On Friday’s I attend my weekly BNI meeting. It’s an amazingly productive way to speed up client acquisition.

This week we had a very full room. We had some great guests: Alex, a computer guy; Roxane, sells ad space at bus stops; Linda, runs an organic bakery; Jason, offers virtual office services. I’m looking forward to meeting each of them.

The main thrust of our meeting this week was to recruit people that we can refer business to.  Right now we have 10 people who are looking for personal banker. If you know a banker who wants a lot of business now, we would like to meet that person.

We are also looking for a Chiropractor, a Florist, a Landscaper, a Heating and Cooling Professional, an Alarm Systems Installer, a Hairdresser or Barber and a auto mechanic.

If you would like to know more about any of this post, contact me.

I’ve decided to start sharing what I’ve learned from dance cards and meeting the many interesting people in Tucson.

My first entry if for Dee Anne, the Director of Sales for AdVision. Her company places ads on all the bus stops in Tucson. That is a lot of bus stops.

Dee Anne has 25 years in the ad business. She started in radio in New Orleans and moved to Clear Chanel Radio in Tucson. She was recently offered a nice job with AdVision and had taken to it like a fish to water. She’s a really nice lady.

Dee Anne explained that her company has benches and signs all over Tucson and that advertising on them cost way less then you would imagine. Benches start at $37.50 per week. (That’s $150 for 4 weeks!) There is a one time fee to make the banner/artwork that goes in the ad, but you can use that for years. The posters last 9-12 months on the streets.

As a web site developer and host, I strongly encourage people to get their website out there. If you’ve ever driven across town, you’ve probably seen at least one bench ad.

If this sounds like something that would work for you, call AdVision at 520/292-6200 and tell them Nohl sent you

Every major search engine provides hints and tips about how to optimize your pages for improved rankings on their sites. But when you read these guidelines you quickly see that most of it is just their own wish list. Things like ‘Write for humans not search engine bots – or – do not hide keywords with a font matching the background color.’ It is all good advice but kind of general and already well known (for the past decade.)

But there are always things a search engine will not tell you. And, of course, these are the things that make all the difference in your SEO efforts and results. That said; here are eight things that Bing does not want you to know (or you can skip to the Magic Formula section at the end):

1.) Your Domain Name Matters
A Lot Search for just about anything on MSN / Bing and at least three of the top five matches will have some version of that keyword as the domain name. For example if you wanted to optimize for the keyword ‘my domain’ you should try to get the domain name ‘mydomain.com.’ If that is taken, opt for ‘my-domain.com.’ If that’s taken try for a name starting with ‘mydomain’ and ending with a word that is commonly associated. This is called LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. A good example would be ‘mydomainname.com’ or ‘my-domain-name.com.’ BTW, Bing treats dashes as a space so as long as long as the dashes merely separate words, they are treated much like the non dash version.

2.) There is No Sandbox
Here’s some great news for anyone just getting started. Bing does not seem to care about the age of your domain name. There is no ‘sandbox’ like Google has. Many people, myself included, have registered brand new domains and had them ranking in a matter of days.

3.) DotCom Trumps DotNet
Today some search engines like Google will often give .net and .com virtually the same value, and possibly higher value for a .org that is for a recognized non-profit organization. Bing however appears to prefer the .com version. You can even see instances where a ‘.co.uk’ site gets high rankings simply because it uses the exact keyword in the domain name and .co is close enough to .com.

4.) We Like Sub Domains
Most web hosts will let you add sub domains to your website. On Bing, if you have the sub domain mydomain.mydomain.com you are in for some potentially great rankings. The same is true if you have my.domain.com, but to a slightly lesser degree.

5.) Less is More – Part One
We have been trained by Google to try to have hundreds of pages of quality content on every website. Bing adheres to the old policy that they are indexing web ‘pages’ not web ‘sites’ (like Google says they do, but Bing appears to really mean it.) This means each page is treated on its own merit so a site with one page has the same chances of being ranked as a site with 100 pages, because each page is genuinely treated individually.

6.) Less is More – Part Two
The same rule as above goes for on-page text. Pages with 800 to 1,200 words seem to do best on Google but on Bing the reverse is true, with 250 to 500 words being the magic number. Just do not overuse your keyword.

7.) Links are Nice But Not Required
Forget about spending your life building an ever growing number of inbound links for Bing. They do not need them. Your site, for now at least, is judged by its own merits, page by page.

8.) Be Bold not Strong
The original SEO method dating back to 1996 was using the H1 or ‘strong’ heading tags in your HTML. Forget them for now. Bing gives higher priority to how you would express importance in a word processor document; larger font and bolded text as the main markers.

Summary: I build hundreds of Bing (formerly MSN) targeted mini sites every year using the information above (as it has evolved) and the results have been consistent top ten rankings. You can do it too!

Here’s my magic formula for a one hour top ranking:
A.) Get the .com version of a three to four word keyword as the domain name (dashes are fine.)
B.) Use the domain name as the page heading in a bolded font, slightly larger than the paragraph text.
C.) Write 400 words of natural sounding text using the keyword up to five times.
D.) Mention the keyword once in the first sentence and once in the final sentence of the page – then up to three times scattered throughout the remainder.
E.) Bold one instance of the keyword. Italicize one instance of the keyword. Use one instance of the keyword as a link back to the same page.
F.) Always fill in your Title, Description and Keywords META tags. That’s it.

Good luck and take care!

PS: This works for Yahoo too.

About The Author

Mike Small is the president of DotCom Pirates,a different kind of SEO company dedicated to helping website owners optimize for pennies on the dollar. DotCom Pirates offers Do It Yourself and Turnkey SEO packages starting at just $49. Please visit www.DotComPirates.com for more information and our SEO gift.

And so, here it is. An incredibly complex combination of WordPress, CSS, HTML, XML and hard work.

I’ve put some effort into making this visit worth your while Notice the ‘Switch Theme’ drop down on the left. Give it a try. It’s fun. It demonstrates how a site’s content can be made independent of the site’s appearance.

This is a big deal if you want to have a site and a mobile site simultaneously. It also comes in handy if you have distinct audiences with special needs, such as kids or people with poor eye sight.

I’m using WordPress to demonstrate how easy it is to manage a site (with a blog) from my Smartphone while keeping things clean and friendly.

This is a work in progress so I look forward to your feedback.

Thanks!

It’s amazing how quickly patterns form. Some schools of thought say that it only takes three times to build a pattern. Other schools state that you begin to miss a pattern if it suddenly goes away.

How can you use that in your business? If you were sending emails like this one, you would be reminding people that you are there and are ready to help.

Just put this in real world terms; ever since we started sending these email, we’ve picked up a new project a week. When we stopped, people actually asked if they missed the message. Food for thought, no?

In case you’re wondering, our gnomes are hard at work developing our next web site for Focus Web Works. Features to look for include easy navigation and a blog to share news and marketing ideas.

Let’s talk soon

Nohl