Bing Sign up

Updated Spring 2013 to reflect changes in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Like the webmaster tools on Google and Yahoo it’s free. Bing may not bring you as many visitors as the other search engines but we still feel that it is worth spending 15 minutes setting up a Bing Webmaster Account.

In 2010 Bing and Yahoo announced that they would be consolidating their webmaster tools, saving you valuable time by providing you with all this data in one place. It also means that you only have one tool system to get your head around!

Naturally data from this source is integrated into Analytics SEO allowing you to see an overview of your organic traffic from the main search engines.

It is key to set up webmaster tools account with all of the major search engines to ensure that you’re doing everything correctly for each engine. Now you might not be getting as much traffic from Yahoo and Bing but that doesn’t mean that you can just ignore this traffic source. Indeed you might well be surprised to find just how much traffic you are getting from these sources! Recent reports suggest that Bing is beginning to make inroads into Google’s monopoly.

Here is what we use Bing (Live) Webmaster Tools for:

• Submitting XML sitemaps to Bing Search (video sitemaps and html sitemaps)
• Checking website statistics
• Checking the strength of those pages
• Checking for crawl errors and crawl frequency
• A useful robots.txt validator

Setting Up Bing Webmaster Tools – Step-by-Step Guide

1. Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and sign-in if you already have a Bing account, or follow the link to create a new Bing (Live) account.

2. In Webmaster Tools – click on the button that says “Add A Site”.

3. Click on the “Verify” link and follow the instructions on screen. You can either choose to upload a specific HTML file to the root directory of your website or add a meta-tag to your home page. Either example works well; but we tend to use the HTML file as you can use it again for any other website you manage through the same Bing account.