It looks like Bing’s counterpart to Google’s Matt Cutts, Duane Forrester, is now putting out Matt Cutts-style webmaster videos for Bing Webmaster Tools.
He posted this one about becoming an authority by building quality content and sharing properly:
“You being an authority means you’re an expert. You rank better,” says Forrester. “You get more traffic.That just leads to better business success for you, which is what you want.”
“The first thing is, you need to focus on fundamentals here,” he says. “What we’re really talking about is the quality you have – the quality of content you build and the quality of sharing you do socially. Those are really two critically important points.”
He gives an example of “how to build quality content” using eBay.
“Let me give you two scenarios,” he continues. “One: you’re going to sell a cordless drill on eBay, and you’re just going to take the standard information, images and such. Now, the second example, we’re going to sell the same product – the same cordless drill – but we’re actually going to take videos of that cordless drill in use. We’re going to show that cordless drill in its packaging, in its wrapper, in every way possible. We are going to amplify it. Lots of extra pictures. We’re going to do this all on our own. We’re going to write up descriptions. We’re going to put all of that together.”
“It’s pretty clear to see here by these descriptions that we’re going to have a standard view of an item for sale, and a really deep, rich, immersive view of an item for sale,” says Forrester.
The second version, he says, is the “quality”.
“That is what people are looking for to answer their questions,” he continues. “So when that comes to you content, you have to think of it in terms of, ‘Have I answered all of the questions this searcher has? Have I done it to a depth that satisfies them?’ If you can do that, you need to move on to the next step, which is sharing properly.”
“You get out there, and you’re sharing things on Facebook, or you’re putting it on Twitter. Any of the social media spaces that you like and you frequent, you’re putting this stuff out there.”
He says that before you submit this stuff, you have to ask yourself: Will my tweet or my post bring quality to my followers or my friends?
“That is a critical step,” he emphasizes. “They want you to bring them quality. They need you to bring them quality. You need to bring them quality. If you don’t bring them quality, they’re going to stop following you. If you bring them good quality links either to your content or to related content, they will continually engage with you. They will share you. They will like you. They will amplify that for you. That amplification – that signals that you’re becoming an authority socially.”
“Pull all of that together,” he says. “Now you’re starting to see things as the search engine sees it.
More on Forrester’s thoughts about search and social from a presentation he gave at BlogWorld in November can be found here.