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.
Hey guys thanks for this. As an SEO copywriter I’ve been playing the Google game for the last five years. It will be interesting to see if Bing will require us to jump though a different set if hoops.
This, like your other articles is great! I even refer some of our clients to your stuff.
Just to let your readers know, at the moment there have been some issues submitting sites to Bing via webmaster tools. It should be fixed soon though, if not already, but if there is difficulty, not to worry too much, just try again later!
Interesting tips given Bing’s short existence in the web. I was wondering though, whether we should take Bing into account into our SEO strategies given their low rates in our clients analytics. Optimising for Bing could potentially drop rankings for Google, don’t you think?
Yeah you’ve got to be careful doesn’t mess up your Google rankings but I’m pretty sure all the things we’ve suggested above wouldn’t have a negative influence on Google results, some might even help there as well!