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 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 Abhimanyu – Original Post Is Here.

so with the launch of Bing (but it is not google called by many MS fanboys),Microsoft has gained Search market share by 2% in no time. People have reported and responded well to bing though it still has to go a long way to put any kind of challenge to Google.

Since Bing is just MSN with new name, the seo techniques for Bing will remain same as for MSN. The new content still ranks well in Bing just like msn. Here are few tips on SEO for Bing -

1. Submit your sites to Bing to here

2. Bing likes fresh content, so feed it as much as you can.

3. Most of the ranking parameters are just like for other search engines. I have noticed that new content do not stay that longer in bing as earlier it used to be.

4. Keyword rich domains rank very easily in bing just like msn so if you have a site like keyword1-keyword2.com, you can rank easily for “keyword 1 keyword2″ in bing search engine.

5. You can submit your sitemap to Bing from webmater tools here

6. It seems bing is giving lot of weightage to age of domain as I am seeing lot of sites with strong backlinks and old age ranking very high. Anyway you can’t do much about such factors so better leave it and focus on quality of content.

7. Bing seems to be giving lot of weightage to on page seo factors too so you may like to optimize title, keyword, description etc but don’t over do it and certainly do not prioritize it as you can easily trigger search engine filters due to this.