Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) on Bing.com – same or different?
Gino Carpio
After live.com, Microsoft’s search engine is now called Bing. It crawls, analyzes and touts itself as the first decision engine and search engine on the web. We cannot underestimate Microsoft’s work in developing Bing and its capabilities. With Microsoft really going all out on marketing Bing, we could possibly see a shake up in terms of the search engine market market shares.
So what can you do if you want Bing.com to index and rank your website favourably? I am a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) guy for several years already and I admit I am also learning their new algorithm. There are however some basic guidelines for webmasters that would still apply:
1. Study Bing’s Search Engine Result Page (SERP) – Bing’s SERP is unique. On the left side of the page you can see keywords related to your search which Bing’s Design Team calls categorized results. These are keywords frequently used by searchers use on the web. There could be taken as “Bing’s Keyword Suggestion” and you could focus on these keywords for SEO.
2. Document preview - another thing that webmasters should factor in is the page preview. This allows the searchers to instantly see content from the deep link page before clicking the site. When a searcher’s mouse hovers over the link, the page preview will appear and give searchers what to expect from the page. This feature can be disabled by adding no preview tag to your page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”nopreview” />
or
<meta name=”msnbot” content=”nopreview” />
3. SEO for Flash – Most flash pages do not have meta tags. Search engines (Bing included) will just fetch what their algorithm deems as useful information from the website for the sake of publishing or avoiding empty titles and descriptions on their SERP. Site owners do not have any control over this action. So be careful. The best source of information about the website is always you, the site owner. So make sure the Meta Tags are completed!
4. Sitemaps – Bing now supports sitemap entries. HTML and XML are applicable. To submit sitemaps you must have an account to Bing Webmaster’s Tool.
The main take away here is that Bing is a search engine that supports white hat SEO. If you are doing the ethical thing with your website design, content indexing, inbound links and other SEO tasks on Google and Yahoo, they will also apply to Bing. Microsoft has not changed the SEO mantra of “if we perform good work, we will get good grades”.
Here are some other good sources on SEO for Bing.
