There was a great deal of activity in the digital marketing world during the week of October 18th, and here are some highlights …
Sheri Byrne-Haber wrote a very interesting piece regarding a recent lawsuit in which a company was sued for non-compliance with accessibility standards on their website. The company in question was using a popular WordPress plugin that claimed 100% compliance with current standards. Unfortunately for the company, the plugin, or “overlay,” was not completely effective. This brings up an important lesson: running a website takes a lot of work. Remember, your website is a business asset, and you need to make sure it’s properly maintained and works for all potential users.
Bing announced a new venture to help website owners get their content into search engines faster: IndexNow. This is an expansion over their Bing-only direct submission, which we mentioned briefly in our Pubcon Florida 2021 summary. According to the announcement, Bing is currently working with WordPress, Wix, and Duda to help them incorporate this functionality into their CMS. For now, it seems only Bing and Yandex support this new API submission method. Even so, it’s certainly worth watching.
Many businesses don’t bother to monitor their online reputation to their own peril. Monitoring your online reputation is not that hard, as our CEO, Tony Wright, points out in his latest Search Engine Journal article. Of course, if you need some help with online reputation management, we are ready and able to help.
Those of us who live and breathe SEO are very familiar with Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines. While they are not a checklist of things to do to make your website rank better in Google search, they are quite helpful for learning how Google evaluates websites in their algorithms. Google updated them this week, and SEO expert Lily Ray shares some key changes from last year’s edition. For you non-SEO people, you don’t need to read through them … we do that for you!
Microsoft has partnered with Shopify to make it easier for those running stores on the popular e-commerce platform to get their products in front of customers through their Microsoft Channel app. It’s a quick and easy tool to help store owners get their products in Bing Product Ads. This comes just in time for the busy holiday shopping season.
