It was interesting to read the comments about Bill Gates’ new site The Gates Notes over the last few days. SEOs were giving it a hard time due to its complete lack of any search engine optimisation. (Maybe we need to coin a new term: ’search engine de-optimization’ for sites like this)
Aaron Wall first mentioned an offer of help…
…but it was Danny Sullivan who provided the details in his excellent post: Some SEO Advice for Bill Gates.
His post is required reading for anyone still a little unsure what the benefit of SEO is and how they can easily action some simple improvements. He takes us through title tags, meta description, de-duplication, RSS auto-discovery, webmaster tools, consistent URL and link building basics.
Bill was quick to take the advice on board
Let’s see how the site looks in a few days.
UPDATE: As at 27 Jan it looks like Title tag changes are appearing in Bing:

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