I like the new interface and have always liked the heavy weight their algorithm carries for navigational searches. If you are looking for a company or domain it will be at the top of the Bing SERP's.

I just think the easter eggs on the home page are a waste of time. People use search engines to find information, book travel, buy stuff. I think very few folks will stop and mouse over the little boxes to get facts about the picture on the home page.

The little synopsis of the page and its links on the right of the snippet does seem to do a good job of identifying the page content too. This can lead to a reduction in bounce by random confused surfers but on the downside can prevent a click if the synopsis isn't targeted.

I wish Google analytics, AWStats, and the rest would get Bing integrated as a search engine soon so the keyphrases will be recorded again. Hopefully web hosts will quickly incorporate the changes throughout the web with no delay.

So, do you Bing?

MSN / Live certainly isn't dominating search but it still provides value to webmasters, especially in certain niches.

Prior to August 13, 2008 their webmaster tools only showed the top 5 backlinks for your site. Now the Webmaster Center has included up to 1000 of your backlinks, including their method of ranking these links called Page Score.

Page Score is displayed using 1-5 asterisks with 5 being the top quality score. The links can be downloaded in comma delimited format and includes the page title, url, page score, region, and language. Please add anchor text!

Your domain backlinks can be excluded from the results by selecting the filter option, entering your domain name, and changing the list box to exclude.

The same information is also available for your domain's outbound links. More information is available at Live Search Webmaster Blog.

Chapter 4 of the Website Building Series.

SEO web design is the process of creating a website that will provide a positive influence on organic rankings for targeted keywords. The website is still created with the visitor and conversions in mind. This means that we are creating something that will be useful, linkable, and still be a contributing factor in our SEM process.

If you need some help understanding the basics of web design take a look at our HTML tutorial.

This is the third article in our website building series designed to showcase ethical, safe, seo web design methods.
The first article discussed how to qualify your niche and the second discussed seo planning.

Before we build our website we should discuss some important factors that all websites built with professional website design methods should include.

Quality Hosting

By now you have established your niche, keywords, and have a good idea of the competition and keywords you plan to use to build traffic. If not, then go back to the website building article defining how to qualify your niche.

Prior to getting knee deep into website design we need to think about domain names, developing our site structure, and navigation, along with a few other preliminary decisions before initiating the site creation phase. Let's talk about them now.

Branding & Domain Names