Go Bingo with Bing (How to do SEO for Bing)

August 25th, 2009 by Mehul Ved

Bing is the all new search engine from Microsoft that is making news. As the popularity spreads more people are starting to use Bing as their default search engine. Thus, with increased numbers of people using Bing, webmasters will want to optimize their site to rank better with Bing. While creating a good site and basics of SEO remain the same, you should read what Bing says officially.

How does Bing index your website:- Bing uses a bot called MSNbot; a web crawler program that scans websites and indexes their content such as text, documents, images, and links, for searching. How does Bing rate your website:- Once the website is indexed, bing ranking algorithm rates the website on the basis of content, number and quality of links, relevance of keywords. These remain the same over various search engines. Therefore, no extra work is required to rate your website higher on their algorithm. Technical Points:- These are some of the techniques to be followed to ensure that your website can be crawled better by MSNbot.

• Use only well-formed, HTML code in your webpages. Make sure that all paired tags are closed, and that all links open the correct webpage. For information on validating your HTML code, see either HTTP Compression and HTTP Conditional Get test tool or W3C Markup Validation Service or use a comparable tool.
• If your website contains broken links, MSNBot might not be able to index your website effectively, thus preventing people from reaching all of your webpages. For information on finding broken links on your website, see the Help topic for the Webmaster Center’s Crawl Issues tool.
• If you move a webpage, set up the webpage’s original URL to redirect people to the new webpage. Indicate whether the move is permanent or temporary.
• Make sure MSNBot is allowed to crawl your website and isn’t on your list of web crawlers that are prohibited from indexing your website.
• Use a Robots.txt file or <meta> tags to control how MSNBot and other web crawlers index your website. You can use the robots.txt file to prevent web crawlers from crawling specific files and folders. For more information about the Robots.txt file and the Robots Exclusion standard, see A Standard for Robot Exclusion.
• Keep your URLs simple and static. URLs that are complicated or that change frequently are difficult to index as link destinations. For example, the URL www.example.com/mywebpage is easier for MSNBot to crawl and for people to type than a long URL with multiple extensions. Also, a URL that doesn’t change is easy for people to remember and bookmark. That makes your webpage a more likely link destination from other websites.
• Watch for malicious software (malware). Links to webpages on your website that lead to malware on third-party websites or contain malicious content, such as a maliciously corrupted image or document file, or a harmful ActiveX control or JavaScript, will be disabled and highlighted as Malware in Bing results webpages.

Content Guidelines:- As much as it is important to have a good technical base, good content is as essential to achieving better results. Here are some of the recommendations from Bing to make your content more effective and popular.

• In the visible webpage text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your website.
• Limit all webpages to a reasonable size. Bing recommends covering one topic per webpage. An HTML webpage with no images should be under 150 KB.
• Make sure that each webpage is accessible by at least one static text link.
• Don’t put the text that you want indexed within images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it isn’t displayed only inside an image of your company logo.
• Add a sitemap, which helps MSNBot to find all of your webpages. Links that are embedded in menus, list boxes, and similar elements aren’t accessible to web crawlers unless they appear in your sitemap.
• Keep your website hierarchy fairly flat. That is, each webpage should only be from one to three clicks away from the default webpage.

There are some unethical techniques used by some webmasters which prevent the site from getting indexed in Bing. They are

• Attempting to increase a webpage’s keyword density by add lots of irrelevant words. This includes stuffing ALT tags that users are unlikely to view.
• Using hidden text or links. Only use text and links that are visible to users.
• Using techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your webpage.

Webmaster Tools:- Bing provides webmasters with some nifty tools to check various parameters of the website with respect to Bing. Let us have a look at some of these tools.

• Summary Tool: Summary tool allows you to confirm whether Bing is crawling your site or not. It gives you information on
  • Last crawl date
  • Domain score which tells how authoritative Bing considers your domain to be
  • Number of pages indexed
  • Whether your site is blocked
  • Rating for each page
  • Website Language
  • Region at which website is targeted
• Profile Tool: This tool is useful to add information to your website. It is used to add/confirm site profile, contact information and confirm verification.
• Crawl Issues Tool: Identify issues that Bing found while indexing your website – File Not Found, Blocked by Robots.txt file, long dynamic URL’s, malware, unsupported content
• Backlinks Tool: Gives you the list of URL’s that link to your site. You can find the list of external links to your site, filter where the backlinks come from, find how specific website references your site. To top it up, you can track results over time and also download the results.
• Outbound Links Tool: This tool provides the list of URL’s from your website to external websites. This tool also allows you to filter and search for malware links from your site.
• Keywords Tool: Keyword tool can be used to get the webpage’s score for a word or phrase.
• Sitemap Tool: Using the sitemap tool you can discover more content your website, understand how the website is structured and find canonical URL’s. Using auto-discover directive in robots.txt you can point MSNbot to your sitemap.
• Robots.txt Validation Tool: This tool is used to validate your robots.txt file with respect to MSNbot and identify if there are any incompatibilities.

Ideally the same efforts that you put into Google would hold true for Bing. Registering with Bing and submitting a sitemap to them IMO would be really good!

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Categories: Tips n Tricks | Tags: bing seo, bing webmasters, google seo, microsoft bing, search engine optimization, seo