Duane Forrester is the director of search quality at Bing who provides guidance to webmasters through Bing Webmaster Tools. He has over 15 years experience in SEO, previously working at MSN and helping companies like Disney, GAP, and Walmart. In the document, he discusses that for SEO, quality content that answers user questions is most important to search engines. Other factors like social media influence, user experience, link building, and technical SEO can also help if done well and in a quality manner. He emphasizes investing in quality content and user experience over trying to "game the system" with SEO shortcuts.

2. @duaneforrester
Bing Webmaster Tools
Speaks at shows, runs community and blog,
provides guidance on WMTs
www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters
Does he have a clue?
15+ years as an inhouse SEO; ran seo at MSN;
has helped Disney, GAP, Walmart, GM +
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dforrester
And this helps me how?
Blogging since 2001; owns 150 domains;
runs his own websites
http://twitter.com/DuaneForrester
what does duane do at bing

3. Where does SEO fit in?
Content Social User Experience Link Building SEO

4. • Searchers seek content
• Not after “the best optimized site”
• They have a question, you supply the
answer
• We watch to see how people interact with
content
• This will always be #1 to us
• Wins - Quality, deep, authoritative, unique
• Loses – Duplicate, thin, low quality
There are no shortcuts – quality content requires investment

5. • Use “hooks” and track reactions
• Signal of topical authority
• Real-time – engines want fresh
content, fast
• Integrated social signals influence click
actions of searchers
• Social signals remain only a few of
thousands of signals for organic
ranking
Social = You influencing people who in turn influence us.

6. • Not sexy, but a wise investment
• Usability impresses visitors
• Invest in your platform and design
• Happy visitors are repeat visitors who share
with friends
• Usability is a dedicated field – you can’t bluff
your way through
I’d put money into UX before SEO, as it supports SEO

7. • Build links for traffic
• Don’t buy links
• Links will always have some value –
though maybe not what you think
• Don’t overlook internal link building
• If you nail Content, UX and Social, this
is covered
What would you do if links had no value in the algo?

8. • Still valuable
• Technical SEO can make a difference
• Foundational work – no doing it? Get
left behind
• Used in combination w/other tactics,
you can be successful
SEO is the process of improving your website for searchers and crawlers

9. More SEO
• Crawlability
– Xml sitemaps
– Navigational structure
– Rich media cautions
– Graceful degradation
– URL structure
– Robots.txt
• Site Structure
– Links
– URL structure and keyword usage
– Clean URLs – no extraneous parameters (sessions,
tracking, etc.)
– HTML & XML sitemaps
– Content hierarchy
– Global navigation – springs form hierarchy planning +
style of nav (breadcrumb, link lists, etc.)
– Rich media – don’t bury links in Javascript/flash
/silverlight/AJAX
• On-Page
– Head copy
• Titles – unique, relevant, 60 characters or so long
• Descriptions – unique, relevant, grammatically correct,
160 or fewer characters (Google shows up to 160
characters)
– Body Copy
• H1, H2 and other H tag usage
• ALT tag importance & usage
• Keyword usage within the content/text – see “Perfectly
Optimized Page” image
• Anchor text – using target keywords to support other
internal pages
• Content
– Build based on keyword research
– Down-level experience enhances discoverability
– Keep out of rich media and images
– 250 words per page or more
– Produce new content frequently
– Make it unique – don’t reuse content from other
sources
– Content management – using 301s to reclaim value
from retiring content/pages
– <LINK> canonical to help engines understand which
page should be indexed and have value attributed to it
– 404 error page management to help cleanse old pages
from search engine indexes
• Links
– Plan for incoming & outgoing link generation
– Internal & external link management
– Content selection – planning where to link to
– Link promotion via social spaces – direct traffic & seo
value
– Managing anchor text properly
– URL structure can help insert keywords where they are
needed
• Social
– Build your community
– Interact often
– Share useful content
– Be consistent and useful
– Grow facebook, twitter, etc.
Webmaster Guidelines: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a

10. & Beyond…
• Next generation of local
• Mobile everywhere
• New technologies
• New marketing opportunities
• Evolve to succeed