Optimizing for Bing
Does the mergence of this new engine mean you have to totally adapt your SEO strategies? Fifteen tips for using Bing, plus additional resources.
Does the mergence of this new engine mean you have to totally adapt your SEO strategies? Fifteen tips for using Bing, plus additional resources.
Bing.
MSN is calling it “the sound of found.” I call it the sound of Web site owners and online marketers scrambling to figure out what this means for their search strategies. Does the emergence of this new engine mean you have to adapt your SEO (define) strategies? Are there certain things you should keep in mind when optimizing specifically for Bing?
I was curious to find this answer, so I did some investigation, leveraging both MSN/Bing content as well as observations and findings from fellow search professionals, and here’s what I came up with.
Summary of Overall Findings
From the Horse’s Mouth
It must be said that MSN maintains that you cannot manipulate your rankings in the organic search results:
That said, MSN offers quite a few Web sites and tools to help site owners ensure their sites are well positioned for indexing within the engine. Bing Webmaster Center provides lots of helpful documentation and tools, including technical and content guidelines similar to Google’s Webmaster Tools.
The Webmaster Center Tools offer some unique features that I haven’t seen elsewhere, including Product Upload, which allows site owners to upload and publish their products and offers for free so that they appear in the product search.
There’s also a Webmaster blog, which contains a useful section on search marketing. In particular the following posts are helpful:
As part of the Webmaster Center, Bing offers “Guidelines to Successful Indexing” to help Web site owners ensure that the MSNBot can index all of their content.
Technical suggestions:
Content suggestions:
Big no-nos:
None of these suggestions are really new per se, but it does give us a sense of Bing’s key areas of interest.
Ultimately, successful SEO with Bing isn’t going to be much different than with any other SEO strategies. That said, hopefully these tips have made you aware of Bing resources that you can use to help increase your visibility in Bing.
For more information, check out:
Happy Bing-ing!