SEO For Bing

Written by Marius Oiaga – Original Post Is Here.

What is a search engine without a collection of tools tailored to the needs of webmasters and web developers? With the Bing Toolbox Microsoft is looking to provide website owners with the resources necessary to adapt their websites and online applications to Bing. The Redmond company announced the Bing Toolbox at the end of the past week, indicating that the website brought to the table a set of tools built especially for the Bing community. The promise from the software giant is that Bing Toolbox will serve as the key to boost user engagement and traffic to websites and web-based apps via the successor of Live Search.

“We’re really excited to announce the arrival of the Bing Toolbox, a new portal for all you Bing webmasters, publishers, developers, and advertisers out there. The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community, plus links to our Webmaster and Developer community blogs and forums. The Toolbox provides everything you need to work with Bing in one place—as well as the site you’ll want to regularly visit for announcements of cool new features the moment they’re ready,” revealed Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center.

Bing Toolbox enables website owners to easily submit their URLs to be indexed by the search engine. At the same time, the portal enables the submission of sitemap files and access to the Bing webmaster tools. For developers looking to use Bing as a platform, the Toolbox allows them to get an AppID, the first step on leveraging the Bing application programming interface (API).

“Developer tools now available in the Bing Toolbox include those for API access, PowerToys, Maps, and Translator. This is a first effort and we’ll be building out the site with new content and updated tools as they become available,” a member of the Bing team added.

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.

Written By Tim Anderson, guardian.co.uk – Original Post Is Here.

Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, went live on Monday 1 June, though the UK version is in beta and lacks many of the features in the US edition. Although the core index is the same, Bing is not just a rebranding of Microsoft Live Search, but has new features – including instant preview of websites and ­videos, automatic categorisation of search results, and Best Match results with deep links.

What about the actual results, though – are they as good as those from Google? Michael Kordahi, a Microsoft employee, reckoned that testing search could be like tasting wine, where you cannot help being influenced by the label, so he created a blind search engine. Search results are returned in three columns with identical formatting, representing hits from Bing, Google and Yahoo (the order varies), and users vote for the best one. His site went live on 7 June. Initial results slightly favoured Bing. A day later, Google had pulled ahead. “Google: 45%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 21% | 8,518 votes” reported Google’s search associate Matt Cutts in a Twitter post. Shortly afterwards, Yahoo’s vote soared, but by then it was obvious something was wrong. “Some douche is gaming the system, I’ve removed the ability to see the results until I sort this out,” reported Kordahi.

The result is that we are no closer to knowing which search engine generates the most favoured results, though early indications suggest while Google may be slightly preferred, its margin of success is less than its market share. According to figures from Net Applications, Google gets around 82% of searches, against 9.5% for Yahoo and 5.5% for Microsoft.

That raises the question: is there anything Microsoft can do to wean us away from Google? The search giant is the default in Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox, and it is common for new PCs to come with Google’s search tools pre-installed. According to Advertising Age, Microsoft is budgeting $80m-$100m to promote Bing, but it will take more than advertising to change people’s search patterns. The evidence so far is that Bing saw an early spike in usage, driven by tech-savvy users giving it a try, only to sink back a few days later as old habits returned. Bing needs to be dramatically better than Google. Being almost as good will not win new users; though even Kordahi’s blind test is not perfect, as it hides the new usability features that Microsoft is promoting.

The consolation for Microsoft is that most reviewers have found Bing better than expected, and that while Google will be untroubled, winning a few points of market share looks possible, though by no means assured. There is still potential for new approaches to search though, and to prove it the best tool for researching what happened to Kordahi’s search experiment is neither Google nor Bing – but rather Twitter.