Bing SEO 2023, Guide for Beginners
A Simple Yet Practical Guide for Beginners
Whenever we talk about search engines, we often refer to Google. In fact, Google became a synonym for the word “search”.
Although Google has a lion’s share (over 88%) when it comes to the market share of search engines worldwide.
Guess what? Google is NOT the only search engine as there are other search engines as well such as Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and more.
If you think Google is often filled with millions of search results in almost every industry and looking for an alternative search engine to improve your site’s traffic and sales, Bing is for you.
Bing (also referred to as “Microsoft Bing”) is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. Similar to Google, Bing also offers a wide range of search services including web, video, image, and map search products.
Here’s what the interface of Bing looks like;
As you can see above, Microsoft Bing’s interface is pretty straightforward and simple where you can search for anything in several languages or you can also perform specific image or video searches.
According to Statista, Bing accounted for 6.79% of the global search market. In 2009, Yahoo! made a deal with Microsoft and has been fully powered by Bing ever since.
So if you’re looking for a beginner’s guide to Bing SEO in 2023 to rank your website in Bing search results, you’re in the right place. Let’s get started without much ado.
Bing SEO Optimization 2023: An Easy Guide for Total Beginners
What is Bing SEO?
Bing SEO is the process of optimizing your website to improve its organic rankings in Bing search results.
Whether you know it or not, Bing is the world’s second-largest search engine with over 6% search market share.
Bing is small in comparison to a search engine giant like Google but it holds a great market share in many countries, particularly in the US.
So if you’re someone who’s targeting countries like the US to get better organic visibility for your website, you should NOT ignore Microsoft Bing.
What Are the Benefits of Using Bing for Bloggers?
As a blogger, what are the benefits of Bing? Why should you even care about Bing in 2023? Here are some of the benefits of Bing.
- Bing also powers Yahoo!’s search engine which is currently the fourth-largest search engine in the world. That means, if you optimize your website for Bing, you’re also optimizing for Yahoo!
- Bing has a better image search functionality so users can see high-quality images on the Bing image results page.
- There’s less competition. Google is a HUGE search engine and there’s a lot of competition in almost every industry. If you want less competition and looking for better search rankings, try Bing.
- Bing is not as harsh as Google when it comes to penalizing over-optimized sites. You can get better rankings on Bing by using your target keywords multiple times on your page. Just make sure your content is great.
- Yahoo and Bing own one-third of the U.S. Search Market. So if you’re targeting the US audience, Bing is a great search engine to optimize for.
- With Bing, you can afford both to advertise on and optimize for it. Thanks to low competition on Bing. Yes, Bing ads are much cheaper than Google ads.
Getting Started With Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is a free tool that includes a ton of useful tools including a keyword research tool, an outbound links controller with the disavow option, a reporting tool, and more.
If you’re new to Bing, just follow the below instructions to get started with Bing Webmaster tools.
Create an account with Bing Webmaster Tools
The first step to getting started with Bing SEO is that you need to create an account with Bing Webmaster Tools.
Similar to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service that allows website owners to add their websites to the Bing index crawler, analyze backlinks, manage keywords, and more in Bing.
You can either choose your Microsoft account or Facebook account to sign up with Bing webmaster tools.
Once you’ve created an account and logged into Bing Webmaster Tools, you can add your site easily by clicking on the “Add a Site” option
You can also add multiple sites that you own to see all your website’s performance.
Once you’ve added your website, you need to verify it.
There are 2 easy ways of verifying your website to Bing:
- Place a BingSiteAuth.xml file in the root directory of your website
- Embed HTML code with meta tags to your homepage
- Once the verification is done, you can see your site’s search performance, add new URLs, submit your website’s sitemap, and access everything from Bing Webmaster Tools.
Make sure your pages are indexed
You’ll start getting search traffic only if your website pages are getting indexed on Bing, right? So the first step is to check whether your pages are indexed or not.
You can do that by entering site:yoursitename.com in Bing.com
If your website pages are already getting indexed on Google without any issues, you’ll NOT face issues with Bing indexing as well.
But… if you’re running a brand new website, it might take some time for Bing to start indexing your pages. You can also submit your URLs using your Bing Webmasters Tool account.
Just go to the “URL Submission” tab to submit your URLs for indexing.
If your website pages are already getting indexed on Google without any issues, you’ll NOT face issues with Bing indexing as well.
But… if you’re running a brand new website, it might take some time for Bing to start indexing your pages. You can also submit your URLs using your Bing Webmasters Tool account.
Just go to the “URL Submission” tab to submit your URLs for indexing.
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