How to Rank High on Bing Search Engine

Earlier this year behemoth IT companies Microsoft and Yahoo reached a lengthy agreement to merge their search services in hope of trying to compete with the king search-land, Google.

For the next decade, Microsoft and Yahoo will work together, complementing each other’s search and marketing services.  Microsoft’s re-branded search engine Bing will be powered by the Yahoo search engine and Yahoo Search Marketing will be powered by Microsoft AdCentre.

So can webmasters afford to ignore this huge change in the search industry?  Google still may be the white knight of searching but Bing is starting to raise some eager eyebrows.

With the imminent release of Windows 7, expected to be globally endorsed by industry who practically shunned Vista into a small dark damp corner, Bing has tight integration with the Windows 7 Explorer outlined in an article on the Bing website.

Bing seems to be very friendly to website optimisation and you stand a better chance of getting new websites indexed faster on Bing than on Google.

Here are some essential tips on getting your website picked up by Bing search engine.

1. Lots of page content.  While Google looks for relevancy between keywords and phrases within a page, Bing seems like good old chucks of text, placing a higher value on pages with at least 300 words so start cranking out those meaty blogs.
2. Page titles are good. Bing likes title tags and seems to give them a higher importance than Google does.  Again it’s important not to duplicate page titles across your website but for good Bing rankings you may want to place your top keywords in the title tags.
3. All back-links and equal (ish). Webmasters drool over back-links from other high ranking websites but Google seems to frown on too many back-links and that can negatively affect your overall ranking.  Confused?  Well, Bing on the other hand seems to favour heaps of back-links to your site as long as they come from relevant sources.
4. Outbound links in moderation. Google isn’t a big fan of many outbound links per page.  Too many and you can run the risk of being categorised as spamming.  Bing however seems to take a softer approach on outbound links, again as long as they are relevant to the context of the page.
5. Ye Olde Domain Name.Bing likes wise, older, mature domains and places them in higher regard over new ones.  If you’re serious about getting top Bing rankings quickly then perhaps consider purchasing an existing domain name rather than creating a new one.
6. Readable URLs. Most search engines like readable URLs and so does Bing.  If your page is describing the how to build a rocket ship from a toaster and a microwave oven then consider naming your page /how-to-build-a-rocket-ship-from-a-toaster-and-a-microwave-oven.html.  Use hyphens (-) rather than underscores (_) to separate words. Sounds simple and it is.

Bing will continue to grow on size, popularity and likely complexity.

For the moment Bing seems to favour a simpler approach to indexing sites over Google’s very complex algorithms so why not take advantage now and watch your website climb the Bing rankings.

Gravitational FX Web Design website ranks #1 for key phrase “Web Design Edinburgh” as of September 2009.