There are a lot of businesses operating in the US. How many is a lot? Well, back when the last set of official stats existed for 2007, Canadas population was just over 30 million. Now youre wondering what Canadas population has to do with local businesses in the US, right? Well, there was almost the same number of businesses in the US in 2007 as the population of Canada! The actual number the US Census Bureau states for businesses in the US for 2007 was 27, 757,676 .

Keyword research. It should be the beginning of every content-related project you work on. From search to social and from paid search through building your website's navigation, keyword research will provide insights that can set you up for success. In this blog post we'll examine why you should perform the research and what the data is telling you. We'll also look at one internal Microsoft tool, and help you understand how to use the data shown in any tool to best effect.

On June 2 nd we announced a collaboration between Bing, Google and Yahoo to create and support a standard set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. Although our companies compete in many ways, it was evident to us that collaboration in this space would be good for each search engine individually and for the industry as a whole. In the short time since the announcement weve received a lot of great feedback.

While Bing Webmaster Tool users have been enjoying the latest features such as crawl control and user management announced in early June at SMX Advanced as part of the Honey Badger update , behind the scenes we've been working on the next round of improvements for the tools.

Bing has been investing in building its Webmaster Tools for a while now, and today were announcing some of the most recent updates. We spent a lot of time earlier this year meeting with people at search conferences to understand what new features they wanted to see from us, and what current features we could support further. We also gathered feedback on what helpful content should exist within our webmaster space. Through the Honey Badger update, as were calling it,

Decisions just got easier with the addition of new social features to Bing. By bringing together the power of search and Facebook, people can now receive personalized search results based on the opinions of their friends by simply signing into Facebook. These features, available now, make it easy to see what peoples Facebook friends like across the Web, incorporate the collective IQ of the Web into their decision making, and conduct conversational searches.

Per our public notice on February 4, 2011 regarding Bing Site Owner , we have officially disabled this service. What this means to our customers is: 1. Access to the www.bing.com/siteownwer will be redirected to the forum post announcing site owner's decommission. 2. Users who attempt to query in the search box produced by site owner will be redirected to a 404 page. You will need to update your code, or remove this code form your website.

Today's blog post is brought to you by the letters S, E & O. As in S earch E ngine O ptimization. We have a lot of SEO related documents scattered around the ecosystem here at Bing and Microsoft, so I thought it would be nice to gather some of them into one location. This data will change as we update the main site but for now, it should prove helpful for folks looking to understand more about SEO and related topics. First off, I'll share all the links,

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With cloud services such as Windows Azure now a viable alternative to traditional web hosting, numerous webmasters have reached out to us to ask if, and how, Bing uses the document location as a part of its ranking algorithm. In other words: does cloud-based web hosting outside of the documents intended geography negatively impact a documents ranking? Though its only one of over a thousand features we consider in our ranking,

Gang, we've got a quick note here to alert users to an item we'll be shutting down in 60 days. As of April 4th, 2011 we will discontinue support for the bing.com/siteowner functionality. If you continue to leverage the feature after this date )April 4th, 2011(, users who attempt to query in the search box will be redirected to a 404 page. This means that you will need to move to the Bing API in order to continue to receive web or site search results from us.

You asked for more detailed data. We heard you. :( As part of our ongoing effort to bring more usable data forward for publishers, this week we made additional reporting improvements for your sites traffic. Located under the Traffic tab, page traffic gives detailed information for your top performing pages in Bing. This includes impression, click, CTR, and Average position. It also provides a list of query terms which have had that page return as a result.

We are pleased to announce the release of our new Inbound Links feature. Bing Webmaster Tools now provides registered site owners the ability to easily & intuitively retrieve data about links to their sites. We received plenty of feedback from site owners and SEOs that expressed the importance of this data to better understand how their sites are ranked in Bing and to make the right improvements.

Increasingly, web users are plagued by sites that appear to offer services to help protect their computers from viruses, Trojans and other web baddies. Because the primary tactic used is to frighten users into downloading the software; weve dubbed this category of attacks scareware or rogue anti-virus. Often, the resulting downloads and services contain malicious software that either takes over the users computer or allows other attackers access to the computer.

A caption )also known as a summary( is the area of a Search Engine Results Page )SERP( devoted to a particular result. Captions help users to decide which result to click on and help site owners to communicate to users what to expect on their page. Captions are an oft-forgotten tool of the SEO toolkit. Ranking is certainly the most important factor in determining user clicks, but captions are also a contributor. In this post, I will give you a primer on captions.

In keeping with our themes of rapid change and responding to input and feedback from the webmaster community, we are working on future feature planning for the Bing webmaster tools and we would like to hear your thoughts in a few areas. The first area is Crawl-Delay: Today, we fully support crawl delay which is specified in robots.txt. We are considering creating a tool which allows you to directly control the frequency, and perhaps even the timing, of msnbot/bingbot.

Early this month, in the Bingbot is Coming to Town blog post, we provided details about the impending change from msnbot to bingbot. Its almost October 1 st , so we thought wed send out a quick reminder that this change is still in the works. Taking into account webmaster feedback, we have modified our rollout schedule a bit. Instead of doing an 100% switch on day one, we will do a staged rollout. What does that mean to you? To start,

Thinking Id be original, I first titled this post, Changes, they are a-coming. When I Bingd that title, I realized that original isnt the correct descriptor . . . so, I went searching for inspiration to aid in finding words to convey the importance and need for change, and came up with some great quotes, a few of my favorites: Everything changes and nothing remains still - Heraclitus They say that time changes things,

Back in June, 2010, we published a blog post titled Bing crawler: bingbot on the horizon that announced our plans to retire our venerable web crawler, MSNBot, and replace it with the new. Our plans remain on track, and we want to remind you that this change will occur on October 1 st , 2010. We also want to take this opportunity to help set some expectations for this process, to discuss the name change details,

Early this month, in the Bingbot is Coming to Town blog post, we provided details about the impending change from msnbot to bingbot. Its almost October 1 st , so we thought wed send out a quick reminder that this change is still in the works. Taking into account webmaster feedback, we have modified our rollout schedule a bit. Instead of doing an 100% switch on day one, we will do a staged rollout. What does that mean to you? To start,