10 Bing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips

[mekongtours]

As Bing continues to develop and grow, more and more webmasters would want to know how they can improve their site rankings on Bing. Here are some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips to increase your website’s ranking on Bing:

Bing SEO Tip 1: Web Page Title
It is very important that your page title contains the key words that would summarize the contents of your page

Bing SEO Tip 2: Your Web Domain Age
Bing favors websites with older domains. Essentially, the earlier you register/create your domain, the better Bing will rank you website. So if you are looking into developing a new website, it would be best to purchase or use an older domain.

Bing SEO Tip 3: The right amount of Text
Bing appears to give pages with 300 – 500 words with higher rankings. Unlike Google, Yahoo, or Cuil, Bing seems to focus more on the relevance of the page title to the contents on the page.

Bing SEO Tip 4: A lot of quality links
It is important to build as many back links to your website as possible. However, a good link is sometimes better than 100 regular links and a bad link will actually lower your rankings. So be sure that the links to your page are strongly related to your contents.

Bing SEO Tip 5: Static Links are better
Is best to keep all your URLs static and simple. A static URL is easier to bookmark and easier to index.

Bing SEO Tip 6: Linking to other web pages
In contrast to Google, Bing does not penalize your page rankings if you create a link to a page outside of your website. However, since Google does penalize your rankings, it would be best to limit the amount of external links for the optimal result.

You can still have external links while not leaking your page’s link juice or be penalized. All you have to do is to add rel=”nofollow” in all your link tags.

EX: ‹a href=”samplelink.html” rel=”nofollow” >

Bing SEO Tip 7: Be friendly to the web crawlers
Be sure to have a “robots.txt” file in your main directory that allows the MSNBot to crawl your site. You should also prevent web crawlers from crawling specific files and folders.

Here is an example of a good “robots.txt” from

http://twitter.com/robots.txt

#Google Search Engine Robot
User-agent: Googlebot
# Crawl-delay: 10 — Googlebot ignores crawl-delay ftl
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends

#Yahoo! Search Engine Robot
User-Agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 1
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends

#Microsoft Search Engine Robot
User-Agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 10
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends

# Every bot that might possibly read and respect this file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends

Bing SEO Tip 8: Organized HTML coding style
Bing likes web pages that are designed and coded according to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. This means that you should design web pages with well-formed HTML tags & codes, be sure that your page does no have any unclosed tags or broken links. You can use the W3C validation service

http://validator.w3.org/

to test your page.

Bing SEO Tip 9: Update your pages
If a page from your website is removed or changed to a different URL location, then you need to redirect your visitors to a new web page.

Bing SEO Tip 10: Protect your users
Your web site should not lead visitors to unwanted malware or third-party websites that contain malicious contents or contents that are unrelated to your page.

Update July 6, 2009: Here are some other articles about Bing SEO
Bing SEO Tips (Or Should it be DEO Tips?)

http://www.bizzia.com/articles/bing-seo-tips-or-should-it-be-deo-tips/#comments

Complete Guide of Bing SEO

http://www.bingwindow.com/bing-seo/complete-guide-of-bing-seo/

Update July 14, 2009
Another Bing SEO tip is that Bing has a very strong filter for search results. For example, when you search “bing search” on bing.com you will only get 1 result. All other results are filtered. However, if you google “bing search” you will get a page full of results.

Google is also more friendly with newly developed contents. On google, BingDevelop already has top page ranks with our targeted keywords. However on Bing we where not able to achieve the same results mainly because Bing gives websites with more history higher rankings.

Bing SEO Update July 26, 2009
Register your website at Bing Webmaster. This way you can see the full report/analysis of your website on Bing.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster

Bing SEO Update August 3, 2009
Adding rel=nofollow in your link tags will prevent link juice leakage and prevent search engine link penalization.

EX: ‹a href=”samplelink.html” rel=”nofollow” >

Bing SEO Update August 4, 2009
Before your website shows up on the search results, you need to submit your site to the search engines:

Bing Site Submission:

http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

Google Site Submission:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

[breadnbutter]

Hey, thanks! I have been looking for that bing url submit link for awhile.

People take for granted search engines like bing. Google is all the hype, but there's a significant amount of traffic that comes from yahoo, bing and other search engines! Optimizing on at least 5 of the top search engines will boost traffic through the roof. This is a concept we have not seen much of.

[EmilyRTM]

Thanks!! Very useful information. I have kept it in my computer, do you mind of it? I think it is also suit to google.

[audierules]

Bing does prefer keyword in domain as medium degree.

[erik_kyle_]

Nowadays all are into google! people tends to give more and more emphasis to optimize their sites in google.but often they skip to optimize on bing. so it;s really an useful information and thanks for sharing with everyone here.

[aksatech123]

thanks for the information.

[sunnysingh130]

Thanks for the information....