SEO Tools Edition of the Newsletter: Under the Hood of Bing Webmaster Tools and the SEOToolSet

June’s SEO Newsletter is a Tools Edition. We’ve zeroed in on some new tools and features for SEO analysis that we think you’ll enjoy learning more about.

Our feature interview with Bing Webmaster Tools manager Duane Forrester goes behind the scenes of Bing Webmaster Tools’ Phoenix update. Forrester explains Bing’s efforts to assist the SEO community through the Phoenix Update:

• Why Bing partnered with the SEO community to launch new tools and features.
• The technology powering the new Link Explorer, SEO Analyzer and Fetch as Bingbot tools.
• How Forrester would use the new tools to improve his workflow and data collection if he were an SEO.

“Investing in Webmaster Tools is a way to partner at scale with website owners. If we offer insights that help them improve their site, those improved sites provide us with better results for searchers. Be that through a better user experience on the site, or through fixing issues which might impede discoverability. It makes sense to partner with webmasters and enable them as best we can,” Forrester says.

In a past Back to Basics article, we covered our SEO tools that you shouldn’t live without. These trusted tools were developed to help you analyze the performance of your domains, pages, keywords, and rankings. We cover a few favorite tools including:

• The newly launched Keyword Report which allows you to find keywords with a profitable balance between search activity and competition.
• The Domain Ranking Report and its Keyword Ranking Distribution, a visual analysis of raw keyword rankings across search engines.
• The Single Page Analyzer’s link information report to help SEOs channel link equity through the site.

New tool releases were driven by Web Development Manager Aaron Landerkin, who brought new tools and features crafted from user requests and in-house expertise. Many of the enhancements were subtle yet provided more in-depth analysis.

This month’s contribution from Bruce Clay Australia reports on Google’s official guidelines for mobile SEO. Google announced that its preferred method of mobile site configuration is responsive design, a single Web page that detects the device and adjusts content delivery accordingly. This article outlines:

• The three mobile site configurations supported by Google.
• The advantages of responsive design and resources for implementation.
• A mobile SEO checklist and best practices.

In newly published guidelines for Building Smartphone-Optimized Websites, the company says: “Google supports all the different ways the standards allow for using media queries in your code. Each implementation technique has pros and cons and you can use the one that works best for your site and users. As a general rule, if your site works in a recent browser such as Google Chrome or Apple Mobile Safari, it would work with our algorithms.”

Enjoy this month’s articles and all the month’s news in this edition of the SEO Newsletter!

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.