Bing SEO Tips
Only time will tell whether Bing becomes a major competitor to Google. However, for the time being, thanks to their massive $80-$100 million advertising campaign, there is no denying that for the time being, people are using Bing.
Towards the end of last month, Garry wrote a post that included a link to a blog that is dedicated to sharing information about Bing. While this blog includes some valuable advice about SEO for Bing, I always think that its quite useful to gather information from multiple sources, which is why I want to share this post with you.
On the last day of August, I came across a post in Advertising Age called “After Microsoft-Yahoo Deal, SEO Isn’t Just About Google Anymore.” While the post itself was interesting and is worth reading, what really caught my eye was one of the comments.
The comment was left by Rodney Mason, who is the CMO of Moosylvania (a company that specializes in branding, design, promotions and marketing). Rodney also appears to be an active user of Twitter.
Although I could summarize the thirteen points he made in his comment for you, they were so detailed for a single blog comment that I think it is well worth republishing all thirteen points in their entirety:
Some thoughts for optimizing Bing;
1) Focus on categories presented for your most key search terms. Use Bing’s categories in your key words and in your site navigation.
2) Domain Age is very important. Building micro-sites off your main site vs. independent new sites is key for Bing. Additional findings for Bing thus far.
3) Text Rules
Bing favors pages with at least 300 words of text.
4) Linking Out
Bing favors linking out more than other engines as long as the links are relevant to the overall context of the site and keywords.
5) News Sites vs. Blogs
Bing favors news source sites over blogs especially for breaking news, although major blogs are recognized by Bing as major news sources. Blogs with less significant traffic are not.
6) Page Titles
As with any white hat SEO strategy, page titles should correlate well with the primary subject and keywords on page. Bing seems to follow this more stringently than other web sites.
7) Heavy Flash sites rank better with Bing than Google. A good strategy for a site with a lot of Flash is to emphasize SEO for Bing and continue your Google efforts. Bing and Google draft off one another indirectly as they are both continuously crawling off the web. That means Bing can help heavy Flash sites do better on Google over time as well.
8 ) Don’t overuse keywords in your content and also don’t use irrelevant keywords to increase a page’s keyword density.
9) Place average keywords in your meta tags and content.
10) Don’t use hidden text or links else your website can be blacklisted and ignored.
11) Avoid overused link schemes to avoid being banned.
12) Enable MSNBot onto your site and submit URLs for all sub-pages as it doesn’t automatically crawl all pages.
13) Keep fresh relevant content on your site and update it regularly.
If any of you have additional Bing SEO Tips, be sure to share them with us all in the comments below!
September 5th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
It’s interesting to see so many similarities between the two engines, and yet, see such as significant difference in the SERPs. Ann Smarty also published a great comparison of SEO for Bing and Google (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-differences-between-google-and-bing/12678/) that is definitely worth a look as well and a great companion for this piece.
Angie Haggstrom
Senior Copywriter & Founder, Angie’s Copywriting
September 24th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
With Bing taking up more and more of the search market (25-30%), it’s definitely worth a look and it should definitely start to play a role in the SEO strategies conducted by agencies & in-house marketers. It will be interesting to see how the search landscape changes going forward and how it affects webmasters in general. I remember reading Bing’s patent and them indicating that they put a great deal of weight into web documents that link to & from blogs.
September 28th, 2009 at 8:47 am
This is a good post about Bing SEO. It has been a hot talking point lately and is good for people to get some clarification.
September 29th, 2009 at 5:22 am
i was looking for seo tips to get well ranked in Bing. found useful tips and will follow those very seriously as to rank pretty well and gain visitors
October 25th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
New seo tip: Backlink with the same keyword to subpages as it is in your title tag
January 21st, 2010 at 1:20 am
I think that Bing is going to rise this year due to the fact that there is so much advertising and they have placed their search box´s all over.
April 3rd, 2010 at 11:18 pm
i hope bing doesn't do that well…because i am nowhere to be found on that search engine. i do best in yahoo, then google.
April 19th, 2010 at 12:08 am
Thanks for this. Not a lot is known about Bing and I was having trouble getting ranked, hopefully I can do better now.
April 20th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
It has been a hot talking point lately and is good for people to get some clarification.
May 24th, 2010 at 12:44 am
There is really a lot more to say about this topic these days than ever before. I salute you for speaking out on it and making your site informative. Thanks
June 2nd, 2010 at 10:30 am
this is good explaination but still its not clear..those 13 points are general..we need something different and unique to work on bing seo thing..
bing is really working well nowadays..will be a big competitor to google but it will take time.. huge amount of time
June 29th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Here in South Africa Google is so dominant that there is very little need to pay attention to the other search engines, Bing included. What I do find of interest is that flash pages get indexed better by Bing and that by pushing them to rank on Bing you actually end up influencing the Google rankings too. So the search engines do actually go and check how the other search engines feel about a page. This is of great interest to me.
July 2nd, 2010 at 12:57 pm
What I'm pleased to see is that no one will have to re-invent the wheel here. The two search engines are very close in their SEO requirements. If we just continue to provide good clean quality content our sites should do well
August 29th, 2010 at 2:46 am
I hope this will help me to get my website to first page in bing