People always pay close attentions to Google – the largest search engine on the web, but ignore the other search engines like Bing, which also takes a big share in the search field and brings a large number of visitors to website. In this tutorial, we just guide readers optimize their sites for Bing search engine by using the official Bing Webmaster Tools. With the careful introduction and guidelines, readers can have an in-depth understanding about the service and learn about how to use it to improve WordPress SEO.
About Bing Webmaster Tools
Developed by Microsoft Inc. in 2009, Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service that offers tools for webmasters to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of their website, build sitemap, submission and ping tools, website statistics, and new content and community resources.
It contains many useful tools and features to support webmasters to access data and manage their website on Bing. Some typical ones are listed in the following:
Crawl issues enable users to find potential issues on their sites, such as 404 File Not Found errors, blocked by REP, and more.
Backlink data allows users to access data about their referring links.
Advanced filtering allows users to overview the site report and quickly find the data they need.
Data download allows users to analyze the results by accessing the first 1000 results in a CSV file.
Sitemaps gives users the ability to check whether Bing index their sitemap correctly.
Outbound links showcases the outbound links Bing sees.
Robost.txt validator allows users to check whether their robots.txt file meets the standard.
Get Started with Bing Webmaster Tools
In order to drive traffic from Bing search engine, the first thing you need to do is submitting your site to the service. Once you login with your Microsoft account, you can see a screenshot as the next, where you can enter your site URL and add your sitemap.
Once you submit a site to this service, Bing search engine will crawl your site and index your content, by which you can drive organic traffic from search result pages.
Then, Bing asks you to verify the ownership of your sites, which helps build up your brands easily and efficiently. By default, it offers 3 verification options:
XML File Verification: you can download a file named as BingsiteAuth.xml and place it in the root directory of your site.
Meta Tag Verification: you can take the line of code offered and insert it in the section of your homepage.
DNS Verification: this option needs more technical knowledges than the previous two. You need to add a CNAME record with the name offered to the value verify.bing.com
You can freely choose one of the three options, and then click the Verify button at the bottom. Once done, you can click on your site and it brings you to the dashboard, which showcases your site activities, like clicks from search, appeared in search, pages crawled, crawl error and pages indexed.
Configure My Site
Click on configure my site tab, it takes to you to the dashboard of data for items that you can configure on your site. Click on the sub-tabs and you can get more detailed data and change the specific section.
Sitemaps: here you can submit a new sitemap of your site, helping Bing to know your site structure.
Submit URLs: if you want a specific page get indexed quickly, you can utilize this feature to submit its URL. You are able to enter 10 URLs per day and 50 per month. Read this tutorial to learn about the detailed steps.
Ignore URL parameters: you can use this feature to avoid duplicate content. However, it’s unnecessary if you use canonical tags within your site.
Crawl control: As fast crawling may slow down your site, you can specify the time and rate how Bing to crawl your site.
Block URLs: it helps you to remove pages/posts from Bing index.
Reports & Data
After confirmation your site, you can check the results by viewing the reports and data.
Page traffic – it showcases the traffic data about your site, including click from search, appeared in search, CTR, and search keywords.
Index Explorer – it displays the categories, pages, and a number of URLs indexed by Bing search engine.
Search Keyword – it shows the top keywords which bring visitors from search result pages.
SEO report – here you can get SEO suggestions for your site.
Inbound links – it tells you the number of inbound links pointing to your site.
Diagnostics & Tools
In this part, Bing offers some helpful tools for your usage. For example, Bingbot gives you the ability to see how your site appears on Bing, SEO analyzer provides you some SEO advices for individual pages, and so on.
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