Life would be nice and easy for SEO practitioners everywhere if all the search engines used the same signals to rank your website.
Maybe not easy but definitely a lot simpler.
The first rule of SEO: nothing is ever easy.
Google is the ruler of the internet and the biggest search engine around. We all know that, but did you know that Bing is gaining momentum in users and search traffic? Combined with MSN, Bing now accounts for 16% of all internet searches. That’s a lot of people you could be missing out on if you’re not following and implementing SEO tips for Bing.
Each search engine uses different signals in how they rank websites. There’s the basic SEO practices such as keywords, content relevancy, and site architecture, but Bing has 5 specific things that they look at. Below are a few tips that are sure to help your website rank higher in the SERPs.
Bing Webmaster Central
Bing’s Webmaster Central has recently relaunched and is now a very robust tool for webmasters and marketers. In addition to giving you insight into how your site is performing, it will also give you tips and recommendations on what they are looking at on your site. Pay attention.
Microformats
Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats that were built upon existing standards and that are intent on solving simple problems. The search engines support them and they provide extra benefits in the SERPs
Geo Signals
Bing uses a variety of Geo signals in order to determine which country a certain page is more relevant for, including the location of the server, incoming link locations, the language it’s written in, etc.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
Click through Rate is how many people are clicking on your site in the search engine results. If your site is popular, you have a higher CTR. And if you have a higher CTR, Bing will send more people to your site because they think your content is more relevant and that users are finding what they’re looking for.
Bounce Rate
Bing cares about whether users like your site or go off to another page as soon as they land. If users are hitting the back button soon after they arrive on your site, Bing takes notice (and so should you because it means your content is lacking).
It’s been mentioned in some online forums that Bing is using keyword meta tags in their ranking signals. SearchEngineLand published an article that states that although Bing does look at the keyword tag it’s not used as a ranking factor. It’s used as an indication of spam. With that said, don’t waste your time on keyword meta tags and instead spend it on other endeavours.