Many people spend vast amounts of time trying to please the Google Gods by reading about all of the latest changes, exploring the stories from those who have succeeded (and failed), and making any necessary changes as the nature of its algorithms evolve. What all too many people forget about is that there is another major search engine out there, Bing, that brings in a plethora of traffic in its own right. From more affordable PPC campaigns to highly optimized niche search capability, incorporating Bing into your broader SEO and marketing strategies can truly pay off. We’ll discuss below what you should be doing if you want to improve your standing with this search engine giant.

Procure an Older Domain

It has been noted that Google prefers to rank websites that have a combination of youth and popularity, but Bing takes a different approach. Bing still places emphasis on older domains, which can put those who have just registered a new domain that has never been utilized at a disadvantage. If you want to gain clout in the world of Bing, then do your homework. First, use analysis tools to find some currently available (but previously long-established) domain names that fit your niche or message. By procuring one or more of these, you can then take advantage of any existing reputation associated in Bing’s algorithms with the domain.

Request Indexing

Bing must first know that your website exists, so be ready to submit a request directly to Bing in order to speed this process up. By pinging your website to Bing in the form of a direct request, they will get around to indexing your website much quicker than they would if the process occurred organically. One of the downsides to Bing when compared to Google is that they do not index new websites as quickly as Google does without submitting a request to do so. If your website has been around for a while but has yet to be indexed by Bing, then it could be due to few links pointing to your website, an incorrect robots.txt file, several blocked URLs existing on your domain, or that the site has been removed due to penalties. Always be sure to submit your website to Bing in the first place, and be patient – it can take longer for them to index.

Use Tags

While Google has seen the amount of attention focused on tags wane in recent years, Bing still focuses heavily on the use of tags, including title tags. Bing has published several blog posts on why it does this, and how website owners can optimize their titles and tags to perform optimally in their searches. Bing aims to help users complete searches as quickly as possible, and in order to do so, it will optimize titles for user relevance, optimize any snippets or sub-titles, and even optimize the URLs to your content. All of this means that title tags must be considered heavily when focusing on a Bing SEO strategy. By pinging your website’s pages to Bing with optimized title tags, you are much more likely to rise the ranks – those who focus solely on Google tend to underperform on Bing in part because of this reason.