Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

Microsoft is storming the gates at Google. The recent search partnership deal with Yahoo will put Bing’s marketshare somewhere around 28 percent and they’re likely to spend more and more to further dent Mountain View’s stranglehold (Twitter acquisition, anyone?).

The push has led to an increase in questions regarding best practices for optimizing for Bing. You can argue for or against whether or not two main search players instead of three is a good thing, but the heightened interest is what it is. And although it’s early in the game, here are five tips on getting the most out of your Bing traffic numbers.

1. Create original, spellchecked, linkworthy content – Obvious, right? Great content is going to generate search success. The emphasis on making sure stuff is typo-free plays a somewhat newer equation to the game, however, so make sure you’re dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s. And here’s more from Bing: “Instead of making the mistake of focusing on quantity, you’ll be far more successful if you focus instead on quality. A small number of highly relevant, inbound links from sites with solid reputations can do more for you than a ton of junk links.”
2. Focus – In creating a theme for a specific page, less is more. Optimizing pages around 1-2 main keyphrases is best. Keyword stuffing with the hope that “something will catch” just dilutes your content. Even your homepage should be limited to a few main content elements if possible. And don’t forget the unique titles and metas. Says Bing: “Webmasters can easily (perform well in Bing) by adding unique titles and meta descriptions to each page. If webmasters don’t provide search engines with good, keyword-oriented, well-written caption source data, the resulting captions created by algorithm, no matter how hard we try, won’t represent your website as well as those websites whose webmasters did provide this unique and important data.” And this also goes toward links on a page. They advise against creating pages that have nothing but long lists of links, such as those you might see in an HTML sitemap. Bing says, “Just note that very long lists of links with no context is not helpful for anyone, including you.”
3. Links – Still an incredibly valuable thing with most search engines, but emphasized by Team Bing. Concentrate on building inbound links from similarly themed sites, not from directories or link farms. See Tip No. 1 for more on the kind of content that drives such inbound links. They also recommend the use of the title attribute for anchor text links, hinting the text used would impact search results on the page targeted in the backlink. Checkout W3 for more on this … historically, it hasn’t made a big difference, but now with Bing’s endorsement, it’s worth testing.
4. Zero technical difficulties – Make sure you fix broken links, use proper redirects and validate your code. We use Xenu to help find broken links and W3C to validate code. Proper redirects should be 301s and avoid canonicalization. Dynamic URL variables are becoming less an issue as well. Bing states it can index URLs with more than 30 variables. This is a huge improvement as spiders tend to despise variables. This can also present problems if pages that used to not get indexed are now getting indexed and causing duplicate content issues. See canonicalization info above. We still recommend using keyword-specific, original, concise URLs when possible, but being conscious of your dynamic content is more important now.
5. Use Bing’s Webmaster Tools – Let the official reference manual be your guide for things like your robots.txt file and HTTP verification. Oh, and you’ll finally get to use that Hotmail username and password that hasn’t been in use since 2003. Woot!

There are more – lots more – but this is a blog post; not a book. It should, however, give you enough to go on looking at your own site. Experienced SEOs won’t be surprised by any of the above advice (but most of our readers aren’t SEOs). At the end of the day, it’s blocking-and-tackling and very similar to the tactics that will get you much love on Google. For more on Bing, checkout their community page, chock-full of good information. Happy optimizing!

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