There is no doubt that the creators of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, are trying to create a user experience with improvements over the current market leaders such as Google. However, it is obvious that those improvements will take time to cultivate in order to improve significantly. So, for the most part, search engine optimization (SEO) for Bing is not much different than the others but those differences are subtle. This is advantageous because SEO experts will not have to adopt a totally different optimization process for Bing and can still draw upon their experience of what works well. The findings people have made as to what is important for Bing optimizations are mostly derived from side-by-side comparisons of search engine result pages (SERPs) with Google since the public does not really know Bing’s ranking algorithm. Here are a few important SEO considerations to make for Bing.
Your website should be complete and validated. Resist the urge to place a partially completed website online. All major search engines place a high priority on websites that are well-designed, complete, and have cross-browser compatibility—Bing included. You should be validating your code no matter what because doing so helps to ensure the same web presentation no matter what web browser a person is using. Visit the World Wide Web Consortium website for more information on validation.
Relevant and unique content is still just as important. However, some believe that content change rate is not as critical with Bing as it is with Google. For example, blogs are great for Google when there are entries made to them frequently. Google has always placed a greater weight on active and fresh sites. With Bing, the domain age of a site seems to be of greater importance thus fresh content has less of an impact. Content still should be relevant and written for the reader.
Backlinks are not weighted as heavily by Bing in an effort to combat link spamming. Google is well known for ranking a website based on the number of links pointing back to it. This fact has over the years been exploited by those practicing a Black Hat SEO technique known as link spamming or spamdexing. One method of link spamming involves filling a newly-purchased domain with nothing but links to the website getting optimized. Older and more authoritative websites do not usually practice these methods—otherwise they would have been removed from the Google index a long time ago.
Consider the concept of exact match when optimizing for Bing. Experts who have studied Bing with other search engines have noticed that while Google will use closely-related words to a keyword, Bing focuses on exact with the related searches along the left side of the SERP.
Keywords in link anchor text matters to Bing just as it does Google. This is because links that are crafted with important keywords for a website take time to create and are deemed as higher quality. Usually, with link spamming, links are put out as quickly and with as much volume as possible with little consideration for assigning keywords. Keyword anchor text is also thought to help the exact match criteria of Bing as well.
Download and install an SEO toolkit designed for Bing. One such tool is known as the Internet Information Services (IIS) SEO toolkit, a product of Microsoft. This toolkit allows you to check any website for problems that commonly cause ranking difficulties. The site analysis module of this toolkit can analyze a website for potential problems such as broken links and poor site performance. Another useful component of this toolkit includes a module to help edit the robots.txt. The robots.txt file is important for controlling how an indexing robot reads a site and defining which pages to exclude. For example, if a site has duplicate content among two or more pages, the robots.txt file can be easily edited to tell the robot to ignore the duplicates. All the editing is done through a graphical interface relieving the user of the need to remember the textual instructions.
Tags: bing, important, strategies
