Although Google search refers more visitors to my site, there is at least 45% of traffic coming in from Bing as well. So here is how to fine tune your SEO practices to get more referrals from Bing!

We don’t hear as much about what Bing wants out of a site for rankings but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some great info about Bing SEO and given us some tips. Not surprisingly, a lot of his advice for honoring Bing’s policy does not differ too much from advice that Google gives us.

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. “Just don’t make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution,”

“You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity, time and should not result to mean ways or black hat SEO tricks.”

Don’ts – Things you shouldn’t do.

I’ve put together a list of things that you should avoid in your link building efforts, if it is a good Bing ranking that you are after. Here is what Bing says will get your site reviewed more closely by staff:
1. The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
2. Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites
3. Using hidden links in your pages, Google penalizes such malpractice.
4. Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known “bad neighborhoods” on the Web
5. Linking out to known web spam sites
“When a probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction,”.

“If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.”

Do‘s – Things that you need to follow.

Following are Bing’s tips for effective link building:

1. Develop your site as a business brand and brand it consistently
2. Find relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media folk, and make sure they’re aware of your site/content
3. Publish concise, informative press releases online
4. Publish expert articles to online article directories
5. Participate in relevant conversations on blogs/forums, referring back to your site’s content when applicable
6. Use social networks to connect (make sure you have links to your site in your profiles) and share the information with common minded people
7. Create an email newsletter with notifications of new content and let people subscribe to the newsletter
8. Participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums
9. Strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry, while promoting your site

Yes, there is more on this; Bing also considers your domain age and keywords in the title tag as a key factor in giving an awesome page rank. So make sure you have ‘increase your domain age’ and ‘try to acquire links from pages with your keywords in the title tag‘.

Most of the stuff shared here is nothing savvy search marketer is not already aware of. That said, there are clearly plenty of online (and offline for that matter) businesses out there that don’t have savvy search marketers on the payroll. It can be quite helpful when a search engine itself lays out what to do and what not to do to help webmasters get better rankings.

Tags | bing, dos and donts, google, search