Few weeks ago an online market research report released some statistics which suggest that the Bing & Yahoo association has increased its market share to 30.5% in the United States which is almost half of the market share of Google. Moreover Bing has signed a deal with Baidu, a very popular Chinese Search Engine, to power its SERPs for English queries. It is absolutely necessary for bloggers, webmasters and SEO professionals to take Bing into consideration to ensure that their websites are well optimized for Bing and that they have the chance to get high rankings on the “powered by Bing” network.
In this piece of writing we will focus on how to optimize your site for Bing. These 15 tips can help you earn required search engine positions on the search results. The main advantage is these 15 tips are common in SEO and will also work for Google as well. This is because even if the secret recipes of the major search engine differ, the main principles are the same when it comes to ranking websites.
1. Improve your CTR (Click through Rate)
CTR is really important if you take a look at Google rankings than CTR plays an important role in it as well, Duane Forrester, Product Manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program, has always count CTR site improvement in his past Bing focuses on user interaction with the search results. From one of his past interviews he had disclosed that “Bing would like to see if your result in a #1, does it get a click and does the user come back to us within a reasonable timeframe or do they come back almost instantly?”. This was also confirmed at SMX East by Steve Tullis, who is Senior Program Manager at Bing.
If you have good CTR rate for your site you will definitely improve your SERP and Bing also takes into account the click through rate and that they use it as a Ranking signal.
2. Reduce your Bounce Rate
Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site. The Bounce Rate is more important in SEO since it was used by the search engines as a quality content signal. Bing not only takes into account the CTR but also it measures the timeframe between the click of the user on a particular search result and his return on the SERPs. The calculation goes this way, if the total amount of time was less than a minute or a few seconds; this means that the particular generated result is not helpful for the visitor. Achieving times higher than 60 seconds or 1 minute indicates that your website is compelling and useful for the users.
3. Use Schema.org Tags Specification
Recently all search engine heads Google, Yahoo and Bing developed a mutually supported protocol called Schema.org which allows webmasters to mark up their content by using special tags in the HTML code. These tags allow search engines algorithms to understand you content easily and you can mark your images, videos, product names & descriptions, ratings & reviews, geo location information, maps, addresses etc and define partially the semantic relationships between different components. If this protocol becomes widely used it will allow search engines to understand and rank the pages easier & better, develop new services and present the information in a more user friendly way.
The new protocol is designed by Search Engines because every day big data has been crawled by search engines and it can sufficiently replace in a great extend the expensive machine learning algorithms that are currently used in order to understand the different “types” of data that are contained in each page. Similarly many webmaster blogs talks about duplicate content, when a practice can help search engines reduce their costs, they tend to boost the websites that follow it and punish the ones that don’t. So even though it is early to suggest that schema.org can help you boost your rankings, It is strongly recommend you to start using schema tags on your site pages because it is the SERPs future and search engines will demand it by giving extra points to the websites that have implemented it.
4. A Daily visit to Bing’s Webmaster Center
The Webmaster Center of Bing is a free service and a knowledge base which allows you to learn and analyze valuable statistics about your website, website improvement, check how many impressions & clicks you had on SERPs, manage your crawling rate, submit sitemaps & RSS feeds, manage the way that Bing Indexes your website, check your Organic Traffic etc. By using this tool and analyzing its results is absolutely essential in order to improve your SERPs rankings and help you to understand the flaws of your SEO campaign. Additionally by evaluating the provided information you can get useful insights on how compelling your website is in the eyes of the users.
5. Write and Produce Quality Content
Content has real power and it helps you to increase your CTR as well. Try to focus your visitors in mind while you start writing something because as most search engines, Bing algorithm tries to classify which pages contain high quality content and which contain thin content. If you have blog to gather traffic on your site you must use most competitive search terms of your service or brand in title and content. Usually Content While developing your website you must always have in mind that the only way to develop a successful & long-lasting SEO campaign is to focus on content and on user experience.
Quality content is the type of content that is unique, well written, answers clearly and sufficiently the question of the visitor and makes him/her interact or share it on social media.
6. Mind the user experience
It is not the duty of the Search Engines to focus only on returning relevant results to the search query by users but they always try to boost the ones that provide the best user experience. So the most important aspects that affect the user experience are the website design, loading time of site, the navigation, the ads to content ratio, the proper use of visuals and images, the proper use of videos etc. Presenting your content on the right way is crucial nevertheless the above factors can influence the one another.
It’s always a best practice to research on what the visitors expect from your website and why they visit your site? It is totally depends upon you that, how you carry your visitor from home page to product page.
7. Use Social Media Buttons & be Social Active
Yes, yes, yes…I love social media…it is the true power and I have mentioned several times in the past blog posts as well, social media data are used by the major search engines and they affect the search engine results. If you have a large set of followers on social media sites then you have real chance to increase your CTR and more specifically Bing has disclosed that they use both Twitter and Facebook data in their algorithms in order to evaluate if a given page is popular to the users. Incorporating the social media buttons on strategic places of your design, you can positively affect both your Social Media and your Organic Traffic. Sharing is caring and if you really care about your website you should not ignore these important online channels.
8. On-page Optimization
On-page Optimization is the must thing for website you should have Title, H1, ALT attribute Image tag and Meta description with schema tags to improve in SERPs of Bing. Onsite optimization techniques are same in Google and Bing, as expected Bing weights a lot the Title so writing short (less that 65 characters), descriptive and keyword-rich HTML titles is a must. Meta descriptions are also important for Bing so make sure you write descriptions that describe accurately and sufficiently all content of the page. Also ensure that they are compelling for the users since they usually appear on the snippet and can affect the CTR.
9. Building High Quality Links
The most important thing for both Google and Bing SERPs is link building. Links from sites which are related to niche of your website can help you to earn traffic and SERPs as well but remember one thing in mind don’t go for quantity go for quality links. If you want to read more on how to develop a Link Building campaign and avoid the common mistakes, read the following Best Link Building Basics in SEO and ways to analyze it.
10. Improve your Crawl ability
Yes sometimes for newbie the website cannot be crawled by Bing’s spiders then it will not be indexed and as a result it won’t appear in the search results. A great tool that can help you improve your crawl ability is the HTML sitemap. Your website should have xml ot HTML page based sitemap to get noticed by Bing. Moreover by using RSS feeds & XML sitemaps you can ensure that all the pages of your website will be found and indexed by Bing. Submit all your new WebPages of website to Bing’s Webmaster Center, very carefully define Robots.txt because this file will decide how spiders crawl your website, nevertheless be extra careful while messing with this file since you can easily block the access of your website and make it drop from the index.
Take few thing seriously here, It is observed that Bing algorithm is not very good at indexing AJAX content and that currently they don’t support Google’s proposal for making AJAX applications crawl able. And as a result Bing drops complete parts of the URL that appear after the “#!” or ”#“ (fragment). Be extra careful with some Flash based solutions that are supposed to provide SEO friendly URLs by using fragments. Those URLs are NOT good and SEO friendly and they are not handled by the search engines properly.
11. Improve your Website Structure
The simple, easy to navigate and CSS driven websites developed using SEO friendly techniques always generates best results in search engine. Having SEO friendly URLs that contain the important keywords of the page can definitely give you a boost in SERPs. Moreover ensure that no session Ids or other unnecessary variables appear in the URLs and work on your CMS to avoid duplicate content issues.
12. Work on your Internal Link Architecture
It is been recognize that internal links plays a crucial part in Bing since they provide it with lots of info about the hierarchy of your pages. You need to make sure a few things that you use text menus, optimize your internal anchor texts, make use of a tree like structure, link directly from your homepage to the important pages of your website and always place the important links of your pages above the fold. These common factors have really good impact on SERPs and for your website reputation as well.
13. Mind the GEO signals
While Bing does not use different TLDs like Google for generating geo based SERPs but Bing analyzes multiple different signals to determine results for which country a particular page is more appropriate. Some of those signals are the physical location of the server, the TLD of the domain, the location of the incoming links, the traffic information that is collected from anonymous browser stats, the language of the document etc. Moreover Bing is known for using the META GEO tags, something that Google does not do.
14. Select Your Domain carefully
If you have a domain name related to your brand name then you have increased your chances to earn SERPs. The domain name was always important in SEO for 2 primary reasons: First of all when a result comes from a domain that contains keywords, Bing tends to give it a boost for queries that contain that term. Try to earn links with the name used in domain it will be helpful. Secondly because the domain belongs to a specific TLD and this can be used as a GEO signal (for country specific TLDs only). Thus selecting the domain name carefully can have a serious impact on your rankings. Of course very long domains or domain names that contain lots of dashes should be avoided because they look spammy and they are not very user friendly.
15. Don’t use Black hat Methods – you will be banned
Black Hat techniques are harmful to your website. Bing or Google does not like it when people try to manipulate their algorithms in order to achieve higher rankings. Many black hat techniques which can hamper your SERPs include generating automated content, producing duplicate content, scraping, adding hidden text in the pages, using link farms or three-way linking techniques is not advised. In many cases those practices will not affect positively your rankings and in some cases they might even lead to bans.
Just remember one rule “Keep it Simple” and follow these 15 tips to get good SERPs in Bing. Please don’t forget to share this article it will help us to rank higher in Bing! Keep sharing…..
via:http://www.webbloggers.net/best-15-easy-search-engine-ranking-tips-to-improve-bing-seo/
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