10 Bing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips
« Previous Post | Next Post »As Bing continues to develop and grow, more and more webmasters would want to know how they can improve their site rankings on Bing. Here are some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips to increase your website’s ranking on Bing:
Bing SEO Tip 1: Web Page Title
It is very important that your page title contains the key words that would summarize the contents of your page
Bing SEO Tip 2: Your Web Domain Age
Bing favors websites with older domains. Essentially, the earlier you register/create your domain, the better Bing will rank you website. So if you are looking into developing a new website, it would be best to purchase or use an older domain.
Bing SEO Tip 3: The right amount of Text
Bing appears to give pages with 300 – 500 words with higher rankings. Unlike Google, Yahoo, or Cuil, Bing seems to focus more on the relevance of the page title to the contents on the page.
Bing SEO Tip 4: A lot of quality links
It is important to build as many back links to your website as possible. However, a good link is sometimes better than 100 regular links and a bad link will actually lower your rankings. So be sure that the links to your page are strongly related to your contents.
Bing SEO Tip 5: Static Links are better
Is best to keep all your URLs static and simple. A static URL is easier to bookmark and easier to index.
Bing SEO Tip 6: Linking to other web pages
In contrast to Google, Bing does not penalize your page rankings if you create a link to a page outside of your website. However, since Google does penalize your rankings, it would be best to limit the amount of external links for the optimal result.
You can still have external links while not leaking your page’s link juice or be penalized. All you have to do is to add rel=”nofollow” in all your link tags.
EX: ‹a href=”samplelink.html” rel=”nofollow” >
Bing SEO Tip 7: Be friendly to the web crawlers
Be sure to have a “robots.txt” file in your main directory that allows the MSNBot to crawl your site. You should also prevent web crawlers from crawling specific files and folders.
Here is an example of a good “robots.txt” from http://twitter.com/robots.txt
#Google Search Engine Robot
User-agent: Googlebot
# Crawl-delay: 10 — Googlebot ignores crawl-delay ftl
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends#Yahoo! Search Engine Robot
User-Agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 1
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends#Microsoft Search Engine Robot
User-Agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 10
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends# Every bot that might possibly read and respect this file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends
Bing SEO Tip 8: Organized HTML coding style
Bing likes web pages that are designed and coded according to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. This means that you should design web pages with well-formed HTML tags & codes, be sure that your page does no have any unclosed tags or broken links. You can use the W3C validation service to test your page.
Bing SEO Tip 9: Update your pages
If a page from your website is removed or changed to a different URL location, then you need to redirect your visitors to a new web page.
Bing SEO Tip 10: Protect your users
Your web site should not lead visitors to unwanted malware or third-party websites that contain malicious contents or contents that are unrelated to your page.
Update July 6, 2009: Here are some other articles about Bing SEO
Bing SEO Tips (Or Should it be DEO Tips?)
Complete Guide of Bing SEO
Update July 14, 2009
Another Bing SEO tip is that Bing has a very strong filter for search results. For example, when you search “bing search” on bing.com you will only get 1 result. All other results are filtered. However, if you google “bing search” you will get a page full of results.
Google is also more friendly with newly developed contents. On google, BingDevelop already has top page ranks with our targeted keywords. However on Bing we where not able to achieve the same results mainly because Bing gives websites with more history higher rankings.
Bing SEO Update July 26, 2009
Register your website at Bing Webmaster. This way you can see the full report/analysis of your website on Bing.
http://www.bing.com/webmaster
Bing SEO Update August 3, 2009
Adding rel=nofollow in your link tags will prevent link juice leakage and prevent search engine link penalization.
EX: ‹a href=”samplelink.html” rel=”nofollow” >
Bing SEO Update August 4, 2009
Before your website shows up on the search results, you need to submit your site to the search engines:
Bing Site Submission: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
Google Site Submission: http://www.google.com/addurl/
Bing SEO Update August 21, 2009
Read the Bing–NewFeaturesForWebmasters.pdf document from Microsoft.
Thanks For keeping it on target
Best Regards
Does Bing care about nofollw code?
YES. Is best that you have a nofollow parameter for all the links on your website that you do not want pass link juice too.
For example, on our website, we have nofollow to all of links on the comments, categories, tags, and search pages. So this way, only the individual articles are indexed and containing as few page links possible where the link juiced might be leaked.
[...] means higher revenue for web publishers. Therefore, it is essential that you become familiar with Bing Search Optimization Techniques in order to increase your web traffic from [...]
Hey BingDevelop. I like the tips and I followed all of them. I was wondering how to get my site crawled in the first place? Ive had the Bing Webmaster account for about 2 weeks and have the robots.txt file but my Domain score, last crawled, and indexed pages are N/A and Blocked=No. Is there anything else I can do?
Have you submitted your website to the Bing search engine. Before Google, Bing, or Yahoo! can find your website, you must first submitted your website address.
This is the link to submit your website address:
http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
Oh thanks. I wasnt aware of that, its my first real website.
You should update your tip 6.
Google doesn’t PENALIZE for having external links, there are blogs/sites which link to ext. sites in almost all of their posts, but still are highly ranked in Google.
Moreover points like these actually encourage readers to avoid linking to other websites as mush as possible, and due to which people are nowadays hesitating to give credits too….that’s pathetic !
Having a lot of external links does leak your link juices. However, I do understand that you need to link to other pages for easier user experience.
There is a way to have external links while not leaking your page link juice. Simply use >>> rel=”nofollow” <<< for your every link.
Thanks for the suggestion, I will add the new part as an update.
I think there is nothing to do special for bing.com search engine.
Do a normal SEO like what you were doing for other search engines.
If you do over SEO it may cause your site get blocked.
As long as you stay away from Black Hat SEO then you should be fine. Like any other search engines, SEO for Bing is very important.
Not to mention because Yahoo! & Bing has currently agreed to merge their search engine efforts, approximately 30% of internet searches will be done through Bing. So I think optimization for Bing is very important.
Good day, Guys… I can’t really understand if Bing penalizes websites that doesn’t conform to the W3C webpage standards. The moment Bing was launched, I submitted my Technologian blog for indexing, and have seen the result after few days… I am not really sure if my blog has been or being penalized by Bing since it’s not appearing on Bing anymore…
Technologian,
it would be best if you sign in to Bing webmaster to see whether or not your site is listed. The Bing webmaster would also give you a lot of feed back about your site.
http://www.bing.com/webmaster
also, usually your website needs to be re-indexed if you added any new meta descriptions or if you have changed your website structure. give a week at most and your site will be back
Thanks for including Bingwindow in your post.
When Bing was first launched Matt Cutts sent a tweet to say it was “spammy”, so I checked out my own stable. It all looked good except for two entries, the last of which was for an Egyptian hotel in Bangkok, whereas the search was for “web design bangkok”. It’s still the same today.
Then I came across http://www.bingdevelop.com/bingcompete/compare-your-search-bing-vs-google-vs-yahoo and on my test of ten random, newsworthy search terms and Google and Bing were neck and neck.
This test proves that Google should be very worried about its close SE rival.
Well, it might take a while before Bing reaches a point where it threatens google, but right now at the moment it sure has people at Google concerned
Nice post . It will help people SEO and Bing to give more accurate data to end users.
Thanks,
there are also a lot of resources available on the bing community website.
I checked out your website and I think businesses these days really need a SEO plan, plan ranking in Google, Bing, or any other search engine is very important in terms of getting traffic for your website
thank you for the tip.
Todday, we hope your website cheap4wholesale.com ranks well with Bing. BE sure to come back sometimes because we are currently writing a new article on advance Bing SEO techniques.
Useful tips. Thanks for sharing it
We are glad that you like it
No doubt MS new Search engine is far better then old Live search. It simply great, I was really searching for bing optimization. And you really helps me. Thanks
thanks a lot
be sure to check often because we are in the process producing new contents.
Bing SEO Tip 7: Be friendly to the web crawlers
Here is an example of a good “robots.txt” from http://twitter.com/robots.txt
These tips can also be applied to other search engines in general, however, the weight factors & effectiveness for each tip might change.