Bing SEO Tips

Here are the Bing SEO tips:
1. Domain Age is Key
Bing appears to put a lot of stock into how long ago a domain was registered. For marketers, this means that you may look to purchase older domains if you want to get on good position in Bing.
2. Text Rules
On most search engines, the amount of text on the page usually isn’t usually a huge factor. However, Bing appears to really like pages with at least 300 words of text.
3. Link Out
With Google especially, some marketers are scared to link out to other websites because they don’t want their Page Rank to be lowered. On Bing, linking out actually appears to be smiled upon.
4. Bad News for Bloggers
Google seems to appreciate the blogosphere more than Bing. This is especially true when recent news events occur and bloggers battle with major websites for space on the search engine results page.
5. Bing Loves Titles
If you want to make it to the top of Bing, be sure to have a title that correlates to the subject at hand. Without following this SEO tip (or is a DEO tip?), your other efforts may be lost.

via everyjoe.com

Domain Age: Bing is a lot harsher about domain age than Google. The longer your domain has been registered, the more favor it will find with Bing. One may consider acquiring older domains to enhance the chances of being picked up by Bing.
Length of Text: For Bing, size does matter. So, ensure that your webpages have content of at least 300 words. The length of the text is more of a significant factor for Bing than it is for Google.
Link Out: Google alters your page rank based on the relevance of the link out webpages. Often, people are unsure of how a particular link out would impact their webpage and steer clear of this option. However, Bing likes link outs and increases the page ranking of those webpages that have more of them.
Title Tag of your Page: The title tag is of utmost importance for Bing. Without the relevant keyword in this area, your complete SEO efforts could be wasted.
Title Tags of Other Pages: When you link out from your page, ensure that the title tags of the pages you have linked out to have the keyword that is most relevant to your page. Bing simply loves this.
Link Popularity: Google is more fascinated with link popularity than Bing.

via vedainformatics.com

Factors that affect (any) SEO

Regardless of whether you are optimizing for Google, Yahoo or bing, there are these following parameters that finally dictate where your pages rank:

• Content quality & uniqueness
• The domain age
• Backlinks and authority of the page
• Neighborhood pages
• Title, meta keyword, content relevancy

Prerequisites to get considered by bing

Even before you start optimizing your content check if your blog satisfies the following prerequisites to help the bing bot crawl and index your site.
1. Submit your blog/site to bing: Use the following URL to submit your blog to bing. If you had already submitted your website to MSN earlier, chances are you are automatically indexed by bing as well. Anyhow, it doesn’t harm if you submit again.
Submit your site to bing
2. Verify at bing webmaster central: Use the bing webmaster central to add your blog and its sitemap there in. Do not forget to verify your site using the XML verification process mentioned there in.
3. Upgrade your Google XML Sitemap plugin: If you are using an old Google XML sitemap plugin on your blog, your post updates may not be alerting the bing search bot to crawl your blog. Hence you need to update the plugin and make sure that ‘Notify bing’ option is checked.
4. Robot.txt: Make sure that you are not blocking the bing/MSN bots via any robot.txt entries.

Bing SEO tips

Now, let me summarize the optimization tips that I got to read on the bing official blog.

#1 Construct good HTML

bing seems to give more weightage to the critical HTML parts such as the page title, meta keywords (much more weightage than Google) and H1 tags. It is a must to have relevant keywords in those three areas to get the bing bot understand the importance of your pages.

#2 User’s language in keywords

For bing, it is important to use those key phrases that people actually use to search than the hyped ones such as ‘Make Money Online’.

#3 Create location aware content

Unlike Google, the geo-targeting is not something that can be forced on bing via some settings alone. Bing uses on page information to geographically categorize content. Hence if your business is located in a particular town, make sure to use the name of that town (and address on relevant pages) on your pages and meta keywords tag.

#4 Backlinks from authority sites

Just like Google, the backlinks play a role in deciding the authority of your site. Hence you have to have quality backlinks coming in from authority sites and the relevancy of the anchor text is given more importance than the page rank of the originating sites.

#5 Have good number of outbound links

Due to the monetization models around links, Google degrades pages that have dofollow (ie. without rel=nofollow) outbound links. However, as long as the content linked to are relevant with respect to the anchor text, bing loves pages that are linked to relevant content. No dofollow or nofollow worries in this case! In this particular case it’s a toss up between bing and Google. There is more weightage when you are linking to older and established domains (neighborhood matters).

#6 Simplify your site or blog

If your site or blog is heavy on rich internet application technologies (flash, too much of javascript, silverlight etc), chances are the bing bot is confused. Try to minimize the use of such technologies – not just within your blog content but be choosy on your plugins and extensions as well.

#7 Remove trailing ‘/’ from domain name

While internally linking as well as doing offsite SEO, make sure that you simplify your home URL as much as possible by removing the trailing ‘/’. Sometimes, the url with slash and the one without slash (e..g. http://www.dollarshower.com/ and http://www.dollarshower.com) are considered two entities and hence causing dilution of your backlink equity.

#8 Convert all URLs to lowercase

Due to much the same reason as mentioned above, you may convert all your URLs to lowercase for all reference and link building purposes (e.g. http://mysite.com/About to http://mysite.com/about).

#9 Simple and easy to read URLs

Use your permalink structure to keep all your links as human and bot readable ones. URLs containing too many numbers, port number, non-alphabetical characters are not very readable by bots in order to obtain valuable indexing information and relate to their contents.
Also, absolute linking (http://www.dollarshower.com/about) rather than relative path linking (./about) seems to be of help to the bots.

#10 Domain age and landing page content

Older the domain, the more authority you have in the eyes of bing (also true with Yahoo) where as it is fairly easy to tweak your site to high authority when you are trying to achieve Google SEO. Bing also value unique content on landing pages.

via dollarshower.com