SEO For Bing

Every major search engine provides hints and tips about how to optimize your pages for improved rankings on their sites. But when you read these guidelines you quickly see that most of it is just their own wish list. Things like ‘Write for humans not search engine bots – or – do not hide keywords with a font matching the background color.’ It is all good advice but kind of general and already well known (for the past decade.)

But there are always things a search engine will not tell you. And, of course, these are the things that make all the difference in your SEO efforts and results. That said; here are eight things that Bing does not want you to know (or you can skip to the Magic Formula section at the end):

1.) Your Domain Name Matters – A Lot

Search for just about anything on MSN / Bing and at least three of the top five matches will have some version of that keyword as the domain name. For example if you wanted to optimize for the keyword ‘my domain’ you should try to get the domain name ‘mydomain.com.’ If that is taken, opt for ‘my-domain.com.’ If that’s taken try for a name starting with ‘mydomain’ and ending with a word that is commonly associated. This is called LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. A good example would be ‘mydomainname.com’ or ‘my-domain-name.com.’ BTW, Bing treats dashes as a space so as long as long as the dashes merely separate words, they are treated much like the non dash version.

2.) There is No Sandbox

Here’s some great news for anyone just getting started. Bing does not seem to care about the age of your domain name. There is no ’sandbox’ like Google has. Many people, myself included, have registered brand new domains and had them ranking in a matter of days.

3.) DotCom Trumps DotNet

Today some search engines like Google will often give .net and .com virtually the same value, and possibly higher value for a .org that is for a recognized non-profit organization. Bing however appears to prefer the .com version. You can even see instances where a ‘.co.uk’ site gets high rankings simply because it uses the exact keyword in the domain name and .co is close enough to .com.

4.) We Like Sub Domains

Most web hosts will let you add sub domains to your website. On Bing, if you have the sub domain mydomain.mydomain.com you are in for some potentially great rankings. The same is true if you have my.domain.com, but to a slightly lesser degree.

5.) Less is More – Part One

We have been trained by Google to try to have hundreds of pages of quality content on every website. Bing adheres to the old policy that they are indexing web ‘pages’ not web ’sites’ (like Google says they do, but Bing appears to really mean it.) This means each page is treated on its own merit so a site with one page has the same chances of being ranked as a site with 100 pages, because each page is genuinely treated individually.

6.) Less is More – Part Two

The same rule as above goes for on-page text. Pages with 800 to 1,200 words seem to do best on Google but on Bing the reverse is true, with 250 to 500 words being the magic number. Just do not overuse your keyword.

7.) Links are Nice But Not Required

Forget about spending your life building an ever growing number of inbound links for Bing. They do not need them. Your site, for now at least, is judged by its own merits, page by page.

8.) Be Bold not Strong

The original SEO method dating back to 1996 was using the H1 or ’strong’ heading tags in your HTML. Forget them for now. Bing gives higher priority to how you would express importance in a word processor document; larger font and bolded text as the main markers.

Summary: I build hundreds of Bing (formerly MSN) targeted mini sites every year using the information above (as it has evolved) and the results have been consistent top ten rankings. You can do it too!

Here’s my magic formula for a one hour top ranking:

A.) Get the .com version of a three to four word keyword as the domain name (dashes are fine.)

B.) Use the domain name as the page heading in a bolded font, slightly larger than the paragraph text.

C.) Write 400 words of natural sounding text using the keyword up to five times.

D.) Mention the keyword once in the first sentence and once in the final sentence of the page – then up to three times scattered throughout the remainder.

E.) Bold one instance of the keyword. Italicize one instance of the keyword. Use one instance of the keyword as a link back to the same page.

F.) Always fill in your Title, Description and Keywords META tags. That’s it.

Good luck and take care!

PS: This works for Yahoo too.

Written by Bena Roberts – Original Post Is Here.

I took a look at Alexa this morning and Bing was on the home page showing the most amazing spike in traffic ever.  So, I put in a query for bing.com vs yahoo.com vs google.com.

The chart below shows the results – Yahoo and Google still lead but Bing is coming up and up.  Its strategy of advertising on competitors sites has worked.

In fact, advertising BING on Google and Yahoo is a great way of instantly getting to the top of search engines. The clicks will effect competitors algorithms and make Bing a stronger brand overnight. On top of that organic traffic will be built when click throughs instantly become account users – from the competitor portals. Time on the site and weight vs distribution of the ads will also improve Bing’s SEO instantly.

Written by Bena Roberts – Original Post Is Here.

by Tim Grice – Original post is here.

Just a quick one today following on from my look at how Bing could be ranking sites yesterday.

I have had comments here on the blog, on twitter and even by email looking for a little more proof that Bing is putting their main emphasis on domain age and target anchor percentage. For anyone who missed the post yesterday, target anchor percentage means the percentage of backlinks that are anchored with your target keyword.

Today I wanted to back up the evidence from yesterday with some more lovely figures I decided to use linkscape and the SEOmoz tool set to take an indepth look at the keyword “make money”. I chose this one due to the competition and the fact that most sites targeting this phrase are heavily optimised.

Below are the results and again I have circled the areas “I” think Bing are putting the most emphasis on for ranking purposes.

The two sites are:

Experienced People – Number 1 on Google for “make money”.

Making Online Money – Number 1 on Bing

Some Points To Note

1 – As you can see from the above table the Google site is far better optimised on page, more quality backlinks, more target anchor links and a far superior PageRank. This makes it easy to understand why Google ranks it so high but why does Bing not?

The only thing I can put this down to is the fact that the Bing Site has a more focused link profile in that it has a higher percentage of anchored backlinks. It also is an older domain slightly, on every test I have done the domains have always been older than those on Google.

2 – Bing are obviously not taking the amount and quality of backlinks or PageRank into consideration or their top “make money” site would not stand a chance. PageRank 2??

3 – Something I picked up on from both sites was that very little link juice passed through their target anchor links. This says to me that you don’t need your anchored links to be high quality in order to pass on relevance.

4 – In order to rank higher on Google you need to view SEO as a total package leaving no area under optimised. If you want top results on Google ,who have around 80% traffic share, you need to be systematically implementing SEO on and off page.

In my opinion from the evidence I have collected, Bing are putting a strong focus on domain age and target anchor link percentage. It won’t allow many spammers to get good rankings for competitive keywords but what it will do is create a lack of freshness among their results, something Google accomplish with ease.

Thanks

Tim- Original post is here.