Do not put all your eggs in the same basket - so goes the old saying. In your quest to achieve higher search engine rankings, you cannot be devoting all your attention to Google and ignoring Bing altogether.
And, for those of you who believe in numbers here is a fact. In 2012 Bing (along with Yahoo) accounted for almost 25% of all searches on the Internet. Individually Bing accounted for 15% of all searches. (Source: ComScore)
While Google may still be sitting pretty at the top, Bing is fast catching up, and it's high time that you gave Bing its due consideration in your search engine strategies.
In this article we will identify some 'SEO strategies for Bing' that will help you optimise your website to rank high in Bing search results.
1. Sign up for the Bing Webmasters tool and submit an XML sitemap for your blog or website. This will ensure that all your pages are discovered and indexed by Bing.
2. Use a Meta Description tag to describe the content of each page or post of your blog/website. (Recommended)
3. Focus on content quality and user engagement.
4. Remove all duplicate content. The same applies to 'shallow' or 'thin' content - modify shallow content or remove them altogether.
5. Strategic keyword placement is very important as far as Bing is concerned. Use keywords in Post Title and post URL.
6. Use <h1> tags to highlight important phrases.
7. Create internal links and focus on keyword relevant anchor tags.
8. Pay special attention to where you link to. Remove all links from your site that point towards pages which are spammy, illegal or of a low quality.
9. Go Social. Social media activity surrounding your blog/website has a role to play in SEO. The same is true with both Bing and Google.
10. All existing external link-building techniques (like guest posting on relevant blogs) continue to be valid for Bing. However, pay attention to quality and not quantity.
Tip: Bought links can have a negative impact on your rankings. (Valid for both Bing and Google)
11. Pay special attention to your site structure. An html based navigation interface works best for Bing.
12. Adopt Microdata to mark-up pages. Microdata is a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines including Google and Bing. Visit Schema.org for more information on how you can use microdata to help search engines better understand your content.
Thanks for your time and good luck with your optimisation efforts.
8. Pay special attention to where you link to. Remove all links from your site that point towards pages which are spammy, illegal or of a low quality.
9. Go Social. Social media activity surrounding your blog/website has a role to play in SEO. The same is true with both Bing and Google.
10. All existing external link-building techniques (like guest posting on relevant blogs) continue to be valid for Bing. However, pay attention to quality and not quantity.
Tip: Bought links can have a negative impact on your rankings. (Valid for both Bing and Google)
11. Pay special attention to your site structure. An html based navigation interface works best for Bing.
12. Adopt Microdata to mark-up pages. Microdata is a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines including Google and Bing. Visit Schema.org for more information on how you can use microdata to help search engines better understand your content.
Thanks for your time and good luck with your optimisation efforts.