SEO for Bing

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Search Engine Optimization for Microsoft’s new Bing search engine involves different steps than with other search engines. With Bing, you don’t have to submit your site to search engines or get a bunch of links from other sources just to be indexed.

As soon as Bing was released, online marketing experts wanted to know how to get their websites to the top of the results page. Here are a few SEO tips to help you maximize your exposure with Bing.

To bubble to the top of Bing, you should have a title that is directly connected with the subject. Linking out is encouraged, also. The problem is that many marketers are afraid to link out too much for fear their page rank will be lowered, particularly on Google.
Bing appears to prefer pages with at least 350 words of text, so try to have enough text on your page. In most engines, this isn’t really a big factor, but it is with Bing.

Bing also tends to care about how long ago the domain was registered. So there may be times when it would be beneficial to purchase older domains to improve results positioning in Bing.

Keep your HTML clean. Try to use only well-written HTML on your pages. Make sure that you close all the paired tags and check to see that all the links open on the right web page. You can find out more on validating your HTML code using either HTTP Conditional Get Test Tool, W3C Markup Validation Service, or HTTP Compression. If your site has broken links, then the MSN Bot will have a hard time indexing your site effectively, which could prevent people from accessing all your pages. To learn more about identifying broken links, search on Bing’s Help topic for the “Webmaster Center’s Crawl Issues” tool.
Make sure that if you’ve moved a web page that you’ve also set up the original web page’s URL so that it will redirect to the new web page. It is also good to indicate if the move is permanent or not. Be certain that the MSN Bot is allowed to crawl your website. If you have a list of web crawlers prohibited from indexing your site, check it to see if the MSN Bot is on it.

Use a Robots.txt file or use tags to help control how the MSN Bot and other crawlers index your site. The Robots.txt file can be used to prevent web crawlers from crawling on specific files and folders. It is a good idea to keep all your URLs simple and unchanging. Complicated URLs, or those that change a lot are hard for the MSN Bot to index as link destinations. And it makes good common sense. A meaningful, steady URL is easier for people to remember so they can bookmark it. That helps keep your site visible by attracting links from other websites.

This should apply regardless, but do keep an eye out for malicious software. Find out if links to pages on your site lead to malware on third part sites, or contain corrupted documents or images, bad JavaScript, or ActiveX controlled. These will be highlighted or even disabled as malware in the Bing result listings.  While back links are important to your ranking in Bing, it is important to monitor the quality of those links. Never use link farms or paid link services, and make sure your content is directly relevant to your keywords.