Bing Search Engine Positioning Ideas

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Websites do not typically just rank for the sake of ranking, especially if they are a new website in the search space. The Bing Webmaster blog gives some sound pieces of advice to keep your website running like a well oiled machine and keep you rankings climbing.

“Check to see if your site employs a robots.txt file. If so, confirm that the directives block only what you want blocked. If one or more sets of custom directives exist for specific bots, be sure they include all necessary directives from the generic set of directives. Then be sure the file has been validated. Also, check for and review the validity of any REP commands in webpage tags and in HTTP Headers.” Sometimes a website might have robots.txt file blocking the entire website leaving it rather difficult to be found in organic search.

“Whereas a robots.txt tells search bots what not to crawl, a Sitemap conversely identifies the most important content on your site for indexing. A well-done Sitemap can help your site be crawled more effectively, and that can only help in optimizing your search ranking for indexed content.”

Every website should have a sitemap. A sitemap is the architecture to your website that allows the search engines to understand its structure. It is also important because it allows the search engines to index your information much quicker because they are able to read it and crawl it. A sitemap lets the search spiders know that it is time to re-index a website because they have just added new material to it.

An important SEO factor for measuring the value of websites by search engines is page load time. Servers that host sites with huge pages (such as those with too much high-resolution image content), too little bandwidth for their regular traffic, always running near or at maximum capacity, are intermittently unavailable, or are physically located so far away from their target market that their performance is always hampered by too many time-consuming router hops, can suffer ranking consequences due to these problems.

Page load time is a new factor that has become an influence on search rankings. Make sure to keep your website clean and leave your scripts and widgets to a minimum in order to keep things moving fast.