While Bing Webmaster Tools are free and very useful in SEO, they rarely get noticed or applied by website owners. In this post, we explore the main reasons why you should not ignore the Bing Webmaster Tools but should submit your website and complete the verification process.
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Bing Is the Second Main Source of website traffic
Though Google is the largest search engine and main source of traffic, Bing comes second. Though a separate company, Bing serves its own and Yahoo results. The Bing’s market has been on a steady growth and has recently hit 20% market share in the US. Therefore, even if the traffic coming from to your site from Bing is only 11%, why not work towards growing it?
Bing Webmaster tool dashboard has more info compared to Google Search Console
The info you get from Bing dashboard is more and aesthetically pleasing compared to Google. In the same way, Google Search Console works, the Bing Dashboard also generates a prompt overview on clicks a website got from various searches, search map indexed, and crawl errors. Bing, however, goes a step further to give an overview of crawled pages search keywords, crawled pages, indexed pages, and most importantly, inbound links.
Note that it is also possible to submit sitemaps and utilize Bing SEO tools right on the dashboard.
Bing provides in-Depth Analysis and Data
Under the Bing’s reports and the data section, you get various tools similar to what you are used to in Google Console. However, Bing has more that is worth noting.
- Index Explorer report: This report provides a special view of how your site is viewed by Bing after getting crawled. It is important in identifying various opportunities and issues that need extra focus. For example, the report has info on broken links, redirects and others blocked by robots.txt files. The report even allows website owners to know when bots discovered the site, when the page was crawled, and even request a recrawl.
- SEO reports: This is a very important report because it allows website owners understand how their sites comply with SEO best practices. It also comes with great SEO recommendations that website owners should institute on header tags, alt tags, descriptions, and page titles. The SEO report is updated every two weeks.
- Page mobile friendliness report: This report demonstrates the areas that you need to work on to comply with Bing’s Mobile Friendliness rules. Indeed, you can even filter the repot by selecting either mobile unfriendly or mobile unfriendly pages.
The entire webmaster tools are awesome, particularly the SEO analyzer
On the diagnostic and tools menu, the most favorite is the SEO analyzer. The tool is particularly useful especially for those new to SEO because they can always pull the report on what need to be done. You can promptly identify the issues and implement top notch recommendations provided on the report.
After fixing SEO issues, you can also pull out reports on every page to see the results. If you hit the SEO suggestion, a dialog box will pop up showing the severity of any issue as well as comprehensive SEO explanation.
Bing Search Console has a connected pages configuration
Have your social media pages been ranking appropriately for the brand name? Well, checking to know the amount of traffic coming from them will be very helpful. On the Configure My Site section, browse the connected pages and add all the app pages, social media pages, video pages, and image pages to the verified website.
Once the pages have been included, their performance will start featuring in the search results.
A perfect method of leveraging site’s security
Though many people are used to Google Search Console security monitoring features, it is not 100% perfect. Therefore, your site will be more secure if you can leverage the security with the Bing Webmaster Tools security monitoring. Components that one will fail capture will be captured by the other to keep the website extra secure.
How to submit your website to Bing Webmaster Tools
If you are looking for ways of submitting your website to Bing for indexing, Yoast SEO will allow you to connect your website to Bing Webmaster Tools. To submit your website, follow the steps below:
- Go to Bing Webmaster Tools
- Enter your URL address in the Add site field
- Enter your sitemap and click on the Add button and choose the default option
- Get the verification code, using the Meta tag under the second option. Copy the code that is in brackets after the content.
- Log in to your WordPress website, on your dashboard click on the SEO which is on the left side.
- SEO will expand, choose General, here the Bing Webmaster Tools has been hyperlinked to help direct you to the right place to submit your website.
- Click on the Webmaster Tools tab and then paste the code that you had copied earlier on the Bing Webmaster tools option
- Save your changes
- Go back to Bing Webmaster Tools, click on the Verify to complete your submission.
Other than the Meta tag verification, Bing Webmaster Tools gives you other verification options. They are:
XML file authentication
You can click on the BingSiteAuthr XML to save an XML file to your computer. This file contains your personal verification code. Upload the file to the root directory of your website.
Add CNAME record to DNS
This option requires access to your domain account. In your account, edit the CNAME record to hold the verification code you have been provided with. This option is currently not available.
After submitting your website, the sitemap to your website will mostly likely be having the pending status. You need to wait for hours or even days to have your pages indexed by Bing search engine.
Note that you have the option for adding a site map right away or skip the section to complete the process later. If you opt to add the sitemap right away, Bing Webmaster Tools accepts any of these formats:
- Atop 0.1 and 0.3
- XML sitemaps
- XML sitemap index files
- Text files
To view your data, you must authenticate the information using XML File Authentication, Meta tag authentication, or add a CNAME record to DNS authentication. While the first two authentication processes are fast and easy, the last method, (CNAME record to DNS), should only be used by people with a technical background.
Conclusion
While Bing Webmaster Tools might have been pushed to the back seat for a long time, you can only continue doing so at a great peril. Bing has been rising steadily, and you cannot afford to leave out any potential traffic that can help to improve your site or page’s performance. Remember that this should be used alongside Google’s Search Console to guarantee even better results from your SEO campaigns.
