The Bing Search engine is turning out to be a pretty sharp tool for Internet searchers – prompting SEO consultants to take a closer look at the webmaster tools provided by Bing.
The SEO goal here:
• Make it easier to for Bing robots to comb through your site and index it correctly
• Do SEO link development research
• Gather keyword research data to help optimize your website and run a PPC campaign
As digital marketing consultants at ArcherSEM, the SEM specialists use all of the Search Engines’ webmaster tools for digital marketing research. Each search engine tool has its own pros and cons – and is useful for crafting SEO strategies that are honed for each search engine.
The first step: verifying your site with the Bing Webmaster Center. You can do that by placing a code file in your root directory of your website, or in the meta tags of your home page.
Verifying Your Site: First Step for SEO
Once that is done, the data will start to give you clues about the indexing. That includes:
a) Are some of your pages being blocked from getting indexed? That can happen with a poorly written robots.txt file or pages written with a content-type that is not accepted by Bing’s crawlers.
a) Is there malware associated with your site?
b) Are some of your pages broken and producing 404 errors?
The next step in digital marketing planning: keyword research. The Bing Webmaster Central has an Excel 2007 add-on called Microsoft Advertising Intelligence to help you do internet marketing keyword research. The tool (and it IS very handy to use this with Excel) will help you build keyword lists, and then create strategies based on data such as relevance, volume, cost history, demographic and geographic factors.
Link research is the first part of a SEO strategy. The Bing Webmaster Central has link research tools to provide backlinks and outbound links. Even more importantly, you can download the results and then analyze what Bing is looking for in links – and how that effects your Search Engine rankings.
Talk to a digital marketing consultant at ArcherSEM about crafting an internet marketing strategy for your business!