The KeyWord

Four Tips for Bing SEO

Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” has been attracting a lot of attention from the media over the past few months. All of this attention is definitely driving searchers to try out Bing.com, leaving some marketers concerned about their website’s ability to be indexed and found by the new search engine.

The way Bing search results are sorted and presented in groups is to help speed the search and decision making process, which is why Microsoft has dubbed Bing a “decision engine.” The question that has been coming up since the inception of Bing is, "what does this mean for SEO"?

Here we will explore four tips you can employ immediately to ensure your websites are considered relevant in the Bing "Decision Engine."

First, Bing's search algorithm doesn't change anything in regards to SEO basics. Developing content relevant to search terms that lead visitors to your website(s) is still the most important area to focus on in terms of your search engine optimization. Solid website content will always help across all search engines. However, there are a few tricks you can incorporate to make your site play better with Bing and won’t hurt your results with other search engines.

1. Page Title: It seems that Bing is putting even more emphasis on page title than other search engines. Here is a short list of page title considerations to improve your site’s performance with Bing:

• Use unique page titles for each page.
• Be sure to place your most important keywords for each page in the page title.
• Keep your page title between 15 to 70 characters. The shorter your page title the more emphasis is placed on each word.
• Place your most important keywords closer to the start of the page title.
• Avoid the following characters in your page titles ‘ ” < > { } [ ] ( ) , |.

2. Text: The more relevant text on a page the better. Keyword rich content is a fundamental of search engine optimization, but even more important for performance with Bing. It’s been found that Bing responds best to pages with at least 350 characters of text. So pay close attention not only to your keyword density, but character count as well.

3. HTML: Make sure your HTML code is solid and free of errors. Confirm all of your tags are closed, no links are broken and each link leads to the correct page. . If your site includes broken links MSNBot will be able to index your site effectively, let alone allows visitors to navigate your site easily. You can validate your site’s code using the HTTP Conditional Get test tool or HTTP compression tool available for free from Microsoft. You can check your site for broken links using the W3C Markup Validation Service.

4. MSNbot: Make sure that MSNBot is admitted to crawl your site and not on the list of crawlers banned from indexing your site. MSNbot is a web-crawling robot deployed by Microsoft to supply Bing. The robot collects documents from the web in order to build a searchable index for the MCS search engine.

The information above is just a start. Each search engine involves their own unique algorithms and characteristics of how they present search results to their users. Continuously refining your site’s code, content and links will ensure effective optimization across all engines. The SEO team at Horizon Marketing Group manages the search optimization strategies of all types of companies to ensure they are found online by their target market. If you are concerned as to whether your site is operating up to par or have questions about your company’s online visibility, contact Horizon Marketing Group today.