How To Fix your SEO Blind Spots
Website owners will bend over backwards to try to please Google. But what about the other search engines?
When it comes to SEO, we’ve all been guilty of Google blindness at one stage or another. You know – putting on blinkers to work out how to please the algorithm masters at Google HQ.
However – and don’t tell google we said this – there are other search engines out there. In fact, recently released figures from comScore suggest that Bing is now responsible for 18 per cent of all internet searches.
So how do you please Bing? Unfortunately for website owners, this search engine has its own set of guidelines for submitting and indexing quality content. If you’ve not already signed up to officially index your site through Bing Webmaster, you probably should, because it’s another avenue for generating additional traffic for your website.
Bing Webmaster follows a similar verification process to that found in Google Webmaster Tools. And once you’re set up, you can analyze reports to monitor your presence on Bing search results.
Plus you can utilize additional tools to get higher rankings. These include the following…
Link Explorer
Several years go, getting outside websites to link to yours and vice versa, was a surefire way to rise up the rankings on both Google and Bing. This is not so now, after both search engines minimized the value of this practice to cut down on link spamming and other practices.
However, link intelligence still has some importance to overall SEO and Bing’s Link Explorer is an excellent diagnostic tool for competitive analysis to determine which sites link to sites like yours. Simply enter a URL and click Explore. By default, this will show you a list of web page URLs that contain a link to the specific URL along with the title of that page.
SEO Analyzer
Are your web pages following SEO best practices? Bing offers an SEO Analyzer for your ‘verified’ domain, which scans your web pages to determine if they are in compliance. This is an “on-demand tool” which can scan a single page at a time, making it great for checking new pages to understand where more work may be required.
Just type in the URL you want scanned and click Analyze. According to Bing, the tool fetches the page from your site, analyzes the page against their best practices and displays a compliance report in seconds.
Keyword Research Tool
Just like Google offers Adwords Key Planner, Bing offers an alternative to get keyword ideas and suggestions for your content. According to Bing, the tools will datamine organic search only, giving you natural ideas and accurate numbers, with no polluted data from paid search. The data stretches back about six months and covers a wide range of languages, countries and various other market segments.