{"id":2275,"date":"2011-09-19T11:48:48","date_gmt":"2011-09-19T08:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/?p=2275"},"modified":"2011-09-19T11:48:48","modified_gmt":"2011-09-19T08:48:48","slug":"seo-for-bing-15-tips-to-boost-your-rankings-on-serps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/seo-for-bing-15-tips-to-boost-your-rankings-on-serps\/","title":{"rendered":"SEO for Bing: 15 tips to boost your rankings on SERPs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bing-seo\"Few weeks ago ComScore released some figures which suggest that the Bing & Yahoo alliance has increased its marketshare to 30.5%<\/strong> in the US which is almost half of the marketshare of Google. Moreover Bing has signed a deal with Baidu, a very popular Chinese Search Engine, to power its SERPs for English queries<\/strong>. This makes it absolutely necessary for webmasters and SEO professionals to ensure that their websites are well optimized for Bing and that they have the chance to get high rankings on the \u201cpowered by Bing\u201d network.<\/p>\n

In this article we will focus on how to optimize your site for Bing and we will provide 15 tips that can help you gain positions<\/strong> on the search results. As many of you will notice, some of these tips are common in SEO and will also work for Google. This is because even if the secret recipes of the major search engine differ, the main principles<\/strong> are the same when it comes to ranking websites.<\/p>\n

1. Improve your CTR<\/h2>\n

Duane Forrester, Product Manager with Bing\u2019s Webmaster Program, has made it clear several times in the past<\/a> that Bing focuses on how users interact<\/strong> with the search results. In one of his interviews he had disclosed that \u201cWe are looking to see if we show your result in a #1, does it get a click<\/strong> and does the user come back to us within a reasonable timeframe or do they come back almost instantly?\u201d. This was also confirmed<\/a> at SMX East by Steve Tullis, who is Senior Program Manager at Bing.<\/p>\n

This suggests that Bing takes into account the click through rate<\/strong> and that they use it as a Ranking signal. To read more on how to improve your CTR, I strongly recommend you to read the article \u201c7 ways to maximize your CTR in Search Engine Results<\/a>\u201d where we explain all the basic techniques.<\/p>\n

\n\"CTR\"\n<\/div>\n

2. Reduce your Bounce Rate<\/h2>\n

Over the years, the Bounce Rate started to become more and more important in SEO since it was used by the search engines as a quality content signal<\/strong>. Bing not only takes into account the CTR but also it measures the timeframe between the click of the user on a particular search result and his return on the SERPs. If the total amount of time was less than a minute<\/strong> or a few seconds, this means that the particular result is not helpful for the users. Achieving times higher than 1 minute or 2<\/strong> indicates that your website is compelling and useful for the users.<\/p>\n

Also here we should note that both of the major search Engines, have developed browsers of their own (IE and Chrome) which allow them to gather anonymous information<\/strong> on how users interact with the various sites. All these \u201cgoodies\u201d provide useful information to the search engines about which websites are of high quality<\/strong> and which are not. If you want to learn more on how to reduce your Bounce Rate read the article \u201cThe 8 ways to lower your Bounce Rate<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

3. Use Schema.org<\/h2>\n

Recently Google, Yahoo and Bing developed a jointly supported protocol called Schema.org which allows webmasters to mark up their content by using special tags in the HTML code. These tags allow search engines understand<\/strong> easier your content since by using them you can mark your images, videos, product names & descriptions, ratings & reviews, geolocation information, maps, addresses etc and define partially the semantic relationships<\/strong> between different components. If this protocol becomes widely used it will allow search engines to understand and rank the pages easier & better, develop new services and present the information in a more user friendly way.<\/p>\n

The new protocol is designed by Search Engines in order to save them from spending money and resources<\/strong>. This is because it can sufficiently replace in a great extend the expensive machine learning algorithms that are currently used in order to understand the different \u201ctypes\u201d of data that are contained in each page. Similarly to what we said in the past about duplicate content<\/a>, when a practice can help search engines reduce their costs, they tend to boost the websites that follow it and punish the ones that don\u2019t. So even though it is early to suggest that schema.org can help you boost your rankings, I STRONGLY<\/strong> recommend you to start using it because very very soon, search engines will demand it by giving extra points to the websites that have implemented it.<\/p>\n

4. Use Bing\u2019s Webmaster Center<\/h2>\n

The Webmaster Center of Bing<\/a> is a free service which allows you to see valuable statistics<\/strong> about your website, check how many impressions & clicks you had on SERPs, manage your crawling rate, submit sitemaps & RSS feeds, manage the way that Bing Indexes your website, check your Organic Traffic etc. Using this tool and analyzing its results is absolutely essential in order to improve your rankings and understand the flaws of your SEO campaign. Additionally by evaluating the provided information you can get useful insights<\/strong> on how compelling your website is in the eyes of the users.<\/p>\n

\n\"bing-SEO-tools1\"\n<\/div>\n

5. Produce Quality Content<\/h2>\n

As most search engines, Bing tries to identify which pages contain high quality content and which contain thin content. While developing your website you must always have in mind that the only way to develop a successful & long-lasting<\/strong> SEO campaign is to focus on content and on user experience. So while developing your website, ask yourself the following questions:<\/p>\n