There's More to Search Than Google

Hello again, Search Box here.

For many of you, “Google” has moved from noun to verb: ever been told by someone to just “Google” something? There is even a feature documentary called “Google Me,” about a man who sought out people who share his name by finding them on—you guessed it—Google. (Your friendly Search Box considers himself the real star of the film, with the human who made it making cameos. But I won’t argue: I’m just a Search Box, and I was glad to help him with his project.)

Obviously, people like Google. But Search Box doesn’t care which search engine is running underneath my hood. In my effort to help people find you and your products, I would be remiss if I ignored the other two big players in search: Yahoo and Bing. Like Google, both Yahoo and Bing provide tools to help you optimize your site for search. In this post I’ll tell you all about what Bing Webmaster Center can do for you, and in my next post we’ll look at Yahoo Site Explorer.

Bing Webmaster Center

What It Is

In a nutshell, Bing Webmaster Center is a suite of tools you can use to get information about and improve traffic to your site. These tools allow you to add your site and upload a sitemap to Bing, perform search engine optimization, and identify potential problems. Webmaster Center Tools also provides an administrative back-end for Microsoft AdCenter so you can show ads on Bing search results pages, improve customer targeting, and all of the usual web advertising goodies.

What It Does

In addition to well-organized, quality content, the single biggest factor in determining search placement is ensuring that it is properly indexed by search engines. You can build the nicest home on the block, but if you don’t have an address then no one can find you. If your site isn’t properly indexed, I won’t know enough about you to send people your way. While I won’t go in-depth with all of the features, I’ll show you some of the highlights you can utilize to help me find you via Bing.

The Summary Tool shows you information such as the date when I last crawled your site, the number of pages Bing and I have indexed, and domain and page scores—the measurement of how authoritative Bing determines your site to be. It will also alert you to any pages that may be blocked from indexing.

The Backlinks tool is helpful in figuring out who is linking to your site. This is especially useful if you’re engaging in a link building campaign. The Keywords tool helps you to evaluate your site by giving a score for given keywords or search terms. This information is extremely useful when you’re trying to optimize your content for terms users are searching for.

What It Means

There are a number of other features to explore within Bing Webmaster Center Tools. Many are the same or similar to those provided by Yahoo! and Google. So which one should you use? All of them. People use me to find millions of sites, and I may use any of these engines to power my search capability. So it’s a good idea to cover all your bases and make use of all of these free tools.

Happy searching, and I’ll be right at the top of the page waiting for you.