Architect Web Design

How I got to number 1 in Bing in 2 weeks

With Bing being the new search engine on the block I thought I would post some free SEO tips that helped me get to the top. Admittedly the keyword I am optimising for isn’t the most competitive in the world but hopefully this example will give a better insight into what Bing is looking for. As you can see below the search term I was using was ‘Celazole’.

4th in Bing

On 26th August I was 4th in Bing. I needed to make up 3 search engine positions and I was competing with the manufacturer of the product. So here are the SEO changes I made to the page:

• I know that Bing has a higher weighting for CAPITAL LETTERS than other search engines, this is already integrated into the style of the page so wasn’t hard to put the keyword in capital a couple of time (no more than a couple!)
• As this is quite an old website, the coding used is tables and cells and is really bad… I worked my way through it removing anything unnecessary, and correcting a couple of errors. My changes made about 2/3KB worth of difference in the file size. The page still has errors on it but it’s doing well at the minute.
• I finally I changed a few of the links coming into this page – found on other pages within the same site. Focussing on ‘Celazole’ as the keyword
• And then I waited! Not too many changes but search engines don’t like too many changes too fast.

As you can see there was no link building, no scrutinising of the keyword density – just plain old improvement of the page and knowing what Bing was looking for.

Number 1 in Bing

Number 1 in Bing! Now I just have to do that for every page of the website – and some will not be as easy as this!

wayne Bing, SEO Tips free seo tips, keyword, meta tags, optimise, search engines, seo

Wordpress Meta Tags and a Robots.txt file

Continuing on from my previous post Wordpress SEO Part 1 here is what you need to do to make sure Search engine robots find what they are looking for.

Meta Tags in Wordpress

When Wordpress was first released, you had to be quite technical to SEO it. This was because no Meta content was added by Wordpress itself. If you wanted Meta Tags you had to manually code them in. While there are still some uses to that, now with Wordpress 2.8 it is much easier.

In Wordpress, go to Current Theme Options from here you will now be able to enter Meta Description and Meta Keywords. These two fields form the homepage Meta tags of your blog. Choose wisely, and focus on keywords that appear frequently on the page and in posts – not just terms you want to rank high for.

I’ll cover Meta Tags in more detail later, for now you will be able to give the search engines some general information about your blog by using these Wordpress Meta Tags.

Wordpress Robots.txt file

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content

Sitemap: http://architectwebdesign.co.uk/sitemap.xml

Above is the current Robots.txt file for Architect Web Design. This .txt file (Plain Text created using Notepad) is placed in the root folder of a domain and is a web standard telling search engine robots and spiders which pages they can/cannot look at and index.

So you can better understand my Robots.txt I will explain what each line means. Remember the ‘Disallow’ command means to skip this location:

User Agent: * = This command tells the robots to look at all the pages of your website

Disallow: /cgi-bin = The CGI bin of your web server usually contains scripts that your server runs in the background, no need for the search engines to look in here

Disallow: /wp-admin, /wp-includes, /wp-content = These folders make up Wordpress, but should not be indexed. The admin folder is excluded for obvious reasons but the other two folders need to be stopped from being indexed as if they are read by the search engines your ranking will drop due to duplicate content. Search engines hate duplicate content as they see this as spam – you could even disappear from search engines because of this!

And finally the last line of your Robots.txt file should be pointing to your XML sitemap. Haven’t got a XML sitemap? Don’t worry, I’ll cover that in a later post – the important thing to remember is to stop search engines indexing pages that they shouldn’t. This will keep your SEO good, your rankings high and make sure you aren’t labelled a spammer.

More on Setting up Wordpress for SEO next time including: Post titles and Post content.

wayne Wordpress SEO blog, free seo tips, meta tags, search engines, wordpress