SEO For Bing

Written by Sean Bradford – Original Post Is Here.

A little more than a month ago, Microsoft officially launched Bing.com. Preliminary reports that are now being released are showing that the search engine is again continuing to climb in terms of unique visitors and total number of searches.

Last week it was revealed that Bing took 8.23% of the U.S. markets web searches for the month of June, which was up from 7.81% in the month of May. And today reports are coming in that Bing has continued to grow in terms of unique visitors for the month of June.

According to Compete.com, Bing saw a total of 49.57 million unique visitors in June. Surprisingly the number trumps CNN’s 28.54 million, Twitter’s 23 million, and even Digg’s 38.96 million. It is to no surprise that Bing is continuing to grow, given the positive press coverage it has had in the last month.

Image credit – Mashable.com

Another interesting thing to note is that according to Compete.com’s numbers, Bing is ranked #13 in the United States in terms of unique visitors. Microsoft’s previous search engine, Live.com, is still sitting in the #12 position with 79.4 million unique visitors in June.

It is no doubt that Microsoft has a long road ahead if they want to give Google a tough challenge, but they are heading down the right path with Bing. As Microsoft continues to push the Bing platform, yes we said platform (More on that soon), expect to see Bing incorporated into more Microsoft products.

Written by Mark Cijo – Original Post Is Here.

Microsoft launched its new polished version of Windows Live search named Bing. How to do SEO for Bing is a question asked by most of the SEO experts and I thought it is the right time to share my observation on SEO for Bing. What do I need to do for SEO with Bing ? SEO for Bing is not at all a tough task as it was for Live search. The new spider algorithm gives more importance to certain signals to get SERP. For the best SEO for Bing you can count on the following points and make sure you follow the guidelines.

Unique Title Tag:  Bing gives lot of importance for keywords in the title tag. Make sure you have the primary keyword for that particular page in the caption in form of a Meta title tag. If you don’t provide search engines with good, keyword-oriented, well-written caption source data, the resulting captions created by algorithm, no matter how hard Bing try, won’t represent your website as well as those websites whose webmasters did provide this unique and important data.

The usage of consistent data structures between pages: Placing similar data between pages using a similar tree structure, similar class names, support standard markup technologies, such as microformats, etc will help improve the effectiveness of the bing crawler, which puts more of your content into our index.
Submitting your sitemap to Bing: You need to submit your sitemap in XML format if your website is new to Bing, or if you have made any changes to the web pages or added any new product. You can submit your sitemap.xml file via the Sitemap tool in Webmaster Center or directly from your browser’s address bar by going to http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
Make  sure to include the full URL for your website’s sitemap.xml file at the end of this line. If your website is already present in windows live search and you haven’t made any changes recently you can skip this.
Robot files: Make sure that you have a robots.txt file in your website and it allows Bing spider to index the important pages of your website.
Clean HTML Code with W3C Validation: A clean validated code as per the W3C standards will help your website crawl faster by the Bing Spider. You need to make sure that all the open tags are closed, use proper image alt tags and Code Headers. Validate it using W3C Validator.

Check for Broken Links: Make sure that all your links are valid and have no broken or inactive links. This will help spiders from crawling the web page effectively.
Always use Static URLS: Bing loves static html URLs. Dynamic URL’s are not easily crawled by Bing, it takes more time when you have the Dynamic URLs. Use URL rewrite and have it simple with the keyword in the URL. This has proven better results.
SEO for Bing is now same as SEO for Google. All the tactics that works well for Google and Yahoo still go in par with SEO for Bing.
Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design.