February 12, 2010
Five months ago, I don’t think I would have asked this question about optimizing your blog or website for Bing, then called the MSN search engine. Five months ago, I wasn’t interested in Bing because non of my websites ever ranked in its search engine. My focus was and still is on Google and it made sense because afterall MSN Search receives only about 9% of web searches compared with Google and Yahoo. But my thinking and focus somewhat changed quite recently.
OK enough with the suspense. 5 months ago I launched my Micro Niche Adsense Websites and you probably have read a few of my posts providing some updates on their progress like how I crossed $100 adsense earnings in the same month. To date I now have 8 micro adsense sites and I set all of them up as static websites as opposed to wordpress blogs I had so far been using previously. I did have other reasons for doing so but never came close to any of those I would discover 6 months later.
While my micro niche adsense websites have been earning me some decent income, the most likely thing to happen to new websites that tried to rank too quick too soon on Google’s page one, did in fact happen to me too. I am referring to getting the Google Sandbox for some of my websites.
After some research on Google Sandbox I concluded that there was nothing I could do and the best option was to accept it and continue doing backlink building so that when they get out of it, they emerged stronger in search engine ranking. Having said that I did what I could to make a few of these websites “reappear” again albeit temporarily each time for a few days. I did this legitimately through getting backlinks from different sources after much testing done. How I learned to index my Angela’s backlinks specifically using Google Slingshot helped me achieved just that.
Recently while those few adsense sites continued to remain banished from Google’s page one ranking, I was surprised to find traffic coming to these sites. This wasn’t supposed to be I told myself. It was indeed a nice problem to have but I soon found out the reason why. I was getting traffic not from Google but from both Yahoo and Bing, something that has never happened before.
While it’s important to always focus on Google to get most of your search engine traffic, don’t ignore whatever traffic you may get from Bing, or Yahoo for that matter. This applies to my case more because I was looking for a solution for my Google sandboxed sites and it did somewhat help during the “blackout” period. Also getting more traffic from another search engine is always welcomed, don’t you think? Trickles it may be, but for my adsense sites this traffic is pretty targeted.
Bing has a FAQ which provides some useful information on some of the on-site seo so that you can rank well in their search engine which includes:
According to a report from Tech Crunch it states that Bing users are more likely to click ads than Google users. If this is to be believed anyone setting up an adsense site simply cannot ignore Bing and what having a Bing search engine optimized website can do for your adsense income. I said it before that while almost all my niche sites are on page 1, not all of them are #1 positions so I don’t get much impressions for some of them. But because my CTR for these sites is good, having more impressions coming from Bing just puts the icing on the cake.
1. Simply go to Bing’s webmaster centre and click the button for “Add a site” and provide your URL and then verify your site. To do this and quite similar to Google Webmaster, add the meta tag provided to the head section of your blog. Finally click on the site you have added and go to its summary page. Here you will find useful information like when your site was last crawled by Bing, and what backlinks your site has.
2. Here is a utility tool that you can use to check how your keyword ranks and it displays the results for both Google and Bing side by side.
While I’m not trying to make a mountain out of a molehill, and I’ll still focus on Google search engine optimization, I now see Bing and Yahoo in a different light. From my own experience but without proof this is what I think about Bing:
Filed under Blogging Tips, How To Make Money Blogging, Link Management, Search Engine Optimization, Traffic, Work From Home, seo-tips