Bing SEO - How to Optimize Webpages for Bing Search

How is Bing SEO different from Google SEO? What kind of webpages does Bing like? Why is it important to optimize your webpages with Bing in mind? These may be some of the questions you have asked yourself.

In this hub I will answer the most important Bing SEO questions, and how best SEO practice is different in the case of Bing. You'll learn how page content is viewed differently, how backlinks are weighed differently, what some of the factors are that count more with Google and the ones that count more with Bing.

The basics of search engine optimization don't differ much, high-quality content being the decisive factor, but the devil is always in the details. After reading this hub, you can stop asking why your rankings are so different in Google and in Bing.

I know the frustration when you can't find your page in Bing that ranks 1st place in Google. The good news is you can help your Bing ranking without harming your Google one. In most cases you just need to make a few changes or throw a few more backlinks at your page.

It has been announced that both Bing and Yahoo will be showing Bing search results in their search engines.

This means that you can forget your current positions in Yahoo SERP in the very near future. You have to go get yourself good positions in Bing.

Yahoo and Bing together make up over 35% of the search market and they are gaining ground.

Facebook the site that has more daily visitors than Google.com has decided to power its web search feature using Bing. Can you imagine a time when people will want to search the web right on their Facebook profile to easily find, open and share the content they are interested in? I can.

It's similar and yet different. I don't really want to compare all the aspects of Bing and Google SEO one by one. I'll go with describing the kind of webpage that Bing tends to like and rank high on its SERPs.

Since Bing is a relatively new search engine, its index is not as big as that of Google. It may well be that Bing doesn't even know about your site yet. The first step you should take when optimizing for Bing is submitting your site to them.

Bing has its own webmaster tools that can help you improve your site's SEO. Also, Microsoft has a small application called Silverlight 4, that goes hand in hand with the Bing webmaster tools to help you analyze your site's visibility in Bing.

Submitting your xml sitemap to Bing will also go a long way to help Bing find and index all the pages on your website.

• Bing likes pages of big websites with lots of content and pages. Wikipedia, Squidoo, Hubpages pages rank well in Bing.
• Bing loves long webpages with lots of relevant and useful content. Organization is also key. Bing just loves a table of contents.
• Webpages with lots of relevant outbound links to pages with quality content also rank well in Bing search.
• Domain age is also a decisive factor when it comes to ranking well in Bing. The older the domain, the better. This is a lot more important for Bing than for Google.
• Surprisingly, Bing likes Blogger blogs targeting micro niches.
• Bing likes keywords in the domain name. Bing also tends to like hyphens between keywords in a domain name.
• Needless to say, make your urls, titles, and meta tags keyword rich.
• As opposed to Google that likes high-quality backlinks, high PR backlinks .gov and .edu backlinks, for Bing it is more decisive to have plenty of backlinks from many different sources. Also, the anchor text of a link doesn't seem to play such an important role as in the case of Google. Some say Bing can't even read them.
• Bing loves backlinks from pages discussing the same topic as your page. They get this info from the title tag and content of the page that links to you.
• You can help your ranking in Bing you locate relevant pages that link to you and check if they are already in the Bing index. If they are not, submit them to Bing.
• Try to get backlinks from relevant sites that rank well with Bing. They are the ones that Bing considers authority sites.