Want to be indexed faster by the MSNBot? The best thing to do is to simply follow their guidelines listed here. I have summarized the guidelines below for your quick reference. Note also that these guidelines will help you get indexed not just on Bing but will also affect your SEO on other search engines so pay attention!

Technical Guidelines:

1. Validate your code for W3C compliance using the W3C markup validation service.
2. Remove/fix broken links.
3. Use redirect when you move to a new URL. Indicate whether the move is a temporary or permanent one.
4. Make sure MSNbot is not expressly disallowed from crawling your pages.
5. Use Robots.txt to specify which pages on your site should or should not be crawled.
6. Use simple static URLs.
7. Watch out for malware and address the problem soon as you detect one.

Content Guidelines:

1. Provide valuable content for your target audience.
2. Use keywords in the text.
3. Limit page content to 1 topic per page.
4. Limit page size to an average of 150 KB for pages without images.
5. All pages should have at least one incoming static link.
6. Add a sitemap.
7. Make sure all pages in your website is at most 3 clicks away from your default webpage.

Discouraged Techniques/Practices:

1. Keyword stuffing – includes stuffing ALT tags.
2. Using hidden text or links.
3. Using/joining link farms.

As you can see the tips here echo Google’s guidelines. This only means that the basics apply for all search engines and that it would be smart to listen to the advice of any one of the search engines.

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Robots.txt files can be used to block bots (the most common use) and at the same time specific which files can be crawled. To do this you should use the Allow directive. See example below.

Allow: /private/public.doc
Disallow: /private/

According to Bing if “there is some logical confusion and both Allow and Disallow directives apply to a URL, the Allow directive takes precedent.”

Other things you can or should do with your robots.txt file include:

Wildcards – Wildcards can be used in a variety of ways in robots.txt files such as :

• Blocking bots from accessing all URLs that contain a specific directory name;
• Blocking bots from accessing all URLs that end with a specific string regardless of the directory where it is found; and
• Blocking bots from accessing all URLs that contain a specific line anywhere in their URL string.

All the above can be done using the “*”character, which is used to represent characters appended to the strong of a URL. To filter by file extension the character “$”must be used.

XML Sitemaps – Make sure to add a reference to your sitemap at the end of your robots.txt file to make it easy for bots to make its way through your site. To reference a sitemap use the following syntax:

Sitemap: http://www.your-url.com/sitemap.xml

File format – Make sure to save your robots.txt file in a standard file format such as ASCII or UTF-8.

Validate at Bing’s Webmaster Central – They have an online robots.txt validation tool. If you are not a member then join or at least use other online validation tools.

Source: Prevent a bot from getting “lost in space” (SEM 101)

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Image Search is becoming more and more important with search engines realizing that users are using image searches with greater frequency. Maybe one of the reasons for this is the fact that users can process search results with images 30% faster than results with plain text (at least Microsoft says so).

With this in it is very important that you also think of how well your images rank. According to WebProNews some of the things you can do to rank in Google’s image search include:

*Adding images to your Google Local Business profile;
*Enabling Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account;
*Adding images to local business citation source; and.
*Adding images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

On the other hand if your focus is ranking in Bing’s image search they say that you should:

*Name image files appropriately – For improved relevance, make sure that the file name describes the image appropriately.
*Alternative image text (alt text) matters – For increased optimization, make sure photos are properly described with alternative text tags, and ensure that test within any images is also
*Watch frame breaking – Sites that attempt to break frames make it more difficult for the image to display correctly within search.  Make sure you’re testing your site against the search engines.

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Google has Page Rank and Bing has its Page Score.

So just what is Page Score all about? According to Bing’s Webmaster Center Help the Page Score:

Provides a measurement of how authoritative Bing views your webpage to be, with five green boxes being the highest rating and five empty boxes being the lowest. This is based on many of the same factors Bing uses to determine static rank, but isn’t directly comparable.

Just in case the static rank part adds to the confusion static rank is defined by Bing as:

A query-independent ranking of a webpage by a search engine. The static rank of a webpage provides a general indicator to the overall quality of the webpage.

So basically the Page Score, like the Page Rank, is something useful to keep an eye on but not something you should obsess about because in the end it is still your site’s actual rank in SERPs that matter more. As Brett Yount, Program Manager of Bing Webmaster Center, said, “Note that this [page] score is only relevant to your site and does not track well in our index.”

To know your page site’s page score just sign up at Bing’s Webmaster Center, add your site, and check out the site’s status on Summary Tool. Other things you’ll be able to see using the summary tool would be the last time your site was crawled, the site’s domain score, indexed pages, blocked pages, etc.

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