Search Engine Optimization Tips For Bing

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, Live, and even the recent Bing 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, it becomes essential that we take steps to ensure that our websites are ready for the change. Bing 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 search engine you want to optimize for. However, there are also some additional details you need to take care of.

Here are some search engine optimization tips for Bing

1. Contents

Contents are king. Good contents are what differentiate good websites from the bad. Even if you disregard all other optimization tips below, you will 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)

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 pays more attention to the page title compared with other search engines. Order of the words does not 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 key phrase 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 a 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.

- 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

- Do not 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 place specially high importance on the page URL compared to Google. Try search hotels in dublin in Bing. 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 even though it does not 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 does not have any of the word “hotel” or “dublin” in the URL.

Domain name is not 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/key phrase. 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 these search engine optimization tips.

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 dublin(dot)hotel(dot)com/compare.html for comparison between dublin hotels and dublin(dot)hotel(dot)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 is 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 URL.

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 link-back is the queen”. Link-back, 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, even though it is having much less influence on Google. Bing 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 link-back, 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 link-back 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 do not want to link to websites frowned upon by search engines. For example search for “site:cheatad.com” in Google, Yahoo and Bing. You’ll see there are pages indexed in all 3 search engines. If you see that a specific website does not have any page indexed, steer clear of them. Either those are new websites (which do not 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 Search Engine Optimization effectiveness. In the Webmaster Center, you can submit your website and sitemap, diagnose crawling issues, as well as review back-links and outbound links.

6. Meta tags: Meta Description and Meta Keywords

By now, these are considered ancient techniques already. Do not bother too much with those, unless you have extra spare times.

Well, try the simple techniques above and your website will get much ahead in a very short time.