We have been deeply documenting the rise of Bing, and there’s no denying it has unquestionably improved Microsoft’s position in terms of search market share.

So now the issue for website owners and Search Engine Optimizers remains – “How do I rank top in Bing and drive more visitors to my website?”

As you guys know very well that Bing is a smart search engine because if you are an SEO and optimizing a website for a keyword, example: “SEO Consultant” then if you’re optimizing your main page and let suppose your main page doesn’t contain the keyword OR text SEO Consultant then Bing will automatically find the text from your subpages.

While the jury is still out on definitive strategies for higher ranking success in Bing, there seems to be a rising chorus of support for certain tactics, which I have detailed below:

• Backlinks: While backlinks are still used in the bing algorithm, it seems not to the similar level as Google. Backlink counts for top 10 websites in Bing are much lower as compared to Google, suggesting less importance.
• Anchor Text: It seems that Bing focuses more deeply on links with relevant anchor text, so that should influence your linking strategy – get your text anchor text right.
• On-Page Optimization: One of the more contentious factors, but many SEO experts believes Bing is weighting more deeply towards On-Page Optimization, not sure this will remain the case, if in fact it is the case.

• Keywords in URLs add essential ranking benefits
• Title Tags are as important as all the time.
• Internal link anchor text seems to add major weight to content relevance

• Age and Authority: It appears that Bing places a higher weighting on site/domain age and authority as compared to Google. Once more a factor that is surely not sustainable given the importance of social media and blogs in terms of relevant results.

Below is a chart that ABC News Alerts produced based some analysis. We compared the top 2 results for the search “Latest News” in Bing and Google to determine what factors matter most for the two respective websites.

As you can see from the general consensus and ABCNewsAlerts’s research, the higher ranking factors for Google and Bing do differ.

The important thing to note is that no one of them competes, so to get higher rankings in Bing and Google won’t compromise each other. Smart site owners should be covering off the factors of each search engine to maximize their website visitors.

New tools, guidelines for Bing Maps

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September 03, 2009, 03:20 PM by Webmaster Center team | 83 Comments |

When I attended both SMX Advanced in Seattle back in June and SES San Jose just a couple of weeks ago, I heard a lot of questions from webmasters about Bing, especially pertaining to search engine optimization issues. Typically these included:

• I want to do SEO for Bing—where should I start?
• How is Bing different in terms of SEO?
• What do webmasters need to know and do?
• Are there any insider tips for successful ranking?

I’ll tackle these questions by providing some useful, baseline information and include pointers to more detailed, pertinent docs.

As you know, Bing is an evolution in the search engine space. With its innovative, new user interface (UI) design bringing new depth and opportunities for searchers, they can now quickly find the information they seek when they search the Internet. New UI features, such as Quick Tabs, Related Searches, and Document Preview (to name just a few), surface more information and present more opportunities to discover what searchers want to know so they can make more informed decisions more quickly. As a result, we describe Bing as a decision engine. (For more information on the new UI features in Bing, see the Bing Webmaster Center blog post, Bing white paper for webmasters & publishers released.)

Under the covers of the new UI, we do a lot of engineering work on a very large scale. For example, we crawl a variety of content types found on the Web, index that content, apply appropriate algorithms, and finally send relevant content to user queries in our search engine results pages (SERPs).

Bing’s SEO principles

SEO is fundamentally about creating websites that are good for people. The most basic advice we can give for achieving optimum rank for your site in Bing is to do the following:

• Develop great, original content (including well-implemented keywords) directed toward your intended audience
• Use well-architected code in your webpages (including images and Sitemaps) so that users’ web browsers and search engine crawlers can read the content you want indexed)
• Earn several, high-quality, authoritative inbound links

As you can see by the links, much of this material has already been discussed in-depth in the Webmaster Center team blog in our ongoing column, search engine marketing (SEM) 101.

The type of SEO work and tasks webmasters need to perform to be successful in Bing hasn’t changed—all of the legitimate, time-tested, SEO skills and knowledge that webmasters have invested in previously apply fully today with Bing. Moreover, investments in solid, reputable SEO work made for Bing will bring similar improvements in your website’s page rank in other search engines as well.

Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content, website architecture, and have done the hard work of earning several high-quality inbound links.

Key content and tools for performing SEO with Bing

To keep up with the latest and greatest information coming from the Bing Webmaster Center team, we recommend that you follow and review the following content:

• Review the Bing official guidelines for successful indexing document for various recommendations on technical and content issues as well as known problems that can affect your site’s rank
• Visit the Webmaster Center blog to keep up with the latest information from the team (you can even subscribe to our blog’s RSS feed to automate this process)
• Register all of your websites with Bing Webmaster Center tools, where you can use our tools to see all sorts of data to your website pertinent to webmasters
• Participate in our Webmaster Center user forums to ask questions and provide us with feedback

We look forward to working with you as partners in helping our mutual customers find the information they seek on the Internet.

– Rajesh Srivastava, Principal Group Program Manager, Bing