Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

If anyone still doubts that Microsoft is the second most popular search engine today, the Real November 2008 Search Market Share Report knocks that doubt into yesterday. Microsoft served an estimated 100 million search visitors in November and that’s just too big a market for SEOs to ignore.

But how do you capitalize on a market that is so well obscured by the myths and preconceived notions of the SEO community? The trick here is to understand that most SEOs wrongly believe that Google controls about 70% of the search market — so they tend to focus their efforts on Google and just assume that basic SEO works well enough for Microsoft and other search engines.

That’s where you have the advantage.

Through the years there have been numerous studies concerning search index overlap. Researchers have shown repeatedly that each of the major search engines miss large portions of the Web that the others index. The probability of two search engines indexing entirely the same data is extremely low.

So armed with that knowledge, here is how you optimize for Microsoft:

First, start your linking resource research on Microsoft. Be careful to understand that I’m talking about linking resources. This is not backlink research (which is a waste of time). All you’re concerned with here is finding the types of Web sites you can use to develop launch links in Microsoft’s index.

Secondly, develop content that appeals to Microsoft’s user base. If you are working with existing Web sites you can look at your raw server logs to see which queries people use to find your content from Microsoft (Google Analytics won’t reveal this to you — nor will any standard Web analytics software). Knowing which queries Microsoft search promotes your sites for helps you zoom in on where you met Microsoft’s criteria.

Thirdly, take advantage of Microsoft’s site search functions. As long as you get your content indexed in Microsoft, using their site search ensures you have a testbed in which to alter your optimization techniques to ensure Microsoft positions the best pages first. You can watch as changes to your pages are indexed and gauge how fast Microsoft works to integrate your content into their index.

Now you’re ready to set a dual-path optimization strategy into motion. That is, you’re going to develop content and links for two Web sites and watch how your optimization works with Microsoft. Why two? Because you need to test your conclusions and assumptions. Microsoft is going to crawl your new content on the basis of its own priorities.

If you’ve been seeing relatively little traffic from Microsoft search it’s not because they don’t refer people to Web sites, it’s because you haven’t been optimizing for Microsoft search. My personal network receives a lot of traffic from Live.com and search.msn.com because I made the conscious decision to optimize for Microsoft search two years ago when everyone else was laughing at Microsoft’s decision to launch live.com.

In today’s search world I can live without referrals from Google because I still get substantial traffic from other sources, including Microsoft and Yahoo!. If you cannot say the same thing it’s time for you stop paying attention to bogus search market share estimates and start optimizing for the real search market. Don’t fuss over who is laughing at Microsoft’s market share — they’re obviously not getting a very large piece of Microsoft’s 100 million search visitor pie, either.

Ok, I couldn’t resist. In the spirit of the season I’ve compiled a grouping of the most awesome Christmas movies of all time. Will it make you a better SEO? Heck yes it will!

1. Die Hard
Who could forget this holiday favorite? Bruce Willis crashes the company Christmas party with a couple presents of his own. Big explosions and plenty of yuletide tag lines.

2. Scrooged
Bill Murray is the perfect schmuck in this irreverent classic. Rick Moranis plays a loose canon, disgruntled ex-employee who ends up a bitter, gun-toting, drunken mall Santa. Every company’s got one.

3. The Nightmare before Christmas
Jack the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town discovers some doors in the woods. One of the doors takes him to Christmas Town where he stands in for Santa. Sounds like a Pink Floyd song.

4. Jennifer 8
I think this is the only scary movie Andy Garcia has ever been in, lucky for us that it happens to take place during Christmas. Edge-of-your-seat suspense in this creepy holiday thriller.

5. The Grinch
No, not the one with Jim Carrey. The cartoon makes the list because somehow this crusty, booger-colored fuzz ball has touched our hearts in a way just plain being nice could never do.

6. Mixed Nuts
This movie is just awkward. It reminds me of the typical family dysfunction we all look forward to during the holidays. I hope it’s not just me. Plus I like Steve Martin.

7. The Shining
Jack Nicholson is a nut. Nevertheless The Shining is a performance to remember and the setting is just lovely with all the snow and trees, and screaming.

8. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
When I think of Christmas movies, I think of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Chevy Chase is the all American, competitive dad just trying to forge out an existence in suburbia. Oh how we love your slapstick antics Chevy.

9. Ghostbusters II
This feel good classic has Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd back to finish off those grumpy ghosts. Slimer plays the elf.

10. The Ref
Hil-arious! Dennis Leary lays the smack down as a bumbling cat burglar who chooses the wrong house to break into on Christmas Eve. The love flows like wine in this house.

Happy Holidays and a safe New Year’s from us at the Best SEO Blog!

Since the Best SEO Blog was inactive for part of the year, it doesn’t make sense to recap our best articles month by month. Instead, I’ll just recap the top ten most viewed posts for the year.

Top 10 Reasons Your Blog Fails – Written by Nicholas Ramirez, this post reaffirms Ann Smarty’s statement that lists still work (at least for drawing eyeballs, if not links).

Optimizing Other People’s Blogs For Search – Written by Michael Martinez (me), this is another list-oriented article (but it’s not as scannable as Nic’s article). This technique helps you help other bloggers help you. How is that for a Jerry Maguire SEO strategy? Show me the referrals! Show me the referrals!

Intuitive Keyword Research = Topical Insight – Written by Gene Tapang, a former employee and a great SEO technician. Gene went on to cofound Relevant Copy and become a partner in G2 Agency. Gene has a standing invitation to write for Best SEO Blog again but … he seems to be rather busy.

What is Website Structure and Architecture – Written by Michael Martinez (me), this article discusses static pages, persistent pages, dynamic or virtual pages, and transactional dynamic (temporary) pages. And there are several other definitions as well. Half of SEO is definitions and the other half is 50% hard work, 63% dynamic effort, and 10% a good sense of humor.

How To Choose A Web Designer Who Also Understands SEO, Part 1 – Written by Nicholas Ramirez, this post kicked off a short series to help people identify what to look for in an SEO-capable Web designer.

How To Design A Link Building Program – Written by Michael Martinez (me), this article discusses four types of links: brand-building links, visibility-building links, relationship-building links, and crawl-building links.

Advanced On Page Optimization – Written by Michael Martinez (me), this article debunks some of the nonsense you’ll find if you search for “advanced on-page optimization”.

How Do I Build Trusted Links To My Website 2008 – Written by Michael Martinez (me), this article answers a question posed in a query several people entered into search engines. this article advises you to avoid the social media trap that many SEOs have set for themselves and to focus on real link building that places value where it should go.

Natural Link Building – An SEO Oxymoron – Written by Michael Martinez (me), this article tackles the confusion that many SEOs experience over terminology. And if you’re looking for information on mattresses, there is a link to a mattress blog embedded in the article, too. A natural link, that is.

How To Choose A Web Designer Who Also Understands SEO, Part 3 – Written by Nicholas Ramirez, this article closes out his short series of articles on how to pick an SEO-savvy Web designer. It also proves that you lose audience in the second act. Includes pretty pictures.

And this post in itself proves something else: if you don’t have time to come up with a good topic, and it’s the end of the year, you can recap your most popular posts of the year and recycle old material. Seriously, though, these “best of …” type posts are good internal link building methods. Search Engine Land takes the principle of internal reinforcement to the brink of absurdity: they recap all their posts on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

There seems to be a growing interest in SEO for subdomains. I find that ironic given that, after many years of tolerating subdomain abuse, Google has over the past 12 months or so tightened its requirements for subdomain visibility and inclusion. I would say a lot of people have missed the boat, but there are certainly still legitimate uses for subdomains and, when their content becomes large enough, there are legitimate uses for sitemaps on subdomains.

So let’s talk about sitemaps for subdomains. We’ll start with traditional HTML sitemaps.

Use HTML sitemaps on any subdomain with more than 10 pages – You can include an HTML sitemap on a smaller site but it doesn’t provide much value. However, once you get up to the 10-15 page volume for a site, your on-page navigation becomes clumsy and inefficient for your visitors. Yes, search engines can still crawl 30-50 links on a page and they are happy to do it, but you need to keep your users in mind. They tend to be overwhelmed by more than 10-12 navigational options.

An HTML sitemap can act like an extension of your primary site navigation. You link to the most important content in your sitewide navigation, and your HTML sitemap should be included in your idea of your most important content. Make it easy for people to find the HTML sitemap. These are among the few types of pages where people are mentally comfortable with navigating through dozens or hundreds of links.

Speaking of hundreds of links on a page…

Paginate large HTML Sitemaps – Just because you CAN put 300 links on a page doesn’t mean you should. It’s okay to paginate your HTML sitemaps when they become very large. Google recommends keeping your links to around 100 per page. That’s as good a limit as 150, 200, or 300 but it’s more user-friendly. Think of ways to organize your paginated HTML sitemap so that people can quickly and easily find what they are looking for.

If your site is extremely large, with hundreds of thousands or millions of pages, you might consider creating a subdomain that is used as nothing other than an HTML sitemap. Think of how you could structure and populate the pages so that people want to use them. You might use a date-oriented structure to archive aging content, a topic-oriented structure, an alphabetized structure, or a hybrid structure.

Include subdomains in your primary HTML sitemap – If your main site is large and has its own HTML sitemap, it’s okay to include at least the top-level content from your subdomains in your sitemap page(s). If the subdomains are integrated into your architecture and design, it makes sense to include them in your primary HTML sitemap. You don’t need to include everything on a subdomain in that highest level sitemap. You can deep-link to your subdomain’s HTML sitemap pages and its root URL and leave it at that.

XML Sitemaps for Subdomains – If you have enough content on your subdomain to justify an HTML sitemap, you have enough content to justify an XML sitemap. You can link to your subdomain pages from your primary subdomain XML sitemaps but you may find you have to authenticate each subdomain with the various search engines (Google, Live, and Yahoo! all allow you to do this).

Subdomain sitemaps can be hosted on the subdomain or primary domain, but again you may run into search engine restrictions. Be sure you authenticate your sites properly and try to manage your subdomain XML sitemaps on the subdomains themselves.

Paginate XML Sitemaps – There is divided opinion in the SEO community on whether you should include as many URLs as possible in XML sitemaps or if you should break them up. Think about this in terms of what is easiest for you to manage. On a large content site you’re most likely going to have sections by topic, date, or some other categorical structure. I would recommend dividing your URLs into XML sitemaps that match your major site structures.

You can do this on large content subdomains as well. The rule of thumb is, ask yourself which is more unwieldy: scrolling through 50,000 blocks of XML code or updating 1,000 XML files.

Only repeat your most important pages in multiple XML sitemaps – An XML sitemap helps a search engine identify URLs for crawling. If you have more than one XML sitemap on a site, I see no reason not to include the root URL and HTML sitemap in every XML sitemap. I do this myself. I feel strongly that covering those URLs as much as possible is better than assuming I have covered them exactly where they need to be covered.

Restrict access to your XML sitemaps – Quite frankly, there are a LOT of rogue robots out there. They gobble up XML files like locusts on a field of grain. You can protect your XML sitemaps from the rogue robots by using .htaccess files to restrict which search tools have access to your crawling lists. Let the major search engines see what you have on your site and tell the rogue robots to go fly a kite.

I have often used XML Sitemaps.com to create small XML sitemaps, but you may need to develop a custom solution or find another tool for truly large sites.

“Why does google ignore my meta description?”

I’ve seen this question asked in forums, on blogs, and in search referral strings. There are several reasons why a search engine may ignore a meta description, although the search engines might change their algorithms at any time.

The meta description element is presently only used by the major search engines to assist in managing the listings they provide in their search results. That is, they don’t index your meta descriptions for resolving queries. Hence, if you’re embedding keywords in the meta description element but not elsewhere on your page (or in link anchor text), the search engines are essentially blinding themselves to the keywords you want to rank for.

The meta keywords and meta description elements have, unfortunately, been abused by search spammers through the years. To reduce the effect of that abuse, search engines just look at the meta description for help in determining what they can show searchers whenever your page is included in search results.

For that reason, the SEO industry has been advising people for several years to create unique, concise, relevant meta descriptions for each of the pages on their sites for several years.

But even if you create the meta descriptions correctly, some search engines may instead prefer to use descriptions provided by Yahoo!’s directory or the DMOZ directory when they show your page listings. To prevent that from happening, you need to include “noydir,noodp” in a robots meta element for each page. There is presently no way to implement this directive on a site-wide or page-independent basis.

But what if you have excluded the directory descriptions and you have written unique, concise, relevant meta descriptions for each page and they still don’t appear?

The search engines are trying to match the queries users type in with the information they provide in search listings. If you don’t use the exact query expression in your meta description but it does appear elsewhere in the page (in indexable content), there is a good chance the search engine will create a descriptive text snippet for its listing from the content on your page rather than from your meta description.

Which is not to say that the meta description is a waste of effort — you can target the meta description element, using it to focus on your primary keyword. You can embed other text snippets on your page that address other queries that are similar.

I would not do this for many expressions, and I would be careful not to use keyword injection (simply replacing query expressions and then replicating the same text block several times). Try to keep each page focused on 2-4 expressions.

The fact that you CAN optimize a page for 100 expressions doesn’t mean you always should. That takes more skill and practice than most people can devote to the task.

Another reason why your meta description element may not be working is you could have broken code — a mistyped element — in your page header. It happens. If the search engines cannot parse your content correctly, they’ll ignore huge swathes of text and code until they find something that looks like it makes sense to them.