Tips about SEO for Google are everywhere, but lets not ignore alternative search engines. We prepared a list of some cool and easy to implement Bing SEO hacks to help you!
Google is the first that comes to mind when thinking about SEO, but it’s not the only search engine in the world! There are many more, some of them quite local, like the Russian Yandex or Chinese Baidu. Each of the technologies uses different algorithms, so we decided to talk about each alternative search engine at a time.
The first in the line is Bing – search engine number two in the USA.
Does Bing market even exist?
Bing seriously is present on the search engine’s market. It may seem surprising for people whose default search engine has always been Google Search, however, there are numerous reasons that make Bing quite important out there.
Bing seemed marginal just two years ago, but it has already gained more than 7.5 per cent of the market share and isn’t meaning to stop anytime soon. I the trend is going to continue, every eCommerce should make use of as many Bing SEO hacks, as possible.
As of summer 2018, the situation on the US market looked like this:
Note that Yahoo’s search service is now powered by Bing, which brings Microsoft’s result to a total of 12.6%.
Why even bother with Bing
There are no signs showing that Microsoft’s technology could be forgotten anytime soon. After all, they learned quite a lot developing MSN with its MSN search system and have tried quite a lot of ideas and approaches to searching information, so finding desired what you need with this tool is actually quite pleasant. It presents you a bit different results than Google, but who says it’s anything wrong? On the contrary – Google’s search engine tends to show you products instead of information, as a result of millions of companies optimizing their websites with Google in mind. Because they don’t have so much influence on Microsoft’s system, it is much more honest with its results.
But this is where Bing SEO hacks become useful. Since there is not much competition, getting the best positions in Bing’s results should be relatively easy!
Bing vs Google
From the user’s perspective, Bing seems to provide a lot more practical information, than Google. For example:
- Searching for “movies” in Google shows you what is being shown in your nearest cinemas, while Bing should also provide information about Netflix, Amazon and so on.
- Searching for artists gives more results connected to various social media and a brief summary of this artist’s Wikipedia page in Google Search, than in Bing. But Bing presents more contextual results, so it may be better for some users.
- Bing’s visual search tool is available for users of all platforms, whereas Google’s tool does not work on iOS.
How Bing works
Microsoft stressed very hard that Bing is not just a search engine, but a decision engine, when they released it in 2009. Obviously, they decided to do so mainly because of marketing related issues. Maybe there is something to it, but it’s mostly philosophical.
The idea behind this system is to get rid of every potential useless result before presenting the user with the list of information that make sense and are the closest to what they may need.
Facts on Bing
What are some major facts about Bing?
- .gov and .edu domains have priority in Bing.
- Context is less important for Bing’s indexing robots, than keywords, meta tags and titles.
- Distance is important. The closer you physically are to a given company, the more probable it is to appear in your search results.
- Link building still works, when it comes to Bing, whereas Google decided to fight this SEO technique.
Bing SEO hacks
Since Bing powers up Yahoo’s search service, all of the Bing SEO hacks listed below work for both of these services.
Let’s start!
Be old-school with your Bing SEO hacks
It means that if you had to abandon an SEO technique at some point because Google had decided to ban it, it is probably not a problem for Bing.
Example 1:
Keywords based on the proximity principle (“topic + location”), such as “luxury hotels Newcastle”, “Newcastle luxury hotels”, “luxury hotels in Newcastle” should give identical results in Bing. Also, they should be treated equally to more complex sentences, no matter the actual context, such as “Luxury hotels in Newcastle are not really worth your attention”. It’s quite easy to build content aimed at Bing, then.
Example 2:
SEO titles (title tags) get indexed by Bing’s system and it’s super-important to make sure they contain your desired keywords. Interestingly enough, Bing is so old-school, that it treats HTML tags literally, so make sure that your source code makes use of <title>, <H1>, <H2> and so forth.
Example 3:
While the description meta tag seems ancient,
Link building once again
In
- Getting about 20 backlinks each month. 20 is a safe number that doesn’t get you banned by Google and nicely improves your Bing and Yahoo! results.
- Backlinking from .edu, .org and .gov domains is preferred.
- Using anchor text linking. Do it sparingly, though. You don’t want to make Google’s Penguin angry ;)
Get popular in social media
It is surprising, but one of the best Bing SEO hacks is getting your social media presence organically growing. Every single like and share counts for Microsoft’s system. It can be easily observed with tools such as BuzzSumo.
Bing SEO hacks are not enough
Focusing just on the tricks described above is obviously not enough. What you should do is to work on your website’s SEO in a complex way and make it present and visible in search results of all popular search engines. You can read more on that in other posts on our blog, for example here and here.
About the author
- Digital dropshipping propagator, e-commerce expert, linguist and cyclist. A literary blogger in free time.
Latest entries
