How to use Bing webmaster tools for SEO

Google is the worlds no 1 search engine which we all know and so don’t focus your site to rank just on Google. You must also focus on other major search engines. Bing is the second largest search engine and therefore analyze your sites performance in Bing using Bing webmaster tools. To get your sites SEO report like indexed pages, crawls, clicks, malwares, errors and to know the sites performance in search engines you must use webmaster tools. We have discussed about Google webmaster tools and now it’s time to show you how to use Bing webmaster tools for SEO.

How to use Bing webmaster tools

Submitting your site to Bing webmaster tools

Head to BWT and login with your Microsoft account if not sign up. The first thing you need to do is add your site. Enter your website URL and add your site. At the next page add your sitemap select alert preferences and save.

Verifying your site to Bing webmaster tools

Now Bing needs to verify the ownership of your site. You need to verify your site using any one of the three option XML file verification, Meta tag verification and adding CNAME records. XML file verification is same as HTML file upload that we done for Google webmaster tools. Option 2 Meta tag verification is easy and simple. This article can guide you with Meta tag verification for Google, Bing and Alexa. Once done click verify below.

Dashboard – Bing webmaster tools

Once verified you will be headed to Dashboard which shows your site activity (clicks from search, appeared in search, pages crawled, crawl errors and pages indexed), search keywords and links. Since your site is new to Bing webmaster tools you won’t see any data or reports at this time. Your webmaster navigation menu lies in left side.

Configure My Site – How to use Bing webmaster tools

Click Configure My Site where you can add and see sitemaps, submitted URLs, URL parameters, Crawls control and blocked URLs. You can configure your site more in detail using sub tabs.

Sitemaps

By submitting sitemaps you are helping Bing to know your site structure. It also helps all you site pages to easily index in Bing.

Submit URLs

If you want any of your pages or posts needs to be quickly indexed in Bing search results then you can use this feature. Enter URLs one per line and the maximum limit to submit your URL per day is 10 and 50 for month.

Related: how to submit your URL to Google Bing and Yahoo

Ignore URL parameters

This helps you to avoid duplicate content within your site. If any of your site pages have two different URL you can submit the less preferred URL here which gets ignored in Bing search results. This option is not needed for those who using canonical tags in their site.

Crawl control

Here you can specify Bing the time to crawl and the crawl rate (faster or slower). Faster crawling can slow down your site so better leave it as default settings.

DeepLinks 

You cannot add deep links and Deep links are links that appear next below to your site in search results. It is what called site links in Google webmaster tools. The most important and relevant pages are added as deep links which is automatically generated by Bing. When users search your website they will see deep link next below to you site so they can pick the most important. Here you can block any deep links if you want.

Block URLs

If you want to remove any of your site pages or directory from Bing index you can do it here. Just select directory or page and enter the URL to be blocked and block URLs and cache.

Disavow Links

If you don’t want any links you can tell Bing to disavow links. Select page, directory or domain and enter the URL to disavow links.

Geo-targeting

If you want to target your site to Specific County then just select domain, sub-domain, page or directory and submit the URL.

Verify ownership and Users

You have already verified your site ownership. If you want to check you site verification then you can see at the bottom of the verify ownership page. If you wish to allow other user to access your Bing webmaster tools with different account then you can specify here. Enter the email, user role and site to manage.

Reports & Data – How to use Bing webmaster tools

Here you can see the complete report and data of your site that is page traffic, search keywords, SEO reports and crawl errors.

Page traffic – Here you can see your site traffic data and most popular pages in Bing. It shows the click from search, appeared in search, CTR and search keywords. You can also export this data as excel file.

Index Explorer – It shows the categories, pages and number of URLs indexed by Bing.

Search keywords – Here you can see the top keywords that your site pages are performing in Bing.

SEO reports – Here you will get SEO suggestion for your site to rank in Bing.

Inbound links – Know the number of inbound links pointing to your site and target pages.

Diagnostics & Tools – How to use Bing webmaster tools

Here you will find some useful SEO tools for webmasters. Before optimizing your site keyword research is the first step to carry out and so do your keywords research here you can find some list of keyword research tools. Link explorer helps you to explore the number of backlinks pointing to that URL. If you want to see how your site appears for Bing search engine then enter the URL to fetch as Bingbot. If your site using structured data like Microformats and Schema.org then you can validate using Markup validator. Use SEO analyzer if you want SEO suggestions for any of your individual pages.

Hope this article helped you on how to use Bing webmaster tools for SEO. Please share and leave your comments below.