SEO Blog

Microsoft announced today that it was committed to opening up and sharing far more of its technical secrets with users and the software industry. Calling it a strategic shift in the way the company does business and handles information, Microsoft executives characterized the move as a major step for the Redmond WA based firm.

Microsoft is adopting a more open-source stance, in part, because European anti-trust regulators have told them to in order to ensure interoperability between its operating systems and productivity products and software developed by rival companies.

In October, Microsoft was forced to open its code to rivals as part of its settlement of a nine-year anti-trust case in Europe. European regulators have recently threatened to reopen investigations into Microsoft’s practices in order to get them to comply with the terms of that agreement. Another investigation is looking into Microsoft’s reluctance to share information about Word and Excel to competitors making complimentary products.

Moving forward into an uncertain future, the company has several other reasons to open up to outside developers. Quoted in the New York Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his firm was taking these steps on their own and signaled the company would shift to adapt to, “… the opportunities and risks of a more connected, more services-orientated world.”

Content is king. More than a truism, the phrase is a mantra. Content is the stuff people are looking for on a website. A commitment to developing and deploying great page, document and site content is a commitment to good SEO.

Comprised of the most common site elements, content is the most effective tool SEOs have to work with. Loosely defined as All Things On-Page, the term “content” would include titles, tags, text, in-site links and out-bound links. In some SEO practices, the acronym ATOP is used to refer to the hands-on work environment. (ATOP, i.e.: Mark sends the keyword targets to Jade whose staff works ATOP in the overall SEO effort) Content optimization is where creative art gets mixed into the webmaster science of SEO.

In the SEO process, content optimization describes most of the hands-on work done to make unique documents place well in search engine rankings. For the purposes of search engine optimization; content either exists, has to be created, or both.

Sometimes optimization of existing site content only requires the SEO to perform minor textual tweaks. Sometimes content does not exist and has to be written by the SEO. Frequently, SEOs come across pre-existing page content that needs to be totally rewritten or redeveloped.