Bing can be found where one least expects it. Bing Network enhances search experiences on the Xbox and in Microsoft Office, reinforces local search options on Yelp, powers Twitter’s translation interface, and provides Uber’s extensive mapping unit. One in every three Web searches in the US are powered by Bing, and considering how involved Bing is in people’s everyday lives, it’s a wonder why more small businesses don’t optimize their websites for one of the most powerful search engines in existence.
Bing has certainly come a long way since its launch in 2009. Compared to four years ago, when Microsoft engineers only submitted updates to the search engine once a month, Bing is incredibly powerful: its engineers now establish new features and updates multiple times a day, with feature submission times below 30 minutes. A quarter of all clicks on Bing Network come from queries only searched on Bing, and with the introduction of Windows 10 came a 30 percent increase in Bing queries from devices equipped with the new operating system. Most importantly to business owners, Bing Webmaster offers search engine optimization (SEO) analysis with biweekly data reports to any Microsoft user who signs up, making it easy for even the least tech-savvy entrepreneurs to enhance their sites’ rankings on the global search engine.
Though Bing Webmaster provides relatively detailed suggestions on how to improve a specific website’s SEO, it only takes a few simple steps to drastically boost your site’s ranking in search results provided by Bing. Good news, too – optimizing your website’s lineup on Bing doesn’t mean you’ll fall behind in other major search engines’ results, so you can continue to reach a variety of potential Web visitors from every online realm. Test out each of the below steps to begin lifting your site’s search rankings, then sign up for Bing Webmaster to discover tips tailored to your site’s specific needs.
Index Your Website
Bing “crawls” websites on its own as users send in queries; as Bing discovers new content, it adds content links to the appropriate search results. To ensure your site starts popping up in search results sooner rather than later, you can submit it to the Bing index. This quick submission adds your website to a queue of sites to be manually crawled and adjoined to relevant search scripts. Since the Bing index is generated by Bingbot, the engine’s main crawler, there’s a brief list of criteria your website must meet in order to be indexed; to avoid being rejected from the index, ensure you’re publishing high-quality, original content and remove “NOINDEX” code from your site’s individual pages. Encouraging backlinks to your site through other entrepreneurs’ and bloggers’ Web pages will also help Bingbot discover your content and determine its popularity, helping your site to be indexed sooner (which means Bing users can finally find your content on the Web).
Optimize Local SEO
Nearly every business can take advantage of local SEO. Guarantee your business shows up in location-based search results by adding it to Bing Places, Bing’s local business database. Once you’ve tossed your company into the ring, you can add information that will help you “tell the best story about your business,” like hours of operation, product and service menus, photographs, and contact information. When someone in your city is seeking the tastiest sushi spot or a marketing agency with outstanding customer service, your business will pop up in their search results, along with information on how to find you.
Make It Mobile-Friendly
Every search engine prioritizes websites they find mobile-friendly, but Bing takes it a step further by providing smartphone and tablet users with subtle “mobile-friendly” labels on every search result that makes the cut. To determine whether your company’s website is functional on portable devices, take a look at the site’s viewport and zoom control configurations, the width of each page’s content, the readability of text on a page, the number of plug-ins that are mobile-compatible, and the spacing between elements on each page. Bing Webmaster also includes a tool that analyzes the mobile-friendliness of your site for you, providing suggestions after each test on how to improve the site’s responsiveness across devices. Not only will mobile-friendliness help your website pop up toward the top of Bing search results, but it will keep smartphone and tablet users on your website longer, increasing traffic for your business.
Reduce Page Load Speed
Approximately 40 percent of Internet users will abandon a Web page if it takes more than three seconds to load. This is a concern not only for visitors who come to your site organically, but also for Bing search results, which prioritize websites with faster loading times. Reduce your website’s page load speed by minimizing HTTP requests, enabling browser caching, and reducing plug-ins when possible. It’s also recommended that images are kept in JPEG format and scaled to the appropriate maximum size before being uploaded to your website, in order to reduce the amount of time it takes to load them. Lastly, code-savvy website owners (or those who have developers to interpret code for them) can benefit from minifying resources, which is done by eliminating extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation in a page’s code. Shortening the amount of time it takes for each page to load will improve your site’s general quality and allow it to rise to the top of Bing search results.
Properly Categorize Each Page
It’s pretty obvious that Bing’s central goal is to help users complete their searches as efficiently as possible – occasionally, it will even adjust your pages’ titles to prove their relevance to a user’s search. Helping Bing accomplish this everlasting feat will improve your website’s ranking in the engine’s search results. To start, try avoiding generic or overused page titles like “About Us” on your website; instead, make titles unique to your business by using “Meet the Bing Engineering Team.” Next, because Bing searches for exact keywords rather than synonyms and related terms, tag your posts and pages with words that most accurately describe your content. Although you’ll want to ensure your page pops up in as many search results as possible, avoid spamming your page’s tags with too many keywords; Bing finds this practice suspicious and will exclude your page from its search results.
Through these simple steps and the use of Bing Webmaster, it’s easy for business owners to begin leveraging Bing to gain significant traffic. What has helped you optimize your website’s rankings in Bing search results?
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