When I attended both SMX Advanced in Seattle back in June and SES San Jose just a couple of weeks ago, I heard a lot of questions from webmasters about Bing, especially pertaining to search engine optimization issues. Typically these included:
- I want to do SEO for Bing—where should I start?
- How is Bing different in terms of SEO?
- What do webmasters need to know and do?
- Are there any insider tips for successful ranking?
I’ll tackle these questions by providing some useful, baseline information and include pointers to more detailed, pertinent docs.
As you know, Bing is an evolution in the search engine space. With its innovative, new user interface (UI) design bringing new depth and opportunities for searchers, they can now quickly find the information they seek when they search the Internet. New UI features, such as Quick Tabs, Related Searches, and Document Preview (to name just a few), surface more information and present more opportunities to discover what searchers want to know so they can make more informed decisions more quickly. As a result, we describe Bing as a decision engine. (For more information on the new UI features in Bing, see the Bing Webmaster Center blog post, Bing white paper for webmasters & publishers released.)
Under the covers of the new UI, we do a lot of engineering work on a very large scale. For example, we crawl a variety of content types found on the Web, index that content, apply appropriate algorithms, and finally send relevant content to user queries in our search engine results pages (SERPs).
Bing’s SEO principles
SEO is fundamentally about creating websites that are good for people. The most basic advice we can give for achieving optimum rank for your site in Bing is to do the following:
- Develop great, original content (including well-implemented keywords) directed toward your intended audience
- Use well-architected code in your webpages (including images and Sitemaps) so that users’ web browsers and search engine crawlers can read the content you want indexed)
- Earn several, high-quality, authoritative inbound links
As you can see by the links, much of this material has already been discussed in-depth in the Webmaster Center team blog in our ongoing column, search engine marketing (SEM) 101.
The type of SEO work and tasks webmasters need to perform to be successful in Bing hasn’t changed—all of the legitimate, time-tested, SEO skills and knowledge that webmasters have invested in previously apply fully today with Bing. Moreover, investments in solid, reputable SEO work made for Bing will bring similar improvements in your website’s page rank in other search engines as well.
Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content, website architecture, and have done the hard work of earning several high-quality inbound links.
Key content and tools for performing SEO with Bing
To keep up with the latest and greatest information coming from the Bing Webmaster Center team, we recommend that you follow and review the following content:
- Review the Bing official guidelines for successful indexing document for various recommendations on technical and content issues as well as known problems that can affect your site’s rank
- Visit the Webmaster Center blog to keep up with the latest information from the team (you can even subscribe toour blog’s RSS feed to automate this process)
- Register all of your websites with Bing Webmaster Center tools, where you can use our tools to see all sorts of data to your website pertinent to webmasters
- Participate in our Webmaster Center user forums to ask questions and provide us with feedback
We look forward to working with you as partners in helping our mutual customers find the information they seek on the Internet.
-- Rajesh Srivastava, Principal Group Program Manager, Bing
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