bing SEO tips
Ajith | Oct 2009 | Site Promotion, SEO
Fine, 90% of your organic traffic comes from Google search and not from Microsoft bing, Yahoo or other entities. 
But it wouldn’t hurt if you can get a little more search traffic on top of what you already receive, right? Here are some bing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips as documented by the official bing blog.
(Before applying these tips, check if your blog is already getting 6% to 8% of the overall search traffic from bing. If so, there is not much room for optimization as it almost already reflect the bing market share)
Factors that affect (any) SEO
Regardless of whether you are optimizing for Google, Yahoo or bing, there are these following parameters that finally dictate where your pages rank:
- Content quality & uniqueness
- The domain age
- Backlinks and authority of the page
- Neighborhood pages
- Title, meta keyword, content relevancy
Prerequisites to get considered by bing
Even before you start optimizing your content check if your blog satisfies the following prerequisites to help the bing bot crawl and index your site.
1. Submit your blog/site to bing: Use the following URL to submit your blog to bing. If you had already submitted your website to MSN earlier, chances are you are automatically indexed by bing as well. Anyhow, it doesn’t harm if you submit again.
Submit your site to bing
2. Verify at bing webmaster central: Use the bing webmaster central to add your blog and its sitemap there in. Do not forget to verify your site using the XML verification process mentioned there in.
3. Upgrade your Google XML Sitemap plugin: If you are using an old Google XML sitemap plugin on your blog, your post updates may not be alerting the bing search bot to crawl your blog. Hence you need to update the plugin and make sure that ‘Notify bing’ option is checked.
4. Robot.txt: Make sure that you are not blocking the bing/MSN bots via any robot.txt entries.
Bing SEO tips
Now, let me summarize the optimization tips that I got to read on the bing official blog.
#1 Construct good HTML
bing seems to give more weightage to the critical HTML parts such as the page title, meta keywords (much more weightage than Google) and H1 tags. It is a must to have relevant keywords in those three areas to get the bing bot understand the importance of your pages.
#2 User’s language in keywords
For bing, it is important to use those key phrases that people actually use to search than the hyped ones such as ‘Make Money Online‘.
#3 Create location aware content
Unlike Google, the geo-targeting is not something that can be forced on bing via some settings alone. Bing uses on page information to geographically categorize content. Hence if your business is located in a particular town, make sure to use the name of that town (and address on relevant pages) on your pages and meta keywords tag.
#4 Backlinks from authority sites
Just like Google, the backlinks play a role in deciding the authority of your site. Hence you have to have quality backlinks coming in from authority sites and the relevancy of the anchor text is given more importance than the page rank of the originating sites.
#5 Have good number of outbound links
Due to the monetization models around links, Google degrades pages that have dofollow (ie. without rel=nofollow) outbound links. However, as long as the content linked to are relevant with respect to the anchor text, bing loves pages that are linked to relevant content. No dofollow or nofollow worries in this case! In this particular case it’s a toss up between bing and Google. There is more weightage when you are linking to older and established domains (neighborhood matters).
#6 Simplify your site or blog
If your site or blog is heavy on rich internet application technologies (flash, too much of javascript, silverlight etc), chances are the bing bot is confused. Try to minimize the use of such technologies – not just within your blog content but be choosy on your plugins and extensions as well.
#7 Remove trailing ‘/’ from domain name
While internally linking as well as doing offsite SEO, make sure that you simplify your home URL as much as possible by removing the trailing ‘/’. Sometimes, the url with slash and the one without slash (e..g. http://www.dollarshower.com/ and http://www.dollarshower.com) are considered two entities and hence causing dilution of your backlink equity.
#8 Convert all URLs to lowercase
Due to much the same reason as mentioned above, you may convert all your URLs to lowercase for all reference and link building purposes (e.g. http://mysite.com/About to http://mysite.com/about).
#9 Simple and easy to read URLs
Use your permalink structure to keep all your links as human and bot readable ones. URLs containing too many numbers, port number, non-alphabetical characters are not very readable by bots in order to obtain valuable indexing information and relate to their contents.
Also, absolute linking (http://www.dollarshower.com/about) rather than relative path linking (./about) seems to be of help to the bots.
#10 Domain age and landing page content
Older the domain, the more authority you have in the eyes of bing (also true with Yahoo) where as it is fairly easy to tweak your site to high authority when you are trying to achieve Google SEO. Bing also value unique content on landing pages.
At the end it is boiling down to older domain, unique content, good neighborhood and relevant text in key HTML tags.
Happy SEO!
I did not submit my blog to Bing but it’s already sending good traffic. I guess the Guest Posts on relevant(and big) blogs worked!
It is also important to validate site/blog to make sure the cod is valid. This makes indexing job easy not only for Bing but all other bots.
I guess this is something which I have already taking care from beginning and one important factor which you missed here is meta description. BING give weightage to Meta description and so is Google.
Thank you for articulating some differences between Bing and Google seo best practices. We will consider these points, and try to use this knowledge to improve our rankings!
I am going to follow these tips from today. In my last blog i was getting 40% of traffic from yahoo.
i have traffic only from google
[...] more here: bing SEO tips web [...]
Great tips, as much SEO as I’ve been doing, I completely forgot to submit my sites to bing. Thanks for the reminder.
The best way is to use commonly used keywords for the site. It will surely generate good amount of traffic.
@Ishan, Yes… valid (X)HTML code makes life easier for bots to scan the content. Also, javascript that many plugins/scripts blindly use can be a bot-stopper at times.
@Harsh, thanks for pointing out the meta description tag. Definitely, most search engines trust the meta description tag along with the title and that’s where plugins like All-in-one-SEO is very handy
@Coach, Thank you for your comment and I am glad that you found the post interesting.
@Rahul, wow! Looks like you are optimized for Yahoo
Please share your Yahoo SEO tips – I was planning for a post on Yahoo SEO as well.
@SEO Tips for Blogger, If you have a blogspot blog, chances are most of your search traffic originate from Google.
@Matt, mostly your All-in-one-SEO would have done that part
@John, Yes… that’s what Microsoft suggest as well. Instead of ‘make money online’ one may optimize for ‘how can i make money from my blog’ or similar stuff.
Thank you all for your comments!
Good tips, i am getting a decent traffic from bing.
Bing seems to place a whole lot more relevancy on age of site than the rest. Anyone know when they will merge w/ Yahoo’s search engine results?
I think Bing is having different approach for listing sites. The results are based on some research and authority rather than relying heavily on on-page and backlinks factors.
The Google XML Sitemap plugin team updated the plugin right when Bing came out, i think it handled the basic SEO issues and i started getting traffic right away
@Anish, good to know that bing is pouring some visitors for you.
@Atlanta SEO, domain age is a good parameter for both Yahoo and bing. As for the merger of technologies, I am not sure when MS and Yahoo will come together.
@UK SEO, authority & domain age – Yes. But there are a lot of on page factors also (like canonical factors) as per their blog.
@Arun, yes, the plugin takes care of informing the bots, but on page and off site SEO aspects need to be considered as well.
Great post!
I am getting bing traffic but i don’t think it will be 6% of total search engine traffic.
Let me read this again and do the optimizations if needed.
I have a post that will help people to submit the website to Bing. Hope you don’t mind i sharing here.
http://www.niharsworld.com/2009/06/05/submit-website-blog-bing-webmaster-tools/
Thanks again.
Even I don’t get that much bing traffic though there are some visits from bing daily.
[...] Bing SEO tips [...]
Thanx for article it’s help for me..
my blog not indexed in bing i hope after it my blog index in bing
informative tips on bing. im having particular trouble with getting my site coming up in search results for bing. its fine for yahoo and google. i submitted it about a month or so to bing. Have you any idea how long it takes for their bot to visit new sites?
Interesting tips. I never knew that a trailing ‘/’ is considered as two separate entities. I’ve got most of the tips covered though traffic from Bing is still small. Most of my visitors are still hooked on Google
About time we also focused on other Search Engines than Google.
Most of traffic to website comes from Google. But if you get some visitors from bing also than y not . I was having no idea of robot.txt can stop bing. nice post thnx.
nice post, robot.txt i don’t know
Your post helps people understand the importance of website found in Bing
And also help of me with ur great information. Thanks for sharing