Microsoft is offering the Bing Webmaster Guide for anyone new to Bing. It’s the official guide from Microsoft with “New Features Relevant to Webmasters”. Details include the new Bing SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and what it means for your SEO efforts. As boring as it sounds – it’s actually got some good information for optimizing your website for Bing.

Download it here.

Do you have any questions on Bing – let us know in the comments!

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As you have probably heard about 100 times – Microsoft and Yahoo have partnered on 10 year search deal making Bing the primary technology behind Yahoo’s search engine.

What this means is Bing’s market share just jumped from around 8% to around 30% – which means you need to pay attention to this. Ironically the day before this announcement we posted two Bing related optimization posts:

Bing SEO Tips

Bing Website Optimization Guide

We were just as irritated as you with this announcement because it adds another item on our plate to optimize and analyze – but the results will be worth it. Here are some other posts from around the web that you can use to understand what this partnership means to you.

SEOMoz – Top 10 Things the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal Changes for SEO
#1 – SEO for Bing is Worth Your Optimization Effort
#4 – Bing’s Webmaster Tools Are Important
#5 – Yahoo! & Bing Local Become More Essential
#7 – Bing Will Get Lots more Data

SearchEngineLand – What Site Owners, Web Developers, And SEOs Should Know About the Yahoo/Microsoft Deal

The big question is will this partnership significantly change market share percentages? Depending on whose numbers you use, Google has either 65% or 74% share in the US (more in some European countries). That puts the combined Yahoo/Microsoft share at 28% or 25.5%. That’s substantial traffic, sure, and worth paying attention to

Do you have any questions about this partnership? Let us know in the comments!

[image via SEOMoz]

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Earlier today we shared 5 Bing SEO Tips and how Bing is starting to generate a good amount of traffic to our websites. Compete.com says Bing is the #13 trafficked website on the web now so it’s a good time to learn how to optimize your website for Bing.

Here are three tips to optimize your website for Bing – beyond basic SEO.

1. Submit Your URL To Bing

Go to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx to submit your URL to Bing so it knows to index it.

And enter your URL….

2. Add Bing to your XML Sitemap
We are using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress to magically generate our sitemap xml and robots.txt files based on our preferences. If you are using this you’ll want to select the option to allow the MSNBot in and ping Bing when you have updates. If you don’t use this plugin or don’t use WordPress you will likely need to do this manually.

3. Use Bing Webmaster Central
If you are not using Bing Webmaster Central – you should. Much like Google Webmaster tools this gives you a dashboard into how the Bing engine sees and indexes your website. Not only does this give you valuable information on how your site ranks – it seems to make you more favorable in rankings.

Do you have any questions on optimizing your website for Bing? Any tips that we haven’t mentioned? Let us know in the comments!

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During our weekly web analytics session at 48Web last week we finally started seeing Bing jump into our traffic reports for search traffic. And according to Compete.com Bing is now the #13 most trafficked site on the web – beating the likes of cnn.com, twitter.com, digg.com, and others. So – its relevancy in search is growing and should definitely be paid attention to as part of your site optimization and internet marketing efforts.

1. Bing likes older domains better. This means if your domain is older than mine and we are targeting the same keywords – you will have rank.

2. Titles are key. Bing – like most other search engines – like keyword rich titles. This means you should really concentrate on SEO when writing blog posts or creating content. Not only should the title be keyword rich – it should be (obviously) related to the content.

3. Bing likes longer form writing. If the content of your blog post, article, or web page has at least 300 words you are likely to rank higher in Bing.

4. Make sure you are letting in the MSNBot to your site – that’s the spider that crawls your site looking for keywords and text. We’ll have more details in our next Bing Website Optimization post.

5. Link Out. Unlike Google your rank is not affected by linking out – so feel free to do so. Be sure not to do too much as it may affect your Google Rank. I tend not to worry about that because linking is a natural part of the web.

And as a bonus tip – make sure your meta information is keyword rich since that’s something all search engines love. This includes the meta description, title, and keywords.

Want to optimize your site for Bing? Check out our Bing Website Optimization Guide.

Have any questions or tips on SEO for Bing? Let us know in the comments!

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