Microsoft has rebranded it’s search engine as BING.  Instead of the simplicity of the Google interface, they have a large image that is a bit distracting and yet still impressive looking.  The search box is prominent and employs a “search suggest” type functionality that we are all becoming used to since Google and Yahoo have made it part of their search engines.

Search with Microsoft BING

Search with Microsoft BING

 

Although it is certainly noticeable that they have updated their algorithm, one of the smartest changes that they made was the addition of stronger webmaster tools.  Google has dominated the webmaster segment with their powerful set of free tools to discover more about one’s website and improving rankings.  Microsoft has taken a big leap forward with their new tools to help people improve their results in BING.

The webmaster tools can easily be accessed at www.bing.com/webmaster and requires that you have a Windows Live account.  Although not perfect, it does certainly provide essential elements that we have come to need in order to improve rankings and get as much traffic as possible.  Here are some of the highlights before you dive in and start working away.

  1. Handle multiple websites - As you grow your online real estate marketing arsenal you will certainly have more than one website or blog. The webmaster center allows you to add all of the websites you manage and has an authentication feature (very similar to Google’s) to ensure that you are the actual owner. Once you have verified your website you will be able to get a great deal of additional information about your website.
  2. Summary screen - On the summary screen they list the top 5 pages that they identify on your website. Along with these pages they also provide a “Page Score”. This is an important indicator of the level of importance of your pages as indicated by Bing. When you hit a score of 5 green bars you have hit the highest ranking possible for that page.
  3. Backlinks - Microsoft is demonstrating that they are putting more value in backlinks by placing a tool to easily find the number of backlinks to each page on your website.
  4. Keywords - This tool is not a keyword research tool (although they do offer that as well) but rather it allows you to check your page score based on a particular keyword. This is particularly handy when you are optimizing your pages for particular keywords and want to see how you are progressing.

These tools make it much easier for you to let Microsoft know about your website.  When you want to learn more about the different features the help file is actually pretty helpful and I am sure they will be adding additional updates to allow all of us to maximize the features.

Although these tools are much more helpful and will certainly help you to improve your rankings, the question still remains, who is going to use BING?  Even with Microsoft launching new commercials will it be enough to bring new visitors to make searches?  Hopefully users will start to use BING and we can all use the Webmaster Center to keep improving our results.

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