Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing offers various features through its Webmaster Tools though you have the option to submit your site anonymously to Bing search engine. You can use your windows live id to register for Bing Webmasters. Note Bing search engine is used by Bing as well as Yahoo network together having over 15% of the search engine market share in US.
Register for Bing Webmaster Tools here.
After login to your account the first thing is to add your site.

Your site will be added in the dashboard with the message “Site Ownership not Verified”. Clicking on the Verify Now link will provide you three options to verify your site.

Placing an XML file on your web server
Copy & paste meta tag and
Add CNAME record to DNS

Copy and paste the meta tag in your site header area and click on Verify button. You can check under Configure My Site > Verify Ownership to make sure your site is verified successfully.

Verify Site With Meta Tag - Bing Webmaster

Bing Webmaster Tools Features:
Bing in competition with Google Webmaster Tools offers various high end tools for optimizing and improving your site ranking in SERP. The options are categorized under three categories – Configure My Site, Reports & Data and Diagnosis & Tools.

Configure My Site:

Sitemap Submission:

Submit your sitemap to inform Bing search engine about all your web pages and the structure of your site. Select Sitemaps under Configure My site tab and enter your sitemap and submit.

You can also submit your Blog’s RSS feed to update Bing search engine about the latest post in your blog. In case if you are using Weebly site then sitemap and blog feed are automatically created by Weebly as below:
For example: Sitemap: http://theme123.net/sitemap.xml
First Blog Feed: http://theme123.net/1/feed
(Change the number in incremental manner if you have more than one blog in a single site).
After submission the status will be pending and Bing may take few days to a week time for checking and indexing the submitted pages in the data base. The status will be changed to Success once submitted pages are indexed successfully.
You have further options of blocking you site from Bing Search, informing Bing about low quality links pointing your site (Disavow links) and controlling the pace of bingbot crawls your site.

Reports & Data:

Page Traffic:

Page traffic report provides you a detailed insight of how many times your page appeared in the search, average search position and click through rate for each of your pages.

Select the view link under search keywords will provide you more information about each keyword which brought traffic to your site.

Detailed Traffic Analysis of a Page in Bing Webmaster

This will give you how each page of your site is performing and what is the improvement required on non-performing pages to bring more traffic.
SEO reports provides you the issues in your web page, inbound link provides the number of inbound links pointing to your web page and the crawl information provides you the latest crawling date and related errors.

Diagnostics & Tools:

Bing provides exhaustive diagnostics tools to optimize your site for better ranking in SERP.

With Keyword Research Tool you can enter a keyword and find out the number of times your site appeared in search along with the other keywords related to your search.

Normally every search engine takes few days to a month time for crawling your site. You have an option to submit your site manually to Bing using Fetch as Bingbot option.
SEO Analyzer provides you the suggestion for optimizing you web page. The page with error will be opened in a small inside window and the webmaster Tools will point where exactly the error is by showing the point on that location of a web page. This will easily helps you to rectify the errors.

All of these tools are in Beta version hoping Bing will come up with final version with more features.

Monday, 13 January 2014