It’s been a long time coming but Bing has finally released its own version of Webmaster Guidelines, giving an insight on how to ensure that your website not only gets indexed by the search engine but, with some SEO guidelines and tips, how to help ensure that your site fares better. The guidelines are reasonably extensive, although not as much as Google’s own guidelines, and they are joined by a series of Webinars designed to help you fully get to grips with the guidelines. Here are some of the highlights that we think will interest webmasters and marketers the most.
SEO
Bing apparently recognises that search optimisation is a valid marketing technique and an effective way of ensuring that your website offers quality to visitors as well as to search engines. Cloaking, certain types of redirects, and basically any tactic that is an attempt to game the search engine algorithms are frowned upon according to the new guidelines.
Content
Site content is, as most would have expected, one of the major areas of concentration. While they have a lot of words, what the guidelines essentially say is that Bing expects deep and good quality, unique content. Sites with poor, low quality, or thin content will not perform as well.
Social Indicators
Social indicators are used by the search engines to determine your popularity and authority on social networks and social media sites. Google is known to be giving them more weight than previously and it’s not surprising to learn that Bing is concentrating quite heavily on this side of things too. “Positive signals can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.”
Links
Ahh, links. Any discussion over SEO and online marketing will inevitably bring us to a discussion on links and link building. Google dislikes, hates, despises paid links and while Bing apparently appreciates that paid linking is a viable and even valuable traffic building structure they also give a very basic insight into the fact that Bing looks for patterns to help them determine whether sites are using paid links and to devalue those links in the future. Stick to ethical link building techniques to avoid the wrath of Bing.
Matt Jackson is an experienced and professional content writer. He has been writing content on a host of different topics, ranging from toilet brushes to social media marketing, for the past 6 years.
