Couple of weeks ago we’ve seen 8 REASONS YOUR SITE MUST BE OPTIMIZED FOR BING.
Time to roll up the sleeves now, and make sure our website matches top 25 Bing ranking factors.
Bonus tips: Don’ts while optimizing for Bing!
Anchor Text
To reinforce the value of editorial content, Bing gives a high importance to the anchor text. But be careful when choosing your anchor texts. Bing is less powerful than Google in keyword matching (like gender, number, synonyms, context, etc.), so make sure to use as anchor text exactly the words you want to be found for. But do not exaggerate, or you will trigger the Google filter introduced with Penguin back in 2012. You want to optimize for Bing but not being penalized by Google!
Authorship
Thanks to a partnership with Klout, Bing has its own Authorship version, allowing people to claim ownership of their content when used by somebody else without quoting. The more content you “own”, the higher your overall ranking. Also, Bing has recently acknowledged rel=canonical tags to help determining original versus duplicate pages.
Backlinks
Bing values editorial links (those from the body text of webpages), but do not value links from sidebar, footer or list of links. As Google does, Bing gives more credit to links coming from .edu and .gov domains. Generally speaking, Bing value backlinks less that Google does. A few good tips on how to do link building right can be found in our previous articles here, here and here.
Click-Through Rate
Bing measures your CTR from its search result pages, and adjust your ranking accordingly.
Connected Pages
Within Bing Webmaster Tools, you can claim ownership of your social pages, connect them to your account and see similar data as it relates to those connected locations.
Double Meaning
A double meaning search in Bing provides local results first. This is different from Google, where the most popular website comes first.
Flash
Bing crawls Flash websites, and sometimes gives credit to websites that use it. Remember that Google do not crawls Flash at all.
HTML Headings
According to Bing, you should have only 1 H1 tag per page, and use H2 and H3 to identify subtopics.
HTTPS
HTTPS is not a ranking factor in Bing, as opposed as in Google.
Local SEO
If you want to optimize for local searches, you need to include geographical keywords in your page content, and possibly in meta title and meta description as well.
Keywords Density
As you’ve probably understood at this point, Bing algorithm is less sophisticated that Google’s in terms of processing language. Make sure to target very specific keywords and possibly use a webpage for each keyword. Again, find a balance between Bing “dumbness” and Google filters (e.g. avoid duplicated content). As a rule of thumb, use your keywords 1 or 2 times in your first paragraph, and 3 times in total in each page.
Mobile Optimization
Similarly to Google, Bing shows a Mobile-friendly label in their mobile search results. There are rumors this will be incorporated into the algorithm itself (as Google is doing since April 21st), but any clear signal so far.
Non-Text Content
Bing loves content other than text, so use plenty of images, infographics, videos, and podcasts. From this extent, Bing works better than Google. Bing prefers pages with relevant supporting multimedia content.
Page Authority
Bing values a lot page authority. Therefore a new website struggles to climb Bing ranking, as Bing algorithm gives priority to aged domains. This implies that if you’re thinking about revamping an old website, the best option is to keep existing URLs and amend the content. Also, websites serving unique content are preferred to those recycling existing data or widely available materials.
Page Design
Bing promotes websites that provide ads relevant to the content of their website and place ads so that they do not interfere with the user experience.
Page Load Speed
Bing values a lot website page speed, so make sure to be fast.
Page Rank
Keep in mind that this is a Google-specific ranking factor. Do not have any impact on Bing.
Pogo Sticking
Bing values user engagement. The more engaged your users, the higher your rank. Bing measure your user engagement through “pogo sticking”, which happens when a user performs a search, hits a result and then hits the go back button of their browser to view the search results again. If this happens to your website, it means that you rank high but fail to satisfy the needs of the users, which implies your content is not relevant. Therefore Bing penalizes you.
Redirections
Bing prefers 301 Moved Permanently redirections to head search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested.
Site Map
Redirect all your error pages to other relevant content or delete them permanently from your website root directory. As for internal linking, link your content to the pages which are already indexed and receiving traffic from search engines.
Site Structure
Bing values your site structure, and in particular how easy your website is to navigate. They suggest that any page shouldn’t be more than 3 clicks away from the homepage. Also navigation should follow a funnel, moving from broader subjects to more specific ones. For instance, if you are an online flower retailer: Flowers -> Roses -> Valentine’s Day Compositions.
Social Signals
Social signals do matter for Bing. Links from social media platforms are highly valued, so make sure to link back your website from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter at the very least.
Text
This is probably the most important ranking factor for Bing, which looks for fresh and unique content. Also, the longer your page the better.
URL, Meta Title and Meta Description
This is very similar to Google. You need to include keywords in your URL, meta title and meta description.
Few DON’Ts to wrap up
Bing will penalize you for:
- Cloaking
- Black hat link building
- Black hat social media strategies (e.g. paid followers or likes)
- Duplicate content