Google may know all about your nonprofit’s website (and your blog,
and your MySpace or Facebook page, or whatever other social media profiles you’ve
staked out on the Web), but that doesn’t guarantee that Microsoft’s new
search engine, Bing.com, will automatically index your site as well.
As a web developer Guilherme Zühlke O’Connor
explains it, “These are two different services, with two different
databases, two different ranking algorithms and two different search
spiders.”
Just for fun, check out Bing-vs-Google.com and run a search on the keywords that people typically use to find your website — and see the difference!
So, since Bing works off an different database than Google (or
Yahoo, or any of the other leading search engines), and since Bing is the fastest growing US search engine
in the top ten, with a 10% market share reported in September, you’ll
want to make sure your site is indexed, crawled, and listed by Bing as well as other search engines.
If your website is not appearing in Bing.com yet, here’s how to submit your URL so your site will be indexed there:
- Go to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx, Bing’s (free) site submission page.
- Enter the letters and numbers shown in the “captcha” image, just to prove you’re a real person.
- Enter the main web address for your website — for example, Wild Apricot would enter http://www.wildapricot.com/ in the submission form.
- Check for typos!! Then click the Submit URL button.
The search spider MSNBot will follow the links from your homepage to
find other pages on your site. It may take a while for Bing to find and
index all the pages on your website, however, or the MSNBot may not
fully crawl your site. That’s where submitting a dynamic sitemap, a
simple webpage with a linked list of all the pages on your site, or the
RSS feed for your blog can help you.
You may already be familiar with the useful Google Webmaster Tools
that help webmasters to make the most of Google search? A similar
toolbox is available at the Bing Webmaster Center.
You’ll need to sign up for a (free) Windows Live ID (gets you into
MSN/Hotmail as well) to use the suite of webmaster tools, but if
Google’s anything to go by, the results for your search engine
optimization should be worth the small extra effort.