It’s bad enough having to deal with cross-browser compatibility. The last thing we need is conflicting optimisation guidelines across different search engines. So it’s good to know that at first glance, Bing’s SEO requirements are very similar to Google’s. Here’s how to make your site rank better in Bing.
Here are 20 sensible tips to rank better in Bing
- join Bing Webmaster Tools – research shows being a member will probably make a difference
- instruct Bing to index any site pages they haven’t yet dealt with manually, one by one, via the Bing webmaster tools area
- upload a sitemap
- carry out keyword research and apply it intelligently to your pages
- avoid Flash – search engines find it difficult to extract text, content and links from Flash files
- upload a robots.txt file
- structure your on-site navigatrion so it’s as user friendly, flat and simple as possible
- take care over your meta title for every page, making it 65 or fewer characters (including spaces) and featuring the page’s main keyword or phrase at the beginning
- make good quality content. Like Google, Bing appears to appreciate unique, well written, useful, relevant and entertaining content with a light keyword hand and no key phrase stuffing
- add fresh content regularly, updating deeper pages as well as your home page
- think about adding a blog, a convenient and popular way to update content often
- always do your best to create create link bait – stuff that people back-link to naturally because it’s brilliant
- never buy links
- take equal care over your meta description tags, writing a unique description for each page that inspires click-throughs from the search results
- add an RSS feed
- put the user first in everything you do, maximising the pleasure people get from the experience at every turn. Make everything about your site practical, simple, clear, fast and easy for your visitors
- include social media sharing buttons
- keep your code clean – check your html regularly for errors
- never resort to ‘thin’ or ‘spun’ content. Thin content is the bare minimum you can get away with, designed to manipulate search engine algorithms with no thought for the end-user. Spun content is an automatically re-jigged version of existing content, where the order of the words/paras is simply changed around
- never cloak your site. Cloaking is when a site shows human visitors different information from the stuff revealed to search engine robots, and it’s a huge no-no
