Search Engine Optimisation Tips For Bing
Learn How To SEO Optimize Your Website For Bing.com
by Fernando Hal (cheatad.com)
With recent Microsoft – Yahoo deals which combine their search and advertising abilities, there are large consequences for many webmasters. For me personally, I have ignored MSN.com, Live.com, and even the recent Bing.com for so long. It seems like a little too much problem to search-engine optimize my websites for such a small target audience of Microsoft search engines. Visitors from Microsoft search engines (whatever the name is) in my sites accounts for less than 10%, across all sites. Google generally make up about 60%-70%. There are exceptions, however. Some sites have more visitors from Yahoo than from Google.
However, now that Yahoo is going to hand their search capability to Microsoft Bing.com, it becomes essential that we take steps to ensure that our websites are ready for the change. Bing.com also seems to be well received by more Internet users, and there is possibility that they might be able to gain some market share from Google.
Generally, search engine optimization is almost the same, regardless which seach engine you want to optimise for. However, there are also some additional details you need to take care of.
By the way, for more information about SEO, you might want to read this SEO tips first.
Here are some search engine optimization (SEO) tips for Bing
1. Contents
Contents are king. Good contents are what differentiate good websites to the bad. Even if you disregard all other SEO tips below, you’ll still get much ahead compared than if you get all those below but neglect to have good contents in your site. Search engines want to be useful to the users so they can gain more and more market share. They want to find good contents that can satisfy and match the users need. All other criteria are actually additional way to find out how good and important a page is.
Good contents are:
1. Unique, not copied or duplicate from other sites
2. Useful and interesting information for website visitors
3. With more than 300 words of content (specially for Bing.com)
2. Page title
In all major search engines, page title is among the most important part of Search Engine optimization. However, it seems somehow that Bing.com pays more attention to the page title compared with other search engines. Order of the words doesn’t matter much, but you must make sure to place your most important keywords of each page to the page title. Limit your page title to 80 characters the most. Shorter page title means higher importance on each word. And get different page title for each page. Concentrating on just a few keyphrase will not get you a lot of visitors, even if each of them rank first. This concept is something called as long tail optimization.
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Here is some additional tips from Bing webmaster community about page title:
-The closer the word is to the start, the more heavily weighted it is as a keyword. This is true for the bot as well as the reader. (For information on the affect the Golden Triangle phenomenon of user scanning of a SERP, check out the new Bing white paper.)
- Keep the title text between 5 and 65 characters in length
- For greatest efficiency and consistency, write titles using this syntax: keyword phrase, category, website title (or brand)
- Make the title text unique on every page
- Don’t use any of the following special characters in title text: ‘”<>{}[]()
3. Page URL : Domain name, sub-domain, folder name and file name
Yahoo and Bing.com place specially high importance on the page URL compared to Google. Try seach hotels in dublin in Bing.com. Notice that 9 out of 10 results on the first page have the words hotel and dublin in the URL, while the only other one has the word dublin eventhough doesn’t contain the word hotel. Try the same search for hotels in dublin in Google. Notice now there are 7 results with the word “hotel” and “dublin” in URL, one result with the word “hotel”, while the other two doesn’t have any of the word “hotel” or “dublin” in the URL.
Domain name isn’t something you can choose over and over or create one for each keyword, so if you have not started your site yet, think and choose a domain name that is most appropriate for your niche. That should be for your most important keyword/keyphrase. If you have started the website and the domain name isn’t that ideal, then be it. You’ll be more than make up for it if you follow this SEO tips. Read again about the long tail optimization.
Sub-domains and folder names are most appropriate for sub-category within your niche.
File name will the most specific keyword for each page, it should be somewhere along the page title. I would recommend slight variation from the page title to get the maximum result.
For example, if your website is about hotel, and one of your target market is hotels in dublin, the ideal URL would be http://dublin.hotel.com/compare.html for comparison between dublin hotels and http://dublin.hotels.com/information.html for information about dublin hotels. Of course, most of such domain names has been taken long ago, so you got to use some creativity in choosing a good domain name.
There are arguments on which one is more important between sub-domain and folder. I say, it’s up to you. These are mere tools, you can choose to use either sub-domain or folder name. Or you can choose using both of them. Remember though, try to keep the URL as short as possible. Search engines loves short URLs.
4. Link back and Link out
Link-back remains one of the most important aspect of Search Engine Optimization. Some webmasters swears by “If content is king, then linkback is the queen”. Linkback, or sometimes called inbound link, means the hyperlinks from other websites to our sites. Natural links from other sites (when they link to us in their article) without any reciprocal link (us linking back to them in return) remains the best valued link back.
Other methods like web directory submission or link exchange is still useful, eventhough having much less influence on Google. Bing.com is less stringent compared to Google for what constitute as valid link-back, so every link back to your site counts. However, remember that while it is easier for you to accumulate linkback, so are your competitors.
The most valuable links are not those link to your homepage, but linking to specific internal pages. That is called deep-linking.
Aside from linkback to your website, link-out (also called outbound links) to reputable sources is also a good way to improve your site ranking. Do a research and be careful of who you link to. You don’t want to link to websites frowned upon by search engines. For example search for site:cheatad.com in all Google.com, Yahoo.com and Bing.com. You’ll see there are pages indexed in all 3 search engines. If you see that a specific website don’t have any page indexed, steer clear of them. Either those are new websites (which don’t have much reputation point to pass anyway) or bad websites.
5. Use Bing Webmaster Center
Following Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer path, Bing have Webmaster Center for webmasters to manage and review their website and SEO effectiveness. In the Webmaster Center, you can submit your website and sitemap, diagnose crawling issues, as well as review backlinks and outbound links.
6. Meta tags : Meta Description and Meta Keywords
By now, these are considered ancient techniques already. Don’t bother too much with those, unless you have extra spare times.
What do you think? Do you have other Bing SEO tips? Share it here!
Cheatad ! SEO, Google Adsense & Technolgy Blog
I still believe that Google remain the biggest and the most widely used search engine in the world, that’s why, put more attention to it would be much better I think, though Bing is a rising new search engine that’s worth a try to optimize
nice post buddy 
Thanks for the comment. Certainly Google is the main traffic source now. But that also underline that many webmasters still haven’t fully realize the traffic potential from Bing. In simple words, would you prefer placing 1st rank on Bing compared to 4th page on Google? My 2 cents.