6 Ways Bing Webmaster Tools Can Help You SEO

Whilst Google still continues to be the dominate source of organic traffic to most website’s, Bing should not be overlooked, particularly as it continues to increase its share of the market. After remaining flat in the summer at 17.9 percent, Bing reached 18 percent for the first time in September, and hit a new high of 18.1 percent in October. In October 2012, Bing’s search market share stood at 16 percent, according to comScore.

In Comscore’s latest November 2013 Search Engine Rankings, the gap between the two internet giants further closed with Bing holding it’s 18.1% share whilst Google lost ground with a 0.2% loss.

This time last year, Google’s share was 67%, Bing’s was 16.2%

Today, Google’s share is 66.7%, Google’s is 18.1%

Its clear that Microsoft’s Bing is in this game for the long haul and still has a long way to go and one of the things it is doing to differentiate itself from Google is through its apparent ‘courting’ of SEO’ers through its excellent Bing Webmaster Tools.

The information and tools provided in this little used toolbox is superb and I would like to take you through seven of my favourites that can be used to aid your overall SEO campaign.

 SEO Reports

This report gives you a top level overview of SEO improvements that could be made to pages of your site and lists how many pages of your site are applicable to this suggestion.

Clicking on any of the SEO Suggestions then itemizes for you all the pages in question:

Inbound Links

Provides a great little chart to plot inbound links (and as its Bing, is likely to be more accurate / up to date than Majestic or Moz)

You get an export of up to 20,000 external links per page (good for finding bad ones for removal / disavowal)

Disavow Tool

Are you disavowing in Bing too? Remember, Bing invented disavowal, Google copied)

Link your Social Entities to Your Website

You can tell Bing what your social entities are, pretty cool huh? This sections is located in the ‘Connected Pages’ section of the ‘Configure My Site’ menu.

SEO Analyser

This shows you what you need to do the page level and even shows all redirects (if any) for that page. Simply go to the ‘SEO Analyser’ section of the ‘Diagnostics & Tools’ menu and paste in the URL that you would like to analyse.

Markup Validator

A single place to test and validate both Schema and Opengraph data which is found under the ‘Diagnostics & Tools’ menu.

There are loads of other great tools to play with from within the Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard and with Bing continuing to close the gap on Google, be sure to sign your website up for it here so you can take advantage of all that it has to offer and boost your SEO campaign efforts.