Exciting news from Bing at SES New York!
Yusuf Mehdi from Microsoft took to the stage at SES New York today, and announced some exciting news about Bing!
Super exciting new features…
- Contextual searches on Windows Mobile 7 with Bing…
Yusuf demoed a very rare Windows Mobile 7 device. He mentioned that the phones are context sensitive. If you are ask for directions whilst you are driving at 60 miles per hour, it will give you driving directions. If you ask for them whilst you are going at 2 miles per hour, it will give you walking directions! Local search powered by GPS will also be very rich and powerful with Bing! - Newspaper front pages on Bing Maps…
Bing maps will show you the newspaper front pages from a bunch of cities around the world as you navigate the map! Includes International newspapers (he demoed the Guardian in the UK) - ‘What shall I do’ on Bing Maps…
Bing maps will give you restaurants, hotels, attractions near to where you are browsing on the map. How long before travel guide books become a thing of the past?! - Integrate streetside photos with images from Flickr on Bing Maps…
Can’t wait for this to go live! Amazing combination of technology to provide an unparalleled mapping experience. You can view photos taken by the Bing mapping car, photos taken on Flickr, photos taken 100 years ago, photos taken at night time, etc… You will also be able to overlay live video feeds on top of your maps. Before long, you will be able to check how long the queue is at Starbucks before you even leave the house! :-) I blogged about this a few weeks ago.
Foursquare check-ins displayed on Bing Maps
Foursquare is growing quickly! It is becoming a valuable asset for people to share information about places, discover new experiences and meet new people. Bing maps will soon allow you to see local Foursquare check-ins overload on the map location you are currently viewing…
Next time you go to an event, a conference or a new place, you don’t need to wonder where the hot bars are, or where everyone else is staying – you will be able to visualise it directly on the Bing map! Exciting stuff!
I hope that in future this will also tie in to your social networks, so that you can see where friends of friends check in nearby.
Quick tabs at the top of the page…
Bing are now starting to pilot quick tabs at the top of the page. This is due to the fact that a large number of users refine searches, so by placing the most commonly used quick tabs at the top of the page, more users will be likely to click them. You need to pay attention to the quick tabs displayed for your target keywords if you are not already!
Twitter Links
For certain websites, Bing will start to you show the most popular SHARED links from that site (based on Twitter data).
I can’t help by wonder how long it will be until how often a link is shared on Twitter and other social networks, becomes a more significant factor than the traditional PageRank measure of how many other pages link to a site. We are not far off! Maybe we are even already there.
SEO Tips now and future…
Yusuf also provides some of his main focus SEO areas to make sure you rank well in Bing…
- Make sure you URL is crawled properly
- Keywords are very important! Make sure you use them in your titles, anchor text and other sections of the page
Yusuf also mentioned that structured data within websites is going to be more and more important. No surprise there, but nice to have the reminder!
Author: Chris Moore is a Program Manager working on Search Engine Optimisation at Microsoft. https://www.twitter.com/chrismdotcom
| Share |