Bing is one of the many deemed to be a “Google Killer” and to the surprise of many, Microsoft owned Bing is actually pretty damn good and might actually live to the “Google Killer” name. Of course, 100 million dollars in advertising never hurt anything and has generated some significant consumer interest. If your a website owner, you will also notice that in effect, Bing is beginning to notice you.
As of late, I have been seeing more and more SEO related blogs focus on Bing optimization and it has crossed my mind, should we be optimizing our sites for Bing as well as Google? While Bing has only been going strong for a short while, it is definitely going full speed ahead and is rumored to eventually take over Yahoo!.
If you do decide to take Bing optimization seriously here are a few tips from Web Strategy Workshop:
1. Bing likes older domains better. This means if your domain is older than mine and we are targeting the same keywords – you will have rank.
2. Titles are key. Bing – like most other search engines – like keyword rich titles. This means you should really concentrate on SEO when writing blog posts or creating content. Not only should the title be keyword rich – it should be (obviously) related to the content.
3. Bing likes longer form writing. If the content of your blog post, article, or web page has at least 300 words you are likely to rank higher in Bing.
4. Make sure you are letting in the MSNBot to your site – that’s the spider that crawls your site looking for keywords and text. We’ll have more details in our next Bing Website Optimization post.
5. Link Out. Unlike Google your rank is not affected by linking out – so feel free to do so. Be sure not to do too much as it may affect your Google Rank. I tend not to worry about that because linking is a natural part of the web.
You can also further optimize your site by submitting your URL to Bing and registering for Bing Webmaster Central.
For all you website owners out there, do you care about making your site Bing friendly? Let your thoughts be known in the comments.
