Here in the UK, Google dominates the search engine world – accounting for approximately 90% of searches – but across the pond it’s quite a different story. While Google still handles over 50% of searches in the US, a whopping 30% go via Bing according to the latest statistics. SEOs and website managers in the US market cannot ignore Bing if they want to maximise their search engine exposure. Fortunately, we’re here to share the latest advice for Bing SEO!
Recently, Duane Forrester of Bing shared 18 things you need to know about SEO, which is an excellent read for anyone considering international SEO specifically in the US. Some of the tips are core SEO practices that are relevant across all search engines: a site that is visible to search engines’ crawlers (eg: not 100% Flash-driven), logical site structure, relevant keyphrase-rich content, keyphrase-rich meta tags, a strong mixture of internal and inbound links with keyphrase-rich anchor texts, and so on. Don’t wait for a Bing SEO campaign before applying these, please!
However, some of Forrester’s Bing SEO tips are a little more interesting. In his own words: “…here are a few items we love to see websites doing. While none on their own will vault you to the top of the rankings, they remain best practices you should look to engage in.”
RSS Feeds: Bing’s crawlers follow RSS Feeds, using them as an easy method to quickly see and index new content, so set yours up and keep it clean. Do you want to really impress Bing? In your Bing Webmaster account you can insert your RSS Feed URL into the sitemap submission flow. Now that’s an interesting little Bing SEO tip!
Shema.org: Forrester recommends that site managers use the widely supported Schema.org protocol to mark up their content in ways that will enable Bing to better understand the website’s content – thereby giving Bing the information to best serve the website in search results.
Get Social: Social media cannot be ignored in any international SEO campaign, and Bing is no exception. Forrester’s advice is basic, but too often ignored: update regularly with relevant, valuable content. If Bing sees that you are an authority on a subject, it will rank you accordingly: “Fill your social program to the brim with value and folks will love you. Pssst…we see all this happening and it helps us determine the sentiment surrounding your pages, products and services.”
Users First: Thinking of some neat techie tricks to make your website run faster? Need to cut back on user content to do so? Think again. Bing – just like Google and the other search engines – is primarily concerned with serving the most relevant and useful results to searchers. So when you make decisions about the functionality and content on your website, keep the user in mind first. Obviously you want your website to be crawled and ranked well, but when it comes to more minor, technical details – like a 0.2-second difference in loading speed – stop thinking like a techie and start thinking like a marketing manager. What do the users want?
Many of these tips are not unique to Bing SEO – in fact, the fourth one is one of my core messages to all of my clients – but if you’re planning to take your international SEO campaign to the US, you could do worse that to follow Forrester’s tips and get your website exposed to a significant percentage of US searchers.
