SEO

SEO Tutorial: Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools offers several useful reports and features to analyze and optimize the visibility of your website in Bing – analogous to the Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) in Google. We will show you how to set up Bing Webmaster Tools for your website and provide an overview of the most important reports and features.

Set-up of Bing Webmaster Tools

To get started with Bing Webmaster Tools, you need to add and configure your website.

1. Add Your Website

First of all you need to create a Microsoft account. Now you can add and verify your website under “My Sites”. There are three possible verification methods:

  1. XML file, which needs to be uploaded to the root directory of your website.
  2. Meta tag authentication: Add the meta tag from Bing Webmaster Tools in the <head> section of your website.
  3. Add the Bing CNAME record to your DNS (Domain Name System). To do this, you need access to the hosting account of your domain.

2. Configure Your Website

After you have added your website to Bing Webmaster Tools, you can configure it. The most important configuration steps are:

  • Sitemaps: Submit the URL of your sitemap to Bing.
    Bing Webmaster Tools: Submit sitemaps
  • Submit URLs: If your website is new or not yet in the Bing index for other reasons, you should manually submit the most important pages. You can submit 10 pages per day and 50 per month.
    Bing Webmaster Tools: Submit URLs
  • Geo-Targeting: You can define the geographic targeting (country) for the entire domain, but also for the separate subfolders and subdomains or even for individual pages.
    Bing Webmaster Tools: Geo-Targeting
  • Connected Pages: Here you can connect your apps and social media profiles with your website. If you add these connections, you can see additional information for your apps and social media profiles in Bing Webmaster Tools.
    The connection with your app sets the basis for app indexing.To activate app indexing you go to the menu item “App Linking” in the configuration menu.
    Bing Webmaster Tools: Connected Pages

Reports and Features

Bing Webmaster Tools provides reports and features similar to those in the Google Search Console. Here are the most important functionalities.

  • Reports & Data > Page Traffic: Here you will find the top URLs of your website according to the Bing search algorithm. In addition to the impressions you can also see the clicks, the click-through-rate, the average position and the keywords.
    Bing Webmaster Tools: Page Traffic
  • Reports & Data > Search Keywords: This report is analogous to the page traffic report, but provides data based on the top keywords instead of the top URLs.
  • Reports & Data > SEO Reports: In this report you will find a list of your SEO problems, like for example missing ALT tags or not optimal meta descriptions.
    Bing Webmaster Tools: SEO Reports
  • Reports & Data > Inbound Links: This report shows the number of external links to your website, the trend for the number of external links, the linked-to pages, the linking pages and the anchor texts.
  • Reports & Data > Crawl Information: In this report you can see all the crawling issues like broken links, redirects and robots.txt exclusions.
  • Diagnostics & Tools > Keyword Research: The Bing keyword tool is integrated in Bing Webmaster Tools. Here you can check the search volume for your keywords and identify additional keyword ideas.
    Bing Webmaster Tools: Keyword Research
  • Diagnostics & Tools > Markup Validator: This tool allows you to check the structured data markups that Bingbot identifies on your website.
    Bing Webmaster Tools: Markup Validator

 

If Bing is relevant for your website, we strongly advise you to use Bing Webmaster Tools. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you have any remarks or questions.