Bing is a relatively new search engine created by Microsoft and born out of it’s previous MSN search tool. With it’s huge global ad campaign it is picking up momentum quickly. Despite Google being the biggest and most used search engine in the world, there is still good reason to ensure that your website is optimised for Bing.

At present, very little information seems to exist on how to optimise for Bing - everybody is still caught up with trying to rank in Google. But from the sources I have read so far, and from my own experiments, I have managed to compile a small list of tips to consider when trying to rank your website in Bing.

On page content

Where Google values links pointing to a website to determine its ranking, Bing operates slightly differently. Bing looks for keywords on the page, in the web address and in the markup (i.e. alternative text on images). So to maximise your chances of ranking in Bing, you need to ensure that you have a few keywords on the page for which you want to rank. This does NOT mean plugging loads of keywords in there - Bing will know you are trying to game the system, so keep it natural.

Keyword domains

Elaborating on the previous point, Bing seems to regard keywords in the web address quite highly. For example if you wish to rank for the term “dog collars” you will benefit from having these words in the domain. Exact-match domains seem to perform very well.

Domain age

This does not always seem to be the case, but often the older a domain is, the better the site will rank. This can be said for Google as well - search engines seem to consider an aged domain as one that has earned its place - assuming it has been well maintained over the years.