How to optimise your website for Bing?

As usual its very important to have good Titles for your pages - so optimise your titles accordingly. We have some great articles in our blog area regarding onsite optimisation..

As with Google its also important to have sitemaps - good keyword density and the many other factors mentioned in the onsite optimisation article for Bing.

Bing also likes it when websites link out externally to relevant websites - Many people that practice SEO do not like the idea of having external links on their websites as they feel it will lower the Google page rank - As long as you have relevant external links then this should not be a problem - I would also recommend using the 'no follow' attribute for your outbound links so that no authority from your website will be passed to the outbound link.

Bing likes contents and text in the same way that Google does - the difference is that Bing likes more text - so try and keep your text on each page to at least 350 words. The majority of search engines do not consider the amount of text as a factor but Bing certainly does. So add more text it will help you for your Bing rankings.

Bing also puts a lot of weight on the age of the website. So if you are thinking of creating a new website your better off buying an old domain for your Bing rankings.

Bing also pays much attention to your HTML coding so make sure its all validated. Close paired HTML tags and make sure your links are not broken - I would also recommend you make sure that your links open the correct page. If you have broken links on your website then the MSNBot might not be able to access your website properly - this will cause lack of indexing and Bing will not rank your website high in the SERPS.

If you have changed your web-page or website then make sure that you use an adequate redirect - so if its a temp redirect or a permanent redirect then make sure you use the right one.

As standard its very important to make sure MSNBot is authorized to crawl your website - with this its also important to use a robots.txt file. Dont forget that a robots.txt file is the first place of access for any search engine robots. Make sure that you have authorized MSNBot to access your website.

Finally work on your offsite optimisation - get plenty of quality backlinks and use your keywords as the anchor text. In the same way that Google treats a backlink as a vote for your website then so does Bing.

Social media plays a very big role for Bing rankings - so play an active role on Facebook - MySpace - use web 2.0 accounts such as hubpages - Squidoo etc - from my experience Bing loves social media and ranks websites very high in the SERPS when they activley use social media sites.

Social media is becoming even more important for Google too so its a great idea to start practicing it from now.