SEO Tips for Bing
If you have not heard, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search are set soon to merge search engine efforts. Microsoft Bing will soon provide the search results in the Yahoo Search engine. This deal between Microsoft and Yahoo has both companies hoping it will help them better compete with Google’s dominance in the search engine arena. However this change will effect your sites SEO and rankings because Yahoo Slurp (Yahoo’s Current Crawler) and MSNbot (The Bing web crawler) do rank and rate web sites differently based on search criteria and algorithms.
I ran across a few SEO Tips for Bing, and decided to expand upon them. In this article, I will post some tips that will help your web site or blog rank better in the Microsoft Bing search engine which means you will also rank better in the Bing powered Yahoo search in the future. To ensure the best results with Bing, please follow the easy SEO tips below.
SEO Tips for Microsoft Bing
The following tips are the best search engine optimization tips one can follow to get started ranking in Microsoft Bing.
1. Domain Age: The relative age of your domain and how long it is registered play a big role in how bing ranks your search results more so than Google from most observations. The older your domain is and the longer it is registered, the better your site will rank in Bing. Also, the older and longer it is registered, the more pages from your web site or blog will appear in the bing search engine index.
2. Amount of text on web page or blog post: The longer the web page, and the more text you have on a blog post or page the better off you are in Bing’s eyes. The search engine takes the length of the article very seriously in its search engine algorithm as content is king. It uses such factors to prevent content scrappers and others from ranking high on the backs of other peoples work.
3. Quality of Sites You Link Out To: Unlike Google, Bing encourages linking out to sites that are related to your own that have good content. Bing actually gives ranking boosts to pages that have links out to quality resources. Even though Google will alter the PageRank of pages with outbound links, as long as those links are to quality relevant sources it won’t be much of a change and you will benefit in the Bing rankings.
4. The Popularity of Links: Bing differs from Google in link popularity. Bing does not place as much emphasis on this as Google does which means you can rank easier in Bing with less backlinks. However remember the more backlinks you have the better, and backlinks from quality sources related to your sites niche will never hurt you.
5. Title Tag of your Page or Blog: This is very important aspect of optimizing your site or blog for Bing. The Bing search engine puts high relevance on the Title Tags of your pages and posts on your blog/web site. ensure the keywords you want to rank for are included in your title tags.
6. Keyword Anchor Text: when linking out to another resource on the web, ensure that the source web page your linking to has some or all of the keywords you wish to rank for in the page’s Title tag. Bing simply loves this practice and will give your web page or blog post a little more of a boost in its rankings.
7. Make use of sites like Propeller and Reddit: Social Media sharing sites like Propeller and Reddit are constantly crawled by nearly every web crawler out there. ensure you make use of these sites every once in awhile by submitting links to feature rich articles to them. This will help ensure your pages get better indexed by Bing. Even though using sites like Digg, Technoratti, and the like is encouraged, I find many people don’t really take advantage of these services, especially Propeller to maximize their web sites exposure.
8. Make use of H1 tags: Make sure you take advantage of H1 html heading tags for the keywords you want to rank for and include them on the page. This will help your basic keyword relevance in the eyes of the crawler.
9. Take Advantage of Trackbacks: Trackbacks are when you link out to another blog, or another blog links out to you. Take advantage of the WordPress Trackback feature and link out to other blogs. This will help the search engine find your links faster and help get them indexed. Trackbacks help because it can help you get a keyword anchor text link with your keywords on another blog. also, they can help you get keyword anchor links to other quality blogs on your site which will help you out in Bing.
If you follow these tips above, you should see your web sites exposure and ranking in Bing improve some what. I just want to stress that like any search engine, the more inbound links you can get the better off you will be. There is no magic sword in the search engine optimization world. If you talk to search engine optimization experts you will get mixed answers on what works in the SEO world concerning Bing, however the above is how I get traffic from Microsoft Bing. It has proven to be an effective method using white hat SEO techniques.
Even though I have been critical of Bing in the past, they have improved the search engine somewhat over the last few months, and good sites are beginning to rank in it. Following the tips above will ensure your site is better suited to rank in Bing when it takes over Yahoo search in the very near future.
Comments welcome!
Great guidelines for any SEO. I didn’t know Trackbacks can be used so effectively. We should definitely try this.