How does one Raise Search Engine Rankings? Another View

I wrote this in response to a very good question from someone in LinkedIn, on how to raise your search engine rankings:

Content is King. Precise, Concise and Relevant Content.

Write good content using keywords that your potential customer base is looking for. Monitor your results. Look at the pages that rank higher than your page and, while not copying them, employ similar strategies if they make sense for your product or service.

Support your webpages with focused Blogs that point to your desired webpages. Try and get your URLs listed in relevant industry or user websites. Use Google Adwords to help promote your pages. If your content is relevant and readable, and your tactics to raise your organic search rankings are honest and also relevant, then your chances of getting top rankings will increase significantly.

I have had great success in getting top organic search rankings against as many as 40 million other indexed pages... focused and relevant content does the main work. Content is King.

Sometimes less content, that is distilled to the relevant core, will have the best impact. I have more on this subject at: http://erikholladay.blogspot.com/2009/07/raise-organic-search-rankings-by.html

BING still Bungling Duplicate Search Results

Bing has still not figured out how to completely filter 'similar results' from organic search. Unlike Google, which has the ability to filter out multiple results from the same company or content, BING appears to be unable to accomplish the same simple but vital filtering process.

What does this mean in real world terms?

The example I used to highlight this problem was the same for when BING first came out this Spring. I used a search for 'laboratory outsourcing'. The BING results are still showing a glaring weakness in BING's ability to filter out similar results. The first few organic results are quite good actually (especially since my webpages dominate at the top), but when you get past the 9th indexed link or so, things get very strange and repetitive, many of the pages are essentially of zero use for an individual looking for new information related to 'laboratory outsourcing'. Why? Because one company has identical or similar content present on different national domain websites. BING does not yet understand that these pages all belong to one company, or indeed that the content is similar or identical, so all these pages are listed, page after page after page after page.

I'll give BING some credit, the results are not as bad as 3 months ago... but they have more work to do. BING is very interesting, as a heavy user of Adwords campaigns I need to have a viable alternative to Google. I don't have one yet. And the new Google interface is rather 'interesting', to say the least. BING may be useful yet, if my B-to-B technical services clients start using it.