When it comes to search engine optimization of a Website, we should make sure we optimize our site for all the search engines and not just one. Google is most popular search engine at the moment followed by Bing and others, and from last few months traffic coming from Bing search is increasing. Seems like Google algo changes which created lots of negative buzz, made Microsoft worked hard on their search engine and they have been integrating many things in their search engine like Social signals and deep Facebook integration.
Now, this post is not about bing search but it’s about Bing Webmaster tools which will help Websites owners and Bloggers to get their site on Bing search index and get more traffic from it.
I will keep this guide simple and up to the point to get your site indexed in Bing Search and in upcoming tutorials, I will explain other things that you can do with this free Webmaster tool.

How to Submit your site to Bing Webmaster tools:

If you are complete new to this, Bing webmaster tool is a free service by Microsoft for webmasters to submit their site and get a complete SEO report and information related to their site. In-fact, there are many features which are not even available on Google Webmaster tools and there is no reasons you should not submit your Website to Bing Webmaster tool.
Like any other Webmaster tools, you need to create a Free account or you can use your existing Windows live ID to login to your Webmaster account. Here is the link to get started. Once you are signed up and created your account, first step is to add your Website and verify.
Once you have submitted your Website, you need to add details related to site and ownership like sitemap link, Website owner details and so on. If you have not created your blog sitemap yet, you can easily create using Google XML sitemap plugin and add your sitemap link in the Site info page. Providing your sitemap link will help Bing bots to deep crawl and index more pages on your site.
Another interesting thing is, you can set Email communication preference and how often you would like to receive email for your site health issues. Since my Website is my full-time business too, I set it as daily alert so that I get notified regarding any site issues.
Once you have filled out all the details, click on Save and you will be redirected to Bing Webmaster tool dashboard, where you will see a message next to your site saying  ” Site ownership has not been verified, Verify now“. Click on Verify now and use any of the method to verify your site. I find the adding meta tag to be easiest one, but you can pick any of the three verification process:

• File upload
• Adding Meta tag in Header
• CNAME record to DNS

If you are using Thesis WordPress theme (Why use Thesis), simply go to Thesis site options and under Additional scripts copy paste the meta tag, clear your cache and click on Verify and within minutes your site will be verified. If you are using WordPress SEO by yoast, you can quickly add content part from meta tag verification and add it into WordPress SEO dashboard settings.

Site Verified on Bing and What next?

So far, we have submitted our site to bing Webmaster tools and done with the verification. Next step is to configure few settings which will help up to get an extra edge.
I have created separate sitemap for Images and videos and I must admit Bing bots are smart enough to pick all sitemaps from an existing site. You can generate your Image and video sitemap using Image sitemap and video sitemap plugins and under Dashboard > Configure my site> Sitemap you can add new sitemap to Bing.
If you have submitted a complete new site and it may take time for bing bots to crawl and index your site completely, you can manually add few links in here. Bing have put a limit of 50 URL’s submission per month and daily cap is 10. You should also check our earlier guide on how to make bots to crawl your site faster.
If your site pages are indexed with URL parameters like replytocom in Bing search, you can simply add this Parameter here and ask bing to ignore all such links. I hope if Bing populates few URL parameter by default like Google Webmaster tools does. When I checked my indexed pages in Bing search, I realized I have few pages with attachment_id parameter indexed, now you all know what I did to get rid of such links from Bing.
This is another interesting feature by BWT, as they allow you to control when Bing bots should crawl your site more. So, you can set the most busy time of your blog and bing bots will select the time to crawl your site more when your site is less busy. This is useful for high traffic sites and sites with limited hosting bandwidth.
So somehow, bots started indexing your wp-content, tags or categories folder. Or you decided to remove all tags and categories or any other directory from Bing search, this section will help you to do the same. You can stop indexing of any page or directory on your site using Block URL section. This manual URL removal applies for 90 days and you will get an Email notification 8 days prior to completion of 90 days, and you can decide to keep the out of index or let it index in Bing.
This is useful for many people like me who offers Free WordPress setup, as I can quickly add my client site using my Bing webmaster tools account and give him admin access later. Also, if you manage your blog with a team or with a partner, you can quickly give access to your site webmaster tool using users section. There are three roles which you can given:

• Read only
• Read and modification
• Administrator access

There are many more things which we can do with Bing tool to improve our search engine visibility in Bing search, but to keep this tutorial short and informative, I will end it now and will cover next part in upcoming post. For now, if you have not yet explored bing webmaster tools or submitted site to Bing, it’s the right time to go ahead and do the submission. If you are stuck anywhere or have any questions, feel free to ask via comments.
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Generating traffic to your website is imperative if you intend to make money online. This is usually the main challenge for a new web business. In this article I will cover 7 simple steps to get started in generating targeted traffic to your website:

1. Ensure that you have high quality content:
The first thing that you need to do is to have good quality content. In the World Wide Web, content is king!!!
The only way to have a flow of targeted traffic visiting you website daily is by having relevant content. Search engines love good strong content.
Commit the time and effort to create strong engaging content. Make this a high priority; this is important to your successful website.

2. Social Network Marketing:
This is by far the best way in my opinion to generate targeted traffic to your website, if done right of course. Social Networks are growing like wild fire and have a thriving market for every niche. There are many social networks and more still to come, get involved immediately.

3. Go for affiliates:
Affiliate programs mean that you will hire individuals to promote your website or products. In exchange, you will have to pay them a certain percentage of your profits, their commissions. There are many ways to pay your affiliates and you can choose any way that suits you. This is great way to delegate and leverage the marketing of your website.

4. Submitting to directories:
In order to make your website more visible, submit it to popular directories like Open Directory Project, Zeal and others. You can also submit to directories which have themes so that their topics are relevant to your website. You can also go for small directories which can get hold of a lot of in bound links for you.

5. Go for a bit of video marketing:
Make a video promoting your website and then post it on any of the popular video websites. Post it on YouTube, Break.com or even on various social networking sites. Try to make an interesting video which will be appreciated by your target audience. If they like your video, they will circulate it and that would be a great kind of publicity for your website. Make it a point to include the URL of your website in that video.

6. Create free reports, articles and blog post:
Create enticing reports, blog posts and articles with relevant content to your business. A great way to promote your website is to add a link of your website frequently to these. Once you write the report, give it away for free to different website owners, article directories, blog sites, etc. Once these go viral you can ensure that you will get a great deal of traffic.

7. Posting free ads:
Post advertisements in places where you are sure to get traffic. Craigslist is a great place to post a free ad; forums are also great for this. Be creative let your ads stand out, use images, colors, etc.

Any website owner would be distressed to see their ranking on the search engines drop overnight. A first reaction might be an urgent call to ask the designer what went wrong. The revolution in business development, internet marketing strategy, new clients and keeping with time constraints are some of the challenges that SEO copes with as well as constant change. So it is indeed important to know about some of the ongoing activities happening on the internet that directly affects SEO ranking.
Google Preview
On November 11, 2010 Google launched a new feature in online search, the Google instant preview. This is the ability to have a glimpse of the web page design on the Google SERP's. Located next to the title in any search result is a "magnifying glass" icon that can be clicked on and a preview of the website pops up.
In terms of SEO, Google preview means there is now a visual representation of individual web design that can impress users through any search results preview. A poorly designed index web page perceived by a user will most likely not be clicked on to be viewed. Changes such as this to a leading search engine becomes a continuous challenge to web designers to catch the user's attention with a simple lay-out scheme.
Best Trends
With differing opinions regarding users searching capability and the best web design SEO practices, it still is possible to ensure that a website ranks high on SERP's. Following are the three best trends that can be applied to increase SEO rankings in these changing times.

• Social Media Optimization (SMO) - SMO is an internet marketing strategy using social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and many others. Using various SMO to communicate products to social media users can greatly help achieved goals to optimize a business website. SMO offers added features like: RSS feeds; sharing buttons; polling tools; functionality for incorporating videos, presentations and images; user ratings and other promotional activities like blogging; comments; ability to participate in discussion groups; and posting personal status updates, all of which can be advantageous for any business internet presence.
• Real Time Search - This is one of the innovative features added to Google search that began in December 2009. Through this feature, finding the most relevant result is easier since dynamic results are being delivered from many different sources including real-time information. This changed algorithms and Google's gained power over its competitors to offer SEO benefits by: utilizing the latest topical and breaking news to improve SEO; getting feedback to improve business performance; and scan for great ideas on trending topics to start business marketing campaigns.

• Load Time - As had been predicted, one of the changes that leading search engines implemented and rapidly affected website SEO rankings was the page load time. If any page on a website takes too long to load, a decline in ranking should be expected. Note what Google recommends: that pages should load within 3 seconds or less; it accomplished, high-ranking can be continually enjoyed on this leading search engine. 

By Chris M Hunter