Bing has come to the aid of web specialists by publishing a list of 18 things that you need to know about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

On its Webmaster Centre blog, the search engine takes a look at some of the bigger ticket issues that people should focus on when optimising their websites. Presented in a rough order of importance, the list “represents the ideal for a freshly planned website, prior to being built out”.

Although many web professionals inherit sites to work on, rather than having the advantage of building them from scratch, Bing says that the list can still be of help. They suggest focusing on one or two of the main points rather than worrying about what they are not able to achieve.

The top five points on the list are crawlability, site structure, content hierarchy, on-page factors and content production.

Writing about crawlability, Bing says: “If a crawler can’t access your content, the content won’t be indexed by search engines, nor will it be ranked. Enable and use XML sitemaps with a low error rate to build trust with search engines.

“Make sure your website navigation is clean and strive for a simple, search-friendly URL structure.”

To see the list in full, visit http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/19/18-things-you-need-to-know-about-seo.aspx

Last week Google published a nice blog post entitled Quick and easy tips for the holiday rush.

It offers some great simple tips to get your website SEO in shape so that Google can better understand and index it, driving more traffic and generating more sales.  All sounds easy, and to be honest – most of it is not exactly rocket science, but of course if you’d like help with any of Google’s suggestions – things like:

• snippet content and titles
• labeled images
• 404 and 301 errors
• sitemaps
• sitelinks

Then get in touch and we’d be glad to help out!  Our own Search Engine Optimisation Programme deals with all the above and much more.