Bing’s must-know about SEO

Bing has come to the rescue of web professionals by publishing a list of its top 18 things to know about search engine optimisation (SEO).  We’ll investigate three of their top tips in this blog post.

[Don’t underestimate the power of Bing. It recently came out on top over Google  in a survey looking at the relevancy of search results.]

Crawlability

This is number one on Bing’s list, and with good reason. As Bing writes on its blog: “If a crawler can’t access your content, the content won’t be indexed by search engines, nor will it be ranked. Enable and use XML sitemaps with a low error rate to build trust with search engines.

“Make sure your website navigation is clean and strive for a simple, search-friendly URL structure.”

This surely represents the minimum standard for all websites – in many ways, there is no point having a website at all if it is not crawlable.

Site structure

Bing suggests that your site structure should offer strong functionality to encourage link building. Genuine link building is a tried and tested way to improve your search ranking, so anything that supports this is most necessary. HTML site maps are also a good way to ensure a fine user experience and to help search engines find you.

Content production

Bing takes the old saying “content is king” one step further by saying that whilst this may be true, not all content is “fit to rule”. Very true! Search engines are like consumers. They like fresh and compelling content.

Your job is to create content that is so compelling that visitors to your site want to stay there and read it (as opposed to clicking the ‘back’ button and returning to the search results).

If you are working on a new website design, make sure every page is of 100% value. If you are working on an existing site, start with a site audit. You could even survey your employees and customers to gather their thoughts on each page, and start deleting, improving or consolidating your content once you have collated their responses.