With rare exceptions, what helps you with one search engine will help you with another.  Very little will get you forcibly pushed down the listings.  This means that whatever you do with Bing should also help you at least a bit with Google and all other search engines.  So since you don’t have anything to lose by doing so, let’s look at some of the most commonly offered tips for making sure your site gets well Binged.

Pay it forward

href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">Google also places some value on having relevant links out, but it appears from most metrics that href="http://www.bing.com/" target="_blank">Bing scores this even higher.  As always don’t overdo it.  Search engine programmers are well aware of how much you want to game their systems.  Keep it well populated, but not overcrowded.

Say anything

Bing also gives more attention to pages with a significant amount of text.  You’ll want at least 300 words of original text on your page.  Keep it relevant, and keep the keyword stuffing to a dull roar: once or twice per 300 word block is the most common recommendation.

Title your pages

Once, the title of your page was one of the more important page rank considerations.  Other search engines seem to have dropped that.  Bing is bringing it back, so make sure you put your most relevant keywords in there.  Again, though, don’t overdo it: one site recommends no more than 65 characters for this field.  This is a one-line-per-page fix that could make a huge difference.

Structure your site well

Bing puts more emphasis on site architecture than other web search engines.  Some ways to take advantage of this include the following:

• Make your site “crawlable” – Ensure that your site is easy to navigate.  You can use a robots.txt file to help guide Bing along.
• Invest in a sitemap – A single page that maps out your entire web site is a good, comprehensive way to make sure your site is fully indexed.  For that matter, make it, and then go right to Bing and submit it there.
• Keep it text-based – Have as much of the information you want Bing to find in the form of text. If you have to have a heavy multi-media presentation, make sure that for all of if you have sufficient alternate text.

To make it clear that we’re not just posting a useless guide, consider that one study ranked Bing higher than Google in “search efficiency.”  This is the metric of how much users click through on the engine’s suggested results.  This means that Bing just might soon be giving Google a run for its money, seeing as how results relevance is the #1 goal of a search engine.  If you are trying to get your site noticed, then this is not something you’ll want to miss out on.

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Seems a touch hallucinatory, doesn’t it?  You might feel the desire for something of a technical shaman to guide you through this wonderland.  But do you actually need one?  There isn’t an easy answer to this question.  Let’s try to summarize the arguments for both cases.

The argument for “yes”

The important thing to remember about search engine optimization is that it is a continually evolving cat-and-mouse game.  Like playing the stock market, there cannot by definition be any one way, because if there was, everyone would be using it, and you’d have to find something new to one-up everyone.

This, combined with the increasing rate at which search engines change their algorithms, and the eternally growing size of the web that they are indexing, make it harder each day to keep up with the Joneses.  This is an effort that you could work at every day if you wanted to, which means that it’s also a job you could pay someone else to do.  Let’s not forget also that there are “white hat” and “black hat” methods, meaning methods that are considered fair and unfair play, and not knowing the difference can in worst-case scenarios result in your site being blacklisted.

The argument for “no”

You should be relying on far more than search engine results to drive traffic to your site anyway.  While all of the above will constantly change, what won’t change are links to your site that customers/users can reliably use to find you: add in old school advertising to that list as well.

Moreover Google and other search engines have for some years been giving personalized results, meaning that there’s no one right measure anymore of how your site does in various searches: while a company can simulate this by pretending to be multiple users with different preferences, this is a lot of work for quickly diminishing returns.

Then remember that your site will naturally fluctuate in the ranking no matter what you do, and that not all traffic to your web site becomes paying customers (or whatever equivalent is important to you).  You need to try to estimate just how much extra traffic you’re getting, how much that is resulting in extra business, and whether or not the amount you are paying for this higher ranking is worth it (and how much higher is it?  Be sure to check yourself now and then).

There’s no good answer to this: Google has become one of the prime economic forces no matter what your business is, and other search engines like Bing only add to this importance, as well as the difficulty in doing it yourself.  This is a tricky one.  Take careful stock in the differences in your traffic, do the math, and remember that in the end, there’s still no substitute for just having a quality web site that represents a quality business.

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This is a fair objection.  The truth, though, is that there are some fundamental principles that most experts agree on.  The reason that they work is simply that not everyone tries to make their pages more easily findable by href="http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/" target="_blank">Google.  Some web site owners simply assume that all they have to do is put their page up, and Google will automatically pick it up.

This much is  accurate: they will.  If you don’t want to be on page 17 of their listings, however, then you need to do a few things to put you ahead of the people who are making no effort at all.  These are basic rules that anyone can easily follow.

Keywords are your best friend

There is a larger truth about search engines that is so obvious that is seems unfathomable that more people don’t intuitively realize it: search engines can only search through text.  This means that you need the text on your web site as relevant as possible.

Take care, therefore, to make sure that key phrases that you think people who would want to come to your site would search for are somewhere in the text of your web pages, word for word.  These are known as “ href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_%28computer_programming%29" target="_blank">keywords.”  For example, if you are selling “Victorian wall ornaments,” those are your keywords, and you need them used on your site in multiple places, especially your front page.

A warning, though: don’t go crazy.  In the past people created pages that had thousands of words consisting of nothing but keywords in invisible text.  Search engines are now trained to filter out these pages.  Use your keywords only in the appropriate context, but don’t be afraid to use it multiple times.  Make sure as well that you throw in a few synonym phrases (“Victorian ornaments”, “Victorian decorations”, etc.)

Links are your next best friend

Search engines catalog href="http://w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp" target="_blank">links as much as they do basic text.  Make sure that there are plenty of links on your site, optimally ones that contain in their URLs the terms that people are searching for.  Other good ways of adding links that users might find are by setting up external sites that link to yours, as well as getting into link exchange programs with the appropriate types of partners.

Don’t forget social networking

Most common href="http://mashable.com/follow/topics/social-networking/" target="_blank">social networking websites are business-friendly.  Be sure to setup an account on each of these, and optimally, keep them at least moderately updated.  This is one more route by which users can find you, and one more potential entry in a search engine’s top 10 results.

Keep up with the trends

Finally, don’t stop here.  Since everyone is trying to game search engine results, search engines themselves constantly revamp their formula.  Keep an ear to the ground on the latest trends, and remember that Google isn’t the only search engine out there.  Search engine optimization is a job that never quite ends, but one that the dedicated web users can easily keep up with, and are well-served by the effort.

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