This is a guest post by Praveen Rajarao – Praveen has left several thoughtful comments on this blog, and in turn I’ve enjoyed reading his blog, Daily Morning Coffee. Last week I was about to ask him if I could interview him when he offered to write a guest post. Enjoy.

Every bloggers’ initial objective is to get crawled by Google as it is taken for granted in the blogosphere that more than 80% of your “organic” traffic comes from the “King of Search Engines” – Google. Have you ever given a thought about the other search engines which have equally effective and efficient crawling bots and spiders which can index your pages in a competitive manner as compared to Google? Would it not be a welcome idea to properly index and optimize your website to gain that other 20% of traffic? Search engines from Yahoo & Microsoft Bing have been in the play together with Google in this immensely crowded blogging world. Though experts have always opined that Google is leading the web, it does make one take a step back and retrospect the chances of increasing their website visibility with other search engines as well.

In this post, I would like to concentrate on the “MS Bing Flavor” of optimizing a website and what are those initial steps one needs to be aware of to get properly indexed by the Microsoft engine. Here goes:

1. Website Submission – For any search engine to crawl your website, the foremost step is to submit your site to them. Of course, for Google, there are many ways to get faster access to those spiders, like Digg, for example. However, you can access the below URL to submit your site and leave it a day or two for those crawling bots to come all over your pages.
Submit Your Site Here – http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

2. Verify @ Bing Webmaster – Similar to the Google Webmaster tool, you need to access the Bing Webmaster Central (http://www.bing.com/webmaster) to verify that your website is properly submitted. Also, while you are at it, submit all your site-maps(including the image and video site-maps) to the webmaster.

3. XML Site-map Plug-in – Some of the older versions of the plug-in do not support Bing. Ensure that you upgrade your plug-in to “Notify Bing” of your site-map changes.

4. Microsoft Silver-light 4 – The new updated Bing Webmaster uses Silverlight4 and is thus able to give you more information about your site from as long as 6 months ago and also tell you details about crawl statistics, errors, click-thrus, keyword relevance and much more.

Google SEO vs Bing SEO – With the hand-shake happening between Yahoo and Bing to work together and share resources in an attempt to capture the online web market that Google has dominated for years, it is time to concentrate on Bing SEO as well. It is a fact now that both Yahoo and Bing are using BING search engine for their search results, which means, if you search on Yahoo or on Bing, the search engine used is of Bing and the same results are displayed on both. But how is this relevant to us bloggers you may ask!! – If you have good ranking on Yahoo, and not as well on Bing, then you can kiss those Yahoo rankings goodbye, because now, what matters is your Bing ranking alone for both these search engines. Now that the immediate necessity has dawned upon you, here is a very good video by WebProNews that speaks about the differences in Google SEO and Bing SEO -

More WebProNews Videos

Some Bing SEO Tips that I learned from the video and also reading them on Bing journals are below, hope you find them useful enough to start working on them if you haven’t already.

1. Age of Domain – As with any search engine, Bing emphasizes the importance of the age of your website, the older it is, the better the chances of high visibility and easy crawling. If you have just created your website, all you need to do is, submit your site to Bing and wait patiently for it to crawl.

2. Content Originality – Are you a true blogger with original content and unique writing skills? Do you have many such posts in your website that has relevant search keywords? Then your site is most suitable for Bing to get you your share of traffic. Bing somehow relates and compares blog contents and it is easy for them to identify the nature of your blog by analyzing the post contents.

3. Keywords & Meta Tags – Google does rely heavily on keywords and meta tags, but Bing takes this a notch higher by stating that it promotes “phrased keywords” like “Online Casino Games” or “Make Money by Blogging”.

4. Back-links & Outbound Links – Relevant Backlinks to your site from well established renowned websites is highly recommended by Bing, it pays when you have an inbound link to your website from a website of high rating(doesn’t have to mean a high Google PR). Outbound links to healthy websites brings more weightage to your site from Bing, hence you need to link well in your site and also at the same time, promote your website on others as well.

5. Custom Permalink – Bing strongly advises bloggers to use human readable names for your pages. By default WordPress gives random numbers to your posts like “?p=12″ which has to be modified to a meaningful post name like “best-practices”. This can be achieved by customizing your Permalink structure as can be read in this post – http://www.dailymorningcoffee.com/best-practices-for-seo.

Focus on Bing SEO? – Having said all this, what should a blogger really focus upon? Google or Bing SEO? Obviously both of them are two different species of search engines, one not depending on the other’s rank or rating. Personally I feel it is time to start paying attention to Bing in addition to Google ranking. Improving your Bing search traffic to around 5 to 6% will drastically improve your rankings and “organic” traffic.

But at the very end all that matters to attract and retain your visitors is Content & Originality of your posts. Do you think you will incorporate these pointers in your site and try to see how it improves your site performance? Have you got any other useful hints on Bing SEO practices? Do share your thoughts about the same. Thanks for reading.