can go out and put together a view of who Duane is on the Internet to answer that question about the tires I want.

Rand: As opposed to just here are things your friends liked.

Duane: Right. Or here's an online web store that sells tires. Now go into their search functionality and go all over again and through it to find out what's in there. No, no, no. Get me out of that kludgy and get me to the point where I take out my phone and say, "Tires for my truck. You know who I am. You know the make and model of my truck. You have the statistics on the vehicle, so you know what came with it. You also have a history that explains Duane likes to tinker. He doesn't leave anything alone, which means I'm going to modify. I don't want the stock tire. I want a big, meaty, aggressive tire that can take myself and Rand to the top of Mount Rainier."

Rand: Whoa.

Duane: That's what I'm after.

Rand: I'm just going to draw this tire and try to illustrate how cool it's going to be.

Duane: It's got to be bigger.

Rand: See, look at those treads.

Duane: Right? That right there is the future of search.

Rand: That's just the top of your tire.

Duane: That's the top of my tire? On the top of Mount Rainier.

Rand: Oh, damn.

Duane: Right? And you and me sucking on oxygen bottles so we don't pass out.

Rand: Amazing.

Duane: So anyway, the point behind it is that we're not quite at that stage yet. Right? All of these pieces, I've left this footprint out there. They're not being connected yet.

Rand: I guess one of the things that webmasters want to know is, are we going to have to manually try and connect some of these things through formats like Schema.org?

Duane: Yes. This is a large part of the move where the Web will evolve from a collection of links to a collection of objects.

Rand: Yeah.

Duane: Right now the objects are black holes. Pictures, videos, a person, or an object, like our tire, that isn't adequately defined. So if Schema.org, rich snippets of any kind, those things get implemented, they describe the objects, now suddenly the search engine understands not just the context of me but the context of the object. Now it can start bringing back relevant results to me. And not just, okay Duane, here's an aggressive tire to meet your needs, but your friends, their feedback, the communities you are involved in, that extended friendship, those start to influence the search results.

Rand: So how much is Bing going to be doing things like adopting the rel="me", and the author profiles, and the sort of references to where I can say, "Hey, these are my profiles on the Web. So now go pull from these and learn more about me."

Duane: Again, we are so early stages. We're not really committed to those, per se. So if people want to know what we're committed to and invested in, Schema.org. That's where it all lives. That's what we adhere to right now.

Rand: You guys are on that right now. Okay.

Duane: Additions to that can happen at any time. If we feel that the rel="author" is going to make a substantial difference in relevancy to some degree, we're going to hop on board.

Rand: Okay.

Duane: Okay?

Rand: Cool.

Duane: There's no question about it. But it's, again, early and it hasn't been proven. Is it going to accomplish what it's intended to accomplish? Look back at sitemaps. Right? Sitemap's a great idea. Relevancy. Why is everybody a 0.9? Not everything is a 0.9. So these things evolve over time.

Rand: Sure. Another question I guess is, today, right now, Bing is pulling in a ton of data from Facebook. Should we be anticipating that other networks may make their way in there?

Duane: I think it would be fantastic. I have no official word on it. We, obviously, are very tightly aligned and happily aligned with Facebook. We get a lot of integrated data from them.

Rand: They're obviously the largest by a long shot.

Duane: Currently, yes. But, you know, at one time there was only Google, and now, 30% market share. Tada! So, it can happen, right? You get competitive forces in there and it makes a difference. So really what we want to be able to do is, we're asking ourselves, "Have we done enough with the data we have? Have we maximized this data in a way that really improves relevancy, improves it broadly, but also on a personalized level? Take out the creepy, leave the relevancy." That type of thing.

Rand: So let's go to our last thing. The Search Engine Land folks wrote a really interesting article where they cited some discussions with you, some sort of email back and forth, and a mention that you had had that, "Oh well, we don't completely ignore the meta keywords." And suddenly, oh my god, all hell breaks loose.

Duane: Yeah, it was an interesting day.

Rand: Then there was this sort of indication from you that, hey, putting more keywords of the things that you're trying to rank for into your meta keywords, that is not a good use. That's not going to help you. But if we see some signals, and maybe you can explain those signals, we might view pages in a different way. The meta keywords is one of many things that we might even look at.

Duane: Exactly. So meta keywords, in and of themselves, aren't going to suddenly boost your ranking. Let's get that clear right off the bat.

Rand: He just said that.

Duane: It's not like if I go and put words in there, and it's blank today, I will jump up in relevancy. Not going to happen. However, for people that are filling in their meta keywords, good for you. These are good things to do, and this is why they're good to do. If you're willing to take the time to get your meta keywords correct, you're paying a lot of attention to details. That is going to translate to everything you do, content creation, link building approaches, absolutely everything you do. Social will be picked up in the same way, because it's who you are.

Rand: So, you're saying this is correlation but not causation.

Duane: Right. Right. Now, let's say you're not filling in your meta keywords tag, and you're doing this for efficiency sake. You know there's no lift for it. You're not going to put the time into it. Again, not a problem. That is totally relevant. Just keep in mind though that there are services around the Internet that actually pull data from the meta keywords tags, that may take a cue from these things. So you want to be careful.

Rand: These are things like internal search.

Duane: Right. It could be internal search. I know that there are some contextual programs that will take a look at them. So you want to be careful and ask yourself, "I'm skipping this. Am I hurting any of my other services in any way by not giving that signal?"

Now let's talk about the big one. You go in and you think to yourself, wow, I'm relevant for everything, including Viagra. You know what? Seriously guys, it is an old topic. But we see this all the time, still, today. My core search guy came to me on Friday and gave me an example of keyword stuffing that was implemented on Thursday on a brand new website. So people out there still think this is a valid tactic. Right? It's not. Although, as Danny points out in the article on Search Engine Land, if you're a spammer, by all means, please, stuff that keyword tag for us.

Rand: Because we really want to know.

Duane: It just makes it so easy to know to take another look.

Rand: It's like putting on your black hat when you go out in public.

Duane: Totally. Right? Absolutely. If you're going to use the keyword tag, follow the best practices. Get it right.

Rand: Just to be clear, meta keywords is not the only place that you're going to be looking at spam signals.

Duane: No, absolutely not.

Rand: If you see that triggered in other places . . .

Duane: Absolutely. So you can get your meta keywords tag right and spam in other areas. We'll still find out about it. We'll still give you the boot.

Rand: Good to know. Duane, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming. I hope we'll have you back again.

Duane: Absolutely. Definitely.

Rand: Congratulations on the growth with Bing and on the growth of Webmaster Tools.

Duane: Thank you.

Rand: And thanks everyone for watching. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Duane: Thanks for your time guys.