Bing, the new avatar of MSN, is fast becoming as one of the popular and emerging search engine. Bing’s market share has increased, for the first time, to double digit and it keeps up going upwards.

With rising popularity we can’t miss the Bing. Apart from optimizing for Google, which everyone prefers, we should also optimize websites for bing in order to get traffic from Bing.

How to optimize for Bing?

Optimizing for Bing is no more different than optimizing for Google. Basically you have to follow the same rules and adhere with the common SEO guidelines. Following are some of the basic guidelines which you should adhere with in order to get Top ranking on Bing.

Content

• Always write unique, original and interesting content.
• Avoid duplicate content. Check your content with copyscape for any duplication
• Use simple and readable sentences
• Don’t stuff a lot of keywords
• Keep keyword density to be somewhere between 2.5% to 5%
• Use header tags H1, H2 etc
• Group content into paragraphs
• Use only well-formed, HTML code
• Use W3C Markup Validation Service to validate your website for any HTML/CSS error

Title and Metatags

• Use unique title and metatags (Keywords and Description) for each page within your website.
• Bing’s new guidelines clearly emphasizes on the title and metatags and if you don’t adhere to it then your website will not be listed in search results

Sitemaps

• Create Sitemap for users in .html which is good for navigation
• Create XML sitemap and submit to Bing webmaster Center
• Bing now allows up to 50,000 URLs in the XML sitemap (previously it was 10,000),
• Keep the size of XML file to be maximum 10 MB compressed.

URLs

• Keep URLs simple
• If you have dynamic URLs then use mod_rewrite or other methods to convert them into SEO friendly URLs

Inbound Links

• Get good quality links from relevant website
• Use meaningful anchor text
• Directory Submission – Submit your website to DMOZ, Alexa, and other good directories which are the easiest way to get free incoming links
• Article Writing- Write articles and submit to best articles websites such as Articles Gala, ezine, goarticles etc.
• Avoid link exchange as they are no more effective

You can submit your website to Bing from the following link:

Submit Website to Bing

Above are some of the suggestion for Bing SEO. Participate in Bing Webmaster Center User Forum in order to keep up to date with the latest developments.