SEO

Both Google and Bing have what are called 'Webmaster Tools' to help with informing the search engine of your sites content and diagnosing what needs to be done to help improve your search results page. These tools are essential for anyone that is concerned about SEO and search marketing.

Utilizing thee tools is essential, so webmasters need to be familiar with all the tools have to offer. This year both SE's have been upgrading the functions they have available. Let's take a look at some of the tools available and how they relate to the future of SEO.

Google Webmaster Google Webmaster tools did a nice overhaul of it's navigation a few months back, but the biggest thing this year in the Google+ integration. Essentially Google added social metrics to it's reporting tools. This signals the first direct indication that Google+ click are associated in some way with organic search results.

This indicated the move from a primarily link based algorithm for search to a more social/content based system. Mind you, this is just an indication and the link based architecture seems to still dominate the factors the effect organic search

Bing Webmaster

Bing just announced a tool to disavow links that point to your site. They beat Google to the punch on this one, as Matt Cutts recently mentioned Google 'may' be launching something like this later in the year.

The main point of this tool reflects the major trend with search engines to really weed out all of the 'spam' type links out there. Websites that used to benefit from many low quality links are taking a hit. Webmasters can try to remove old links, but many times have no access to do so. Also, many old sites are not administered any more, so there is literally no one to contact to have the link removed.

The 'disavow' process allows a webmaster to let Bing know they no longer consider this link valuable and Bing should ignore it.

This shows that SEO is inevitably moving towards higher quality links with good content and that old techniques(like blog comments and forum signatures) are a thing of the past.