Optimize Your Website For Bing

Bing is the new web search engine from Microsoft, launched in June, 2009. By August 2009, Bing had gained 9.3 percent of the United States Internet search market. Bing promotes itself as a decision engine rather than simply a search engine, and so far has done a fairly good job of making inroads into the otherwise almost unstoppable Google empire on the Internet.

Bing offers several features that differentiate it from other search engines.

1. Categories

All search engines return relevant results from many categories of content. Bing supplies a left hand column list of categories to choose from so that with one click, you can receive news, images and so on.

2. Summary

You can click on the right side of the screen and pull up a small summary of the page you are being directed to, so that you can make a better decision about whether or not to bother going there.

Bing is currently focused on building its capabilities in the areas of travel, entertainment and ecommerce, so it is a great place for online entrepreneurs to penetrate. Here are some optimization tactics.

Join Bing

Go to Bings webmaster site. Click the button for Add a site and enter your URL and then verify your site. Click on the site you have added, and if the authentication is successful you will be directed to a summary page. The summary should indicate when your site was last crawled by Bing, back links, keyword rankings.

Bingle

Bingle is a search engine that provides Google and Bing results side by side so you can get a good feel for how you are being treated by both search engines.

Keywords in URLs

This issue seems particularly important to Bing. You will rank higher if your keywords are in your title.

Back links

Back links are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links. Bing counts back links heavily but they only count back links that they consider to be high quality. You can look at Bings ranking of your back links within their webmaster tools. You will see that they are rated from one to five in a little green bar. Using anchored back links will help you get higher ratings. (Anchored back links are those which have the words you are targeting in them.)

Domain age

Bing, like Google, prefers domains that have been established for a while. One way to get around that issue is to buy an older domain name and refurbish the site for your purposes.

Blogs

This is a piece on non advice: do not count on your blog to help you attract Bings attention; they do not seem to show up very often in Bing results.

Follow Bings Advice

Bing has published advice for optimization success. Among its recommendations:

Target no more than two keywords per page
Use unique title tags on each page
Use unique Meta description tags on each page
Use H1 tags
Use text navigation links

In addition, Microsoft has published a technical paper for webmasters that explains Bing in detail and provides helpful information for working with its search engine spiders. It is called Bing: Features Relevant for Webmasters.

While some people say that if you have optimized for Google, you have optimized for Bing, it appears that there is still worthwhile fine tuning you can do.