Here at Gravytrain, we work with a number of personal clients that desire control over how their name or “personal brand” shows up when people perform a search on Google, Bing or other search engines. In the recent past, Bing has leveraged its partnership with Facebook to provide user-specific results for those who are logged in to Facebook, so you can see results that are directly related to the names in your social network and not other people you don’t know. (As you can imagine, if your friend is named John Smith, a search may pull up some results that are entirely unrelated to the one you’re looking for.)

Today, Bing announced a new tool called Linked Pages that allows users to control what their Facebook friends will see about them when they search through Facebook’s Bing engine, or through Bing when logged in to Facebook. A user accomplishes this by selecting search results that are relevant to a search for their personal name, which are then aggregated together by the search engine and presented at the top result to that person’s friends (when logged into Facebook, of course). Let’s take a look at how making use of this tool can really improve how you show up to your social network in Bing’s results.

How Things Look on Bing Today

Let’s use my name for example. If one of my friends were to perform a search for my name through Facebook or Bing, here’s what they would find:

None of the top few results are me personally (the 2nd result isn’t even the correct spelling of my search… and why is it repeated 2 results below?) and would be of little use to any of my friends or contacts that happened to be searching for me to find more information, another social network profile, and more. Thanks to Linked Pages, that’s all about to change.

As I mentioned above, with Linked Pages a user can login to Bing through Facebook and select which of these results is relevant to them to have these rank higher than unrelated results to those in their social network. Conversely, by “neglecting” to select things that I don’t want linked, they are left out by omission and people may not bother to see them. Hello, free reputation management!

Let’s go through this step by step. First, head on over to the Bing Linked Pages site, and click “Get Started”.

After you click the button, you’ll be asked to sign in through Facebook and allow Bing to have access to some of your usual data on Facebook. Click on “Go to App”.

and do the necessary approvals required to get this sucker working. Once you’re logged in, you’ll be presented with the Bing search results and the ability to link pages to yourself (side note, if you’re not in the USA you might see an error when you try to connect. I guess Bing isn’t offering this outside of the US for now?):

As you can see, now we’re getting somewhere. Bing has correctly identified my LinkedIn page, and allows me to link this and every other page to myself. Hilariously, I can also link pages to other people which leaves open the opportunity for some serious trolling. Go through and click the link to me button on results that link to you (obviously) and when you’re done, you can perform another search for your name to see how things will look. This is what one of my friends sees when they are logged in to Facebook and searches for my name through Bing:

Ahh… now that’s more like it. There are the three pages that I linked to my profile, along with a nice picture and some info that Bing ripped from Facebook.

What Does this Mean?

Since these are basically just vanity results that only your Facebook friends will see, it doesn’t mean a whole lot yet. However, this is information that Bing can use in the future to ensure that your linked pages are the ones that are returned first for those who are likely to search your name. It’s just another piece of managing your total personal brand that you need to be aware of and make use of.

Got any thoughts? Share them in the comments below.

One thing that never ceases to amaze the Gravytrain team is how infrequently most website owners tend to post or update their site’s content (ironically, we’re notoriously bad for writing in our own blog. Guess we should practice what we’re preaching!). A number of our clients have finally started to take heed to our requests to continually build new content, whether in the form of blog posts, employee journals, new pages, manuals or other instructional pages, or other text-heavy pieces that are original and full of value to the reader.

Here are a few reasons why you’ll want to ensure that you are adding new content to your website each day:

Search Engines Love Content

It’s true – search engines absolutely love content that is unique and valuable. Picture Googlebot as a very hungry squirrel that roams back around your yard every day or two looking for food. If there’s always something kicking around in the form of new content, Googlebot is going to have something to add to its index and to show that your business is still alive and kicking with no signs of dropping off.

Posting up new content regularly also means that you will be working to avoid dropping down the ranks in Google thanks to the “Freshness Algorithm“, which is designed to push newer content up to the top results.

You Have Something to Post About on Twitter and Facebook

If you’re like us, you probably don’t feel that posting about which of your employees wore mismatched socks today or some other inane BS is worth updating the company’s Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus or other social media feeds. However, if you have one of your team members writing blog posts on your site each day or you are adding other valuable content that customers or prospective customers might be interested in, it’s well worth updating Twitter and Facebook to let everybody know. If you have a good reason to update, you won’t cheese any of your followers off – and every update means refreshing your brand in front of at least a few pairs of eyes.

Free Website Traffic!

Another upside to posting new content on a regular basis is that you are bound to attract some additional visitors to your website. This can be especially helpful if you run a business that can handle clients outside of your local area. If your client base comes mostly from your local city or metropolitan area, make sure that you are posting up new content regularly that includes information regarding your city.

It can be challenging to figure out what to write about on a daily basis, so it’s best to sit down once a month or so and figure out a list of topics that one of your staff members can drum up 500 words about each day. Also, try to approach a project like this like a newspaper or other periodical would; you can think up weekly columns, employ guest authors in your industry, and when you’re ready to take things to the next level you can produce videos that may end up getting shared around on YouTube, Facebook, etc.

At the bare minimum, get a blog going and post in it daily! If you’d like some thoughts on how to get this content produced, contact us.

I’ve seen a lot of talk lately about Fiverr, so I wanted to take a quick moment to express some of my thoughts on how websites like Fiverr – which essentially allow you to bring the cost of doing inane, repetitive crap down to virtually nothing – are changing SEO, for better or for worse (probably worse).

For those of you who have yet to experience the massive marketplace that is Fiverr, you can essentially find somebody, somewhere in the world, to do virtually anything you want for the low, low price of just $5. Why you might expect that most of the providers on Fiverr are from foreign countries (and many of them are) the site is loaded with individuals from North America offering everything from professional voiceovers to logo design to fresh content. It’s with this in mind that we take a look at Fiverr to see whether or not it’s worth investing in some of these gigs for SEO purposes.

Using Fiverr for Backlinks – as tools for generating backlinks become better, easier and cheaper to use more and more providers have jumped on the bandwagon and accordingly prices have shot to basically nothing for thousands of blog comments, links from forums, and social bookmarks. It’s relatively easy to find a provider on Fiverr who can generate anywhere between 1 to 60,000 backlinks for five bucks. These backlinks are relatively garbage in comparison to more expensive means, but they can be used for indexing and for the ever-so-meta backlinking of your backlinks.

Cheap Content – As virtually everyone thinks that they’re an accomplished writer, there’s no shortage of cheap, poorly written content available in many thousands of gigs on Fiverr. This content is perfectly useful for posting anywhere except sites that you actually expect people will read it. For instance, if you plan on doing some article marketing you can easily score some content on Fiverr that will be generally accepted at most places that you post. If you’re the type that likes your content spun, Fiverr also has a number of highly rated providers that can handle this.

Video / Audio Testimonials or Ads – This is one area where Fiverr can actually be quite useful and extremely inexpensive for the quality of material that you receive for your five dollars. There are a number of very highly rated video and/or audio content producers on Fiverr that happy to transform your script into a video advertisement, audio testimonial, or even something that sounds like one of those cheesy radio ads inviting you to the Dallas Mower Show on “Sunday Sunday Sunday!!!”

My personal favorite has to be this guy baldy, who offers a number of gigs in hilarious low-budget green screen format. Here’s a sample video that he put together with all of his characters marketing some cheap Obama sunglasses:

Logo and Graphic Design – Again, this is another area where you get far more for your five dollars than you ever would’ve thought possible. There are quite a few very capable graphic designers who are willing to create poster designs, logos, Facebook pages, and other graphics that you can make use of in your web or print marketing material. My favorite is hazeltree, who is very skilled at creating retro posters which at first glance might seem only suitable for hipster rock shows, but with a little ingenuity can be put to some very good use online.

So – what exactly does this have to do with how Fiverr is changing SEO? As more and more individuals and businesses are able to leverage extremely inexpensive links and content, the value that search engines place on these will have to come down accordingly. We all remember just a short year ago when Google decided that they didn’t like content farms anymore and the search results were shaken up quite significantly. Expect cheap links like blog comments, social bookmarks, forum profiles, wikis and more to continue to be devalued as their use for SEO purposes trends ever upward.

What are your thoughts? Are you leveraging Fiverr for SEO purposes for yourself or for your clients? Let me know in the comments below.