SEO Tips For Bing

On August 22, 2013, in SEO, by Rowan

Bing SEO Techniques

Guest post by Amit Panwar

Bing is relatively new among the big search engines and doing SEO for it is still somewhat of a mystery.

Simply put, Bing indexes sites differently than Yahoo and Google. Further, Bing’s infancy to the market doesn’t mean it isn’t getting any traffic.

It currently claims about 30% of all search engine traffic. This is good enough reason for any webmaster to want to rank well on Bing!

Bing Webmaster Tools

Most webmasters are familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and maybe even with submitting a site to Yahoo. Bing also has a Webmaster Tools section to which you can submit your site.

This is a good first step in getting indexed by Bing. Submitting to Webmaster Tools lets Bing know your website is there and prompts its search bots to go take a look.

Bing and Backlinks

Results among studies of top 10 search results for the same keyword on Bing and Google consistently show the top results on Bing have fewer backlinks than the Google results.

This shows that Google places more emphasis on backlinks in ranking websites than Bing. Less backlinks means less work for webmasters and this is good news.

However, it is important to remember that the backlinks that are pointing to your site must be high quality ones. Bing doesn’t like junk backlinks any more than the other search engines.

Bing and PageRank

PageRank simply doesn’t matter all that much in SEO for Bing. A lot of webmasters are all wrapped up in raising their site’s PageRank and this is useful on Google.

PageRank is, after all, a Google-patented algorithm of assigning a number to a website based on its perceived search engine strength.

You won’t see many low PageRank websites in the top 10 search results on Google. However, this happens all the time on Bing. This is almost certainly because PageRank is a Google product and Bing doesn’t need it.

Bing Doesn’t Place a Big Emphasis on Fresh Content in Rankings

Google places a big emphasis on fresh content in rankings. The more frequently you put up fresh content, the higher your rankings tend to be there. Bing doesn’t index websites or their pages as quickly as Google and this makes having fresh content slightly less important on Bing.

This doesn’t mean you should never put up new content on your site. Bing’s web crawlers will eventually come around to your site a second time and your place in the rankings could be penalized if the same content is found there with nothing new from the first visit. However, you don’t have to worry about putting up new content with the speed and frequency you need to impress Google to do well in Bing.

Bing and Flash

Strangely enough, many experts have noted that Bing loves websites with Flash and tends to rank them highly in the search results. Google on the other hand hates Flash and penalizes sites that use it. You can do really well on Bing just by putting some Flash features on your website.

Bing’s Holy Grail of Ranking–Inbound Anchor Text

While all search engines appreciate a site that has good quality anchor text, this appears to be much more important on Bing than anywhere else. Bing especially likes pages that have the anchor link word or phrase in the title of the page.

This is unusual for all of the other search engines. A good quality anchor text is one that has very close relevancy to the word or phrase that’s linking to it. Bing will rank websites and their pages very highly for this, so it is definitely something you want to be doing in your Bing SEO efforts.

Domains and Bing Rankings

Bing gives more importance to domain names in its rankings than do the other search engines. It prefers top-level domains like .gov and .edu. Bing also almost always prefers a .com over a .net or .org unless the .net or .org is attached to a highly authoritative website.

Further, aged domain names rank more highly on Bing than on other search engines. Other search engines don’t seem to give as much weight to domain age as in the past. However, this is still an important ranking factor for Bing.

As you can see, it’s a bit different getting ranked in Bing than in the other search engines. Some of this advice may go against what you’ve previously been taught about SEO. However, you must remember that Bing is a different search engine from the rest and it does things its own way. You definitely want to capture that 30% of search engine traffic so learning SEO for Bing is important.