Bing's "SEO Fundamentals" are everyone's fundamentals

 
As a followup perhaps to the Bing/Yahoo! quality checklist, Searchenginejournal.com subsequently provided 18 points of what Bing expects web content publishers to implement for SEO.

Well, it seems to me that all their advice applies equally as well for those aiming to optimize their web content for any search engine. I think perhaps that there should have been a disclaimer associated with point 1, which concerned the implementation of robots.txt and XML site maps. It's still my understanding that both of these files only provide a set of suggestions for search engines, and their parameters may not necessarily be obeyed by crawlers.

Point 8, create an RSS feed, also may imply quite a few additional points, such as that new content is expected to be published with some frequency and that said feed can be easily subscribed to by those who may not know how to hack the URL (via point 11, enablement of social media).

In fact, segmented audience studies have shown that the push method of content distribution was only popular with a fairly niche crowd. Perhaps the bias of the author of this list is showing.

Points 12 through 18 are the don'ts, and they also reflect the most prevalent of "black hat" practices such as link farming and buying.

In all, this list should help someone getting started with SEO efforts to perform a sanity check against their current web site.