Keith Nallawalla
This article was originally published on the TrainSEM blog on 1/2/2013
Bing’s Webmaster Tools Guidelines document will read as commonsense to anyone experienced with SEO, but it’s worth a read and a refresher, especially if you are new to SEO or you have clients or a boss who doesn’t understand much about SEO. You should make sure anyone involved in decision making is familiar with these to prevent them from making any poor decisions.
There are tips advising against certain black hat techniques that you should avoid doing. It is good to make sure everyone involved in your site are aware of this, as some offers on sites like Fiverr.com and other places offer SEO deals that sound too good to be true, in a lot of cases, they are. This specifically warns you against link schemes, social media schemes and other things that lazy people might assume are good shortcuts.
Social Media schemes are starting to take a similar route to typical SEO schemes in the past, such as reciprocal links and reciprocal “likes” etc. It is only a matter of time before the search engines start noticing these patterns and start demoting sites for it, and possibly even affect the reputation of the social media account holders.
The SEO section is a handy checklist to make sure you have done things correctly, there are obviously more in-depth checklists out there, but this is a good starting point for beginners.
