How To Submit Your Blog URL To Bing

Before we get right into “How To Submit Your Blog URL To Bing,” let’s take a brief look at some recent developments between Yahoo and Bing that should matter to you.

In mid-2009 it was reported that Yahoo would be merging with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. This was big news in the SEO arena.

Yahoo search users may soon start seeing results served by Bing (Bing). According to Yahoo’s Vice President Search Product Operations Kartik Ramakrishnan, the company has “started testing organic (also referred to as algorithmic) and paid search listings from Microsoft for up to 25 percent of Yahoo! Search traffic in the U.S.”

That means that users that are part of the test will see results from Bing inside Yahoo’s familiar interface. In spite of the impending changes, Yahoo has continued to add features and make design changes, and the company indicates that it will continue to do so post-integration.

With testing now underway, it would seem then that Yahoo and Microsoft’s plans for integration following their massive search and advertising partnership – signed back in July 2009 – are on track. When regulators approved the deal back in February, Microsoft and Yahoo indicated that they planned to have search and advertising integration completed by the end of 2010.

Now, Ramakrishnan writes that, “we anticipate that our U.S. and Canada organic search listings in both desktop and mobile experiences will be fully powered by the Microsoft platform beginning in the August/September timeframe, and paid search in October.”

In the latest Comscore report of search engine use in the United States, Yahoo and Bing increased their domestic market share to nearly 1/3 of the entire U.S. market.

With this type of consolidation, it may be more important than ever to get your site registered with Bing and to become familiar with Bing’s Webmaster Tools.

How To Add / Submit Your Blog URL To Bing

Authenticate your website

Before you can use the Webmaster Center tools, you must demonstrate that you own the website by placing a Webmaster Center-provided authentication code at the root of your website. Webmaster Center uses authentication to ensure that only the rightful owners are provided with information about their websites.

A website is authenticated when, once you successfully log in to Webmaster Center, you click its link on the Site List webpage. If the authentication is successful, you are given access to the Webmaster Center tools for exploring the website.

Authentication Methods

There are two methods of authentication while submitting your site to Bing, both of which rely on Webmaster Center accessing the authentication code you’ve added to a registered website. The authentication code, which must be available to Webmaster Center at the root folder of your website’s registered host name space, can be added in two ways:

* Upload an XML file to the root folder

Bing provides you with a custom XML file containing your authentication code that you can save to the root folder of your website. The name of the file is LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml.

The format of the authentication code content within the XML file should look similar to this example:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<users>
<user>0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF</user>
</users>


* Add a tag to the default webpage

You can add a tag containing the authentication code to the section of your default webpage. You should be able to modify the tag to conform to the HTML standard you use.

The format of the authentication code entry within the section should look similar to this example:

< meta content="0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF"  />

That’s all there really is to it!

Update: Bing recently upgraded their Webmaster tools to include more crawling, index, and traffic data

If you want your site to appear prominently in search engines you will need to monitor your site in Bing (and Google’s) Webmaster Tools.

What To Look For In WebMaster Data

1) Reports of any problems  that were discovered in crawling your site.

2) Keyword analysis allows you to gauge which of your keywords are more prominent in search engine results.

3) Inbound links of who is linking to your site and how.

4) Verification of successful sitemap submittal. It’s crucial that search engines regularly examine all of the pages from your site.

Please note: That any major changes to your server or blog may create an error message in Bing or Google Webmaster Tools. Your sitemap may require a manual rebuild and resubmission to Google and Bing.