Ever since the existence of a new competitor for the Google search engine came in the form of Bing from Microsoft Corp. there had been constant uprise in the blogging and website management community to optimise their blogs and websites and forums for it. Not a stone is being left unturned in order to catch the initial crawl bots of Bing and make the presence felt in the search engine terms(keywords) and have a piece of the pie.
Similar to Google, Bing follows the same approach in order to educate the developers and as well as webmasters in order to squeeze out it’s usability and make the most out of it. This enables the webmasters and as well as the developers in order to test the search engine to its maximum capability and in the same sense, they educate the search engine which is in it’s baby terms.
Microsoft took the similar path of cloud computing and has started the feature in it’s search engine too by providing many of the features under one roof which can be maintained by a single account of MSN Live. Now, from one place you can access prominent features provided by Microsoft such as Windows Live and MSN. Bing offers a Toolbox which is a placeholder kind of a thing for all the people interested in exploring it.
The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community.
Sounds preposterous? It does not. Surely Bing provides many features to the users to play with. Just like Google Webmasters can play with their site content by submitting the URLs and Sitemaps, similar thing can be performed in Bing.
1. How do you Add A Site to Bing?
Just visit Bing Toolbox and make use of Add a site feature which provides you the facility to add your site(s) to Bing search engine in order to make the crawlers have a peep into your content. So simple.
2. Can I submit my Sitemap to Bing, huh?
Yes, you can. Make sure you have the XML path on hand before you do this. You need to make use of the Bing Webmasters tools in order to let the search engine know the paths which are to be indexed and crawled. Providing an XML sitemap is the most efficient manner in order to request the search engine spiders to crawl your website within a time period.
3. No time to sign-in and do all these things?
You can request Bing to crawl your site in an ad hoc manner too. Just visit the URL Submit Page, fill in the captcha code and type the URL of your homepage and submit the URL.
4. Hey, I haven’t got time to sign-in and Submit My SiteMap. Any open options for me?
Yes, you can do that. There is a generic URL format which you can make use in order to request Bing to scan your sitemap. It’s easier than you think. Just make a note of this URL format and change the “YourWebAddress” to your ‘site address’ like Google or Team Nirvana.
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml
Now, you can go ahead and make use of the tools provided by Bing Toolbox and optimise your site content and as well as submit your unique quality content to the newest search engine.
Go ahead and share what you think of Bing search engine and how you felt using it from the first time you have seen it.
Doesn’t Bing index you automatically if there is another site already indexed pointing to you? I’d say, just get some back links.
@Rob: Yes, Just like Google, Bing does automatically index the site/blog content. But, it does take some time to do so, following the similar pattern of Google. My suggestion would be to submit the sitemap or else request the crawler to specifically crawl one’s site/blog to index.
I may be incorrect and open for correction. But, following the trends of the previous search engines, I formulated this approach.
my initial test result shows that Bing is as good as Google when displaying relevant search results. Google might be having a tough competitor with Microsofts own search engine.
I totally agree with you Kimmy. But, I presume Bing needs a sumptuous amount of time in order to penetrate into the netizens common use.
Bing will never make it to the top google always rocks..
Again as a wordpress user sitemap tool by Barnold pings bing my default.
.-= Srinivas´s last blog ..BSNL Dataone Usage Portal showing Wrong usage Details =-.
i am using both Bing and Google a nd i think both search engines give relevant search results. i would still prefer Google though, because it gives a little bit more relevant search results than Bing.
my default search engine is Yahoo but now i am using BING because it is much better than Yahoo. i heard that Bing search engine would power Yahoo search also.
Submitting your blog to search engine confirms more traffic to your site.
Now even Bing has launched its new Bing webmaster tools.
Read-> How to submit your blogger to new bing webmaster tools