How to Submit Your Website to Bing

If you want to improve your website rankings on Bing search results, another important step to optimize your site is the submission of website and sitemap directly to Bing, which you can do with their Webmaster Tools.

In this ultimate guide, you will discover:

Why do you need to care about Bing SEO?
Submission to Bing Webmaster Tools brings the following benefits
Become a Bing Webmaster account holder
Details on how to add your site, step by step
How to verify site ownership
Submitting your XML sitemap
Best practices for managing your site in Webmaster Tools

Why Bing SEO Matters

Bing currently has about a third of the desktop search engine market share in the US, with over 100 million active monthly users globally. That's tens of millions wasting their time with Bing every day looking for products, services, information, and more.

The search audience can be big for Bing and it will definitely help you in gaining a good exposure of your site. Having a strong presence on the top search engine, Google is great, but investing in Bing gives you the opportunity to scale your organic visitors and conversions.

Below are some crucial statistics that show why you need to rank well in Bing:

Over 7% of the global market share is accounted by Bing, with about 1/3 of all US searches powered by it.
Bing also has a valuable demographic with nearly 50% of users between the ages of 35-54.
For most sites about 6% of your site traffic is driven by Bing, a strong Bing ranking will help.
Good visibility in Bing can boost ecommerce site conversion rates by 8-12%.

So, it goes without saying that a good Bing SEO strategy is worth noting. We can see how by submitting your site directly to Bing through Webmaster Tools, you can gain a better presence.

Advantages of Using Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools is a complimentary platform that allows you to manage your site presence in Bing search. When you verify and submit your site here, you gain access to tools that can improve how well and how often you are seen in Bing.

Some of the advantages are as follows:

1. Improved Indexing

Getting discovered and crawling is a lot easier when you submit your site via Bing webmaster tool.

This enhances the indexing of your key pages and content. You get increased chances of your pages ranking well as indexing happens faster and better.

2. Deeper Insights

Bing Webmaster Tools gives you insight on how your site is performing in Bing. You get to analyze clicks, impressions, crawl stats etc. These insights allow you to find the optimizations necessary to increase your rankings.

3. Sitemap Submission

By entering your XML sitemap directly in Webmaster Tools, your pages get indexed quicker. Bing will then crawl your sitemap to find the new content.

4. Error Warnings

Webmaster Tools will notify you of crawl errors, helping you diagnose and fix issues that may be blocking Bingbot from accessing your pages.

5. Enhanced Account Management

You can control site settings, access webmaster support, and connect other tools like Bing Ads for streamlined management.

It is quite clear that utilizing Bing Webmaster Tools has some definite advantages when it comes to performance in Bing search. Perhaps we can take a closer look at the ways to get going.

Step 1 - Set up Bing Webmaster Account

You will have to create a free Microsoft account (if you do not already have one) in order to use Bing Webmaster Tools. Here's how:

Head over to https://www.bing.com/webmasters/about and click the Sign In located on right corner, or ‘Get Started’ button.
Click on Create one! At the sign in page. Click on the link under "Don't have a Microsoft account?"
Type in your personal email address and press the next button.
Enter your name, number, password and date of birth. Accept terms of use and privacy statement.
Check your email for an inbox verification link.
After creating a Microsoft account, you’re able to log into Webmaster Tools with your credentials.

Step 2 - Add Your Website

Now that you have an account, it is time to add your site. Follow these steps:

Once logged in, go to the dashboard and click on Add your site manually.
Paste your website link (eg. https://www.example.com) and press Add.
Pick your language and time zone of choice.

Your website is now registered in Bing Webmaster Tools. After which, you will need to confirm your ownership before being able to utilize its full functionality.

Step 3 - Verifying Website Ownership

It is important to ensure that you either own or are managing the website. Bing, for example, supports multiple means of verification. Choose one of these:

Meta Tag Verification

Bing will provide a unique meta tag that looks like:

Just copy and paste this tag inside the part of your home page HTML. Next time Bingbot crawls, it is going to see it. You can use this plugin if you use wordpress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-headers-and-footers/

CNAME Record

Add a CNAME record pointing Hosts: bing-siteauth. domain. to add com to the authentication token URL

HTML File Upload

Upload the HTML file from Webmaster Tools to your root folder of your site.

As per Bing Module's instructions: follow whichever the method you like. Once you are successfully verified, you will be able to manage your site completely through webmaster tools.

Step 4 - Submit Your Sitemap

With your site now verified, submitting your XML sitemap is a great way to improve the process of gaining indexing. Here's how to do it:

Go to Sitemaps from the left sidebar.
Press on the Submit sitemap button.
Provide the URL path to your sitemap (e.g. https://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml).
Click "Submit".

Bing pretends to begin crawling the sitemap.zip file and indexes whichever pages URLs it finds there.

With big sites, split up your sitemap into smaller sitemaps of a maximum of 50,000 URLs or less. Submit these separately.

For resubmission of your sitemap, if you add new content or links to your page be sure to resubmit it time for indexing.

Best Practices for Managing Your Site in Bing Webmaster Tools

The following are some of the best tips for using Webmaster Tools to increase your visibility in Bing:

Keep an Eye on Important Numbers - Take a look at the number of clicks your site gets, number of impressions, average position and so on regularly to see developments.
Diagnose Crawls Problems - Budge, mend the crawling errors using the crawl stats reports that obstruct configurations.
New Sitemaps Submissions - First generate new sitemaps for new pages or a group of content to let Bingbot know.
HTML Improvements - Optimizing title, meta description, heading etc?
Connect to Bing Ads - Associate your Bing Ads account with campaigns to organic results.
Disavow Spam Links - Link disavow tool to ignore the back links good manipulated and may produce penalties.
Take Advantage of Site Links - Set up organized sitelinks to show with your SERP listing.
Link GSC Account - Add your Google Search Console account to be able to examine visibility across engines.

Final Thoughts

One of the important steps to get access to the huge search traffic from BING, is by submitting your site and sitemap directly from Webmaster tools.

The verification, indexing and optimization capabilities help you improve the crawlability of your site, extract performance-related insights that you can act on, and subsequently, increase relevant search visibility.

Therefore, do not miss out on connecting with over additional 3 million search users globally. Use this guide to have your site indexed in Bing, and use Webmaster Tools to increase your rankings and organic search traffic.