As an affiliate marketer, search engine optimization is very important. For starters, it makes it easy for search engine bots to crawl your website and blog. When they crawl your blog or website, they index it. This makes it easy for online users to find your website.
Second, SEO improves sales in your business. According to Statista, global e-commerce is expected to be more than $5 trillion. By 2021, this will account for 18% of all retail sales. This is more than double the sales made in 2015 and 2016.
Last but not least, SEO impacts local business when it comes to local search. Modern consumers use keywords to find information. For instance, if a homeowner is in need of a plumber to repair a pipe burst, they will search the internet. The internet has past reviews made by previous customers. This makes it easy for homeowners to make smart decisions.
Problem is, when it comes to SEO, we end up optimizing for one search engine. What you need to know is that optimizing for one search engine means losing a lot of traffic and potential customers. Want to increase traffic and sales? Then, optimize your website or blog for Bing. How can you achieve this? By using Bing Webmaster Tools.
In this detailed guide, we will cover a brief history of Bing’s webmaster toolset, its features and how affiliate marketers can benefits.
A Brief History of Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)
Bing Webmaster Tools was launched on June 3rd, 2009 as a webmaster portal. Previously known as Bing Webmaster Center, the webmaster portal is a free service that is part of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. It was built to help affiliate marketers, bloggers and website owners add their website to Bing index crawler. Also, it helps site owners monitor how Bing indexed crawler crawls and ranks your website content.
As a handy tool, the webmaster portal can help webmasters generate reports which help site owners understand where to focus so as to increase their organic traffic. When building a website, all measures are taken to ensure its visually appealing and functional. Problem is, the site is never optimized for the internet and search engines.
With Bing Webmaster Tools, you can scan your website and know which items to adjust so as to optimize your website for online visibility. Also, it allows you to know what online users are searching for.
Features of Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)
The Bing Webmaster Tools has features and tools to help webmasters optimize and manage their websites. These features include:
Search engine crawler
One of the most important features available on Bing webmaster tools is the search engine index crawler. This is an intelligent application that spider crawls your website and indexes all resources – web pages, images, videos, and URLs. Apart from crawling the site to index it, the search engine crawler can help webmasters discover issues. These issues include 404 errors, long dynamic URLs, unsupported content types and blocked by REP.
They (issues above) can affect your organic traffic. How? Let’s assume your online users click on a Bing search engine link and when redirected to your website, a 404 error page is shown. If this happens, users will opt to visit other sites as the content they were looking for is not available.
Backlink data
Affiliate marketers create useful, engaging, informative, relevant and evergreen content. The content is meant to inform readers and help them make smart decisions before buying a product. To convince readers, it is common for affiliate marketers to add statistics and other relevant information in their content. That is not all. Affiliate marketers add links to important information. These links redirect users to other blogs.
A lot of site owners may not know this but backlinks help to improve search engine ranking. To help you manage your backlinks and related data, Bing Webmaster Tools has the Backlink data feature.
Advanced filtering
Bing Webmaster Tools collects a lot of data about your website and online readers. For instance, it collects data about:
- Number of users accessing your website
- Time and date they accessed your website
- Country of origin
- IP address
- Devices being used by your readers
- The web browser in use
- Webpages they have read and more.
This data is presented in a tabular form. To help you find what you are looking for, the portal has advanced filtering tools. This allows webmasters to scope results and find the data they need.
Keyword search tools and sitemaps
In SEO, keyword research enables site owners to locate keywords online readers are using. These keywords allow site owners to rank better on search engines such as Bing. Keyword search tools such as the one offered by Bing Webmaster Portal enables site owners to find a niche keyword, and expand it (long tail keywords). By using these keywords, affiliate marketers are able to fulfill their SEO goals. If the site owner creates the right content and has backlinks to match, they can rank the said keywords. This tool can be used together with Bing Ads Keyword Planner.
For sitemaps, it helps webmasters to check if Bing search engine is crawling their website and viewing the sitemap correctly.
How Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) Benefits Affiliate Marketers
According to Statcounter, Google has a 92.92% share of the search market while Bing has 2.38% and Yahoo, 1.79%. Other search engines such as Baidu and Yandex RU have 1.03% and 0.55% respectively. While Google has the largest search market share, it is not the only choice when it comes to SEO. As an affiliate marketer, you need to diversify and go beyond Google. To have your website indexed and crawled successfully on Bing, you must use Bing Webmaster Tools.
Want to know the benefits of Bing Webmaster Tools to affiliate marketers?
Let’s get started.
Optimize page content
Content is king and to attract online users to your website and for them to click on your affiliate links and make a purchase, you must optimize your content. If you are new to SEO, optimizing your content makes it easy for Bing to rank it. In turn, it is easier for online users to find your blog/website and read your content.
Bing Webmaster Tools has a useful tool that can help you optimize your content. Its called SEO analyzer. To access the tool, you must add your credentials via the Bing Webmaster Tools login page. From your dashboard, find the SEO Analyzer tool under Diagnostics & Tools.
It works by generating a report from a list of SEO best practices. It then compares these against your web page/website. From the report, you can find out what changes need to make in line with SEO best practices.
Find relevant search keywords
Keywords are phrases that help online users locate content. For instance, if a user is shopping for baby strollers, he or she will likely use keywords such as:
- Baby stroller
- Red/black baby stroller
- Best baby stroller among others
As an affiliate marketer, you need to incorporate relevant keywords if you want to increase traffic to your website as well as sales. To do this, you need Bing Webmaster Tools. It has a search keyword tool able to list search phrases from organic searches of your articles. The tool can generate targeted search phrases, the number of times it has appeared in the article, and whether it was clicked or not. This is valuable information to affiliate marketers. How? It gives affiliate marketers an in-depth look at how keyword phrases drive traffic to their websites.
Generate and analyze SEO reports
Want to find out which webpages are not in compliance with SEO best practices? Bing Webmaster Tools can generate SEO reports for you. Unlike the SEO Analyzer which is an on-demand tool, SEO report tool is not. It runs automatically and generates a report every week. The report presents:
- SEO suggestions
- Severity
- Error Account
- Pages
Data presented on the report can help you discover areas of your website that do not comply with SEO best practices. If your website has SEO issues, this will happen:
- Poor user experience – drives a potential buyer to other sites
- Lower ranking on Bing – makes it difficult to attract buyers
- Deter clicks – normally originates from unoptimized and semantically inaccurate URLs
- No local presence – affects your sales
- Not optimized for mobile – Bing and other search engines may penalize you for this
To generate SEO reports, access BWT via Bing Webmaster Tools login, under Reports & Data find SEO reports.
Mobile friendly
Did you know that more than 80% of adults own a smartphone today? Smartphones have become the go-to devices for many because they are easy to use and can multitask. As such, more people are searching for information and shopping using their smartphones than with desktops and laptops.
As an affiliate marketer, having a mobile-friendly site allows you to attract and retain customers. It improves your site’s user experience, improves your content presentation and site performance. Also, it increases user engagement on mobile devices and helps you rank better on Bing search engine results. So, how do you know if your website is mobile friendly? Bing Webmaster Tools has an intuitive mobile friendliness feature that is easy to use. The key features include:
- Zoom configuration
- Content width
- Spacing of links
- Viewport configuration
- Readability text
To access the Mobile Friendliness Test Tool, check under Tools & Diagnostics in Bing Webmaster Tools. To use the tool, enter your URL and click on “Analyze.” After crawling your site, a report is displayed.
Final Thoughts
The above benefits of Bing Webmaster Tools to affiliate marketers are just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many things affiliate marketers can do with BWT. They include managing deep links, crawl controls, block URLs, disavow links, link building and geo-target your website. You can also generate a page traffic report, crawl information report and use the inbound links tool. When it comes to security, BWT can help you carry out malware and phishing evaluation. As such, you can protect your data and your user’s privacy.
As you can see, Bing Webmaster Tools has a lot to offer. Want to provide your users with great user experience and increase your sales? Open your Bing Webmaster Tools account today!
All the best,
Ed
If you enjoyed this post, you might want to check out these articles as well;
How to use Facebook for Affiliate Marketing
Top 10 Tips on How to Promote Your Website Using Instagram
Google Search Console – All You Need to Know About it
References
https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/getting-started-checklist-66a806de
https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/mobile-friendliness-test-tool-7338b34b
https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/reports-data-page-8e094d5d
https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/keyword-research-tool-628070b5
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/14/about-a-quarter-of-americans-report-going-online-almost-constantly/
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share