SEO: How To Optimize Your Website For Bing

SEO: How To Optimize Your Website For Bing

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It is finally beginning to happen, Google has gotten just a little bit of competition. For years Google has bested Yahoo and MSN by such a distance that you really only had to pay attention to Google.

However, industry analysts now expect MSNs Bing and Yahoo to represent up to 30 percent of the search market within a relatively short timeframe. In fact, Bing is closing in on 10 percent of the query market, reporting a 4.5 percent increase over July. That is a significant chunk of people. Plus, since Bing specializes in shopping, entertainment and travel, online retailers need to pay even more attention to Bing.

When you think about optimizing for Bing, start with this credo, ‘Optimize for people searching, not for search engine algorithms.’ Every search engine tries to recreate the thinking of the human searcher in creating its algorithms. Start with your intended customer in mind when you optimize your website and frankly, you will probably be ahead of the search engines. However, it does not hurt to be sure you also help Bing find you.

Site Maps:

Site maps make sense for people because it helps them navigate your site. Google spiders also use site maps to index your site. And now, the best guess is that Bing seems to rely quite heavily on site maps for indexing, maybe even more so than Google.

Sub domains are Important:

A sub domain is simply an extension to the domain that you already have. Your website may have lots of different pages related to one topic, like mysweetcatscom/Persian which the major search engines will still consider to be part of your main site. Instead of creating separate pages, you can group pages with a similar topic under sub domains for your various niche users.

So, instead of mysweetcatscom/persian, you create the sub domain persian.mysweetcatscom. The advantage of the sub domain is that it is considered to be a separate site by the search engines. This view helps with all sorts of things such as linking back to each other, generating ad revenue and more. You create domains using a panel within your web hosting administration page.

When you create your sub domain, use your keywords. Bing is more likely to select sites that have the search term in the domain or sub domain. Consider making category landing pages into sub domains.

Accurate Code:

Bing does not like non standards compliant HTML. Be sure that your code is well written.

Text:

Bing seems to favor sites with more content per page. While Google looks for phrases that go together on pages rather than length of text, Bing seems to be impressed with length.

Age of Domain:

Like Google, Bing likes older, established sites. So where does that leave you as a new online retailer? One way to solve this problem is to buy an already established domain name so you can trade on its history. Just be sure it has not been blacklisted for black hat SEO methods.

Outbound Links:

We all know that we need links from other sites to ours, essentially votes of confidence in the utility of our site. However Bing also values outbound links, that is, links you create to other sites.

Common sense and a little insider knowledge will carry you a long way on Bing.

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