Six Things You Can Do in The Next Half Hour To Improve Your Rankings on Bing

If you’re carrying out a varied search marketing campaign and performing well on Google, the chances are you’ll be doing quite well on the other search engines, but that’s not always the case.

And with Bing’s growing market share and impending deal with Yahoo, it’s becoming more important than ever to resolve any issues you may be having with Microsoft’s search engine baby.

So what can you do specifically that will help your search engine rankings on Bing?

I suggest signing up with Bing’s equivalent of Webmaster Tools

It won’t in itself help your rankings, but if you can better understand what Bing thinks of your website then it’s easier to make sure you are ticking all their boxes.

Once your account is set up, submit your sitemap to help Bing index your site more comprehensively

There’s always some debate as to whether Site Maps are a blessing or a curse when it comes to diagnosing SEO problems, but if you’re already sure your Bing presence doesn’t match your performance on other engines, then you should definitely consider supplying an XML sitemap directly to Bing.

Bing anecdotally appears to like websites that link out to other websites

Some hoarders of Page Rank will have you believe that you should never link out. This isn’t seen as a negative by other engines but many people seem to think Bing actively approves of it. So become a hub – your website should be a resource to its users and if you can be useful by pointing someone to another site the users (and seemingly Bing) will appreciate it.

Capitalisation of first letter keywords appears to work well on Bing

So where you mention your keywords, think about capitalising the first letter of the words. And where’s the place you normally do this? Headlines and subheadings – but you already had your keywords there didn’t you?

Some people seem to think Bing likes larger sites

I’m not suggesting you go and create hundreds of useless pages but if there was an involved content programme you had in mind or you were thinking of introducing user-generated content, then your difficulties on Bing should really give you the kick up the bum to get it started.

Title Tags of the pages linking to you

This seems to be another element appreciated by Bing. It’s hard enough controlling the anchor text you get from pages that link to you, but Bing seemingly really likes those links which have your keywords in the title tag of the linking page. You won’t be able to control this on most links, but on the links you do have control over think about the title tag of the linking page – it won’t do any harm with any search engine.

Related posts:

• Has Microsoft got the Budda-BING?
• What is SEO? Part 1- Search Engine Rankings Page
• Recruiting? AKA A Very Easy But Effective Form of Link Building.
• Managing User Generated Reviews for the Maximum SEO Benefit

Kelvin Newman is SiteVisibility's Creative Director and is the editor of the UK's most listened to Marketing Podcast which is second biggest in the iTunes US. He also spends his time at conferences, tweeting too much and working on top secret research and development projects.