Optimize for Bing: Four Key Tips
Although Google remains the search engine of choice for most customers, you can't ignore the importance of optimizing for Bing—which currently powers nearly a third of all stateside searches. And at the Bing Community's Webmaster Center blog, Duane Forrester provides insight into Bing's SEO preferences.
"[There] are a few items we love to see websites doing," he says. "While none on their own will vault you to the top of the rankings, they remain best practices you should look to engage in."
Here are four key ways to optimize for Bing:
Get your RSS feeds up and running. With clean RSS feeds, Bing can see your content more quickly—meaning it will be indexed, ranked and displayed in SERPs more quickly. "Want to really impress Bing? Get into your Bing Webmaster account and insert your RSS feed URL into the sitemap submission flow," Forrester advises.
Mark up your content. Help Bing to understand your content by marking it up according to the http://schema.org protocol. "[T]he better we understand it," he notes, "the more likely we are to be able to return you for matches to queries."
Recognize the importance of user experience. Using the example of page load time, Forrester explains that most human visitors won't notice if your page loads in .5 or .25 seconds—and Bing won't be impressed if you sacrifice content or functionality for the fractional improvement of something appreciated only by machines.
Manage social media with care. "Build your presence so that followers see you as an authority and a resource," he suggests. This requires a consistent stream of valuable content that your customers will want to share.
The Po!nt: Spread your appeal. Consider Bing's insider advice to optimize for those who don't use Google.
Source: Webmaster Center.
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