How to Submit Your Website to Bing?

When the conversation turns to website optimization, you’ll most often hear “Google, Google, and Google again.” But there is another player we must not forget — Bing, which has gained a significant market share and provides data for a secondary tier of search engines. Microsoft has ensured some competition for Google with the Bing search engine, and you should not skip submitting to Bing Webmaster Tools.

Today, the most popular search engines in Slovenia include Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Najdi.si, among which Google clearly dominates. However, the other three search engines are not insignificant and should not be neglected, so in this article we will focus on Bing and learn how to submit a website to Bing. Among the three most popular web browsers are Mozilla Firefox (uses Google), Google Chrome (Omnibox — option to choose between Google, Yahoo, or Bing), and Internet Explorer (uses Bing).

The title of this article can be a bit misleading, because if you have a Google Sitemap, you also have a Bing Sitemap. However, to really see how Bing views your website, you need a Bing Webmaster account. It is truly important to submit your sitemap (site index) to different search engines for fast indexing.

About Bing Webmaster Tools in General

In the past, when Bing.com was still Live.com, their Webmaster Tools was fairly useless. In the old days, you needed a Microsoft-related account (Passport or Hotmail) to use Live Webmaster Tools.

That is no longer the case — now you can sign up with any email. The user interface has improved significantly. Everything is displayed through MS Silverlight. The functionality is like a simplified version of Google Webmaster Tools — really straightforward. To verify site ownership, you either need to upload an XML file to the root or add Meta Tags — just like with Google.

Bing has a tool where you can directly submit URLs to your website’s index. It allows you to submit up to 10 URLs per day and up to 50 URLs per month. Bing also offers a query parameter exclusion tool, which blocks certain pages of your website from appearing in Bing’s search results. All site data can also be exported.

Overall, Bing Webmaster Tools offers a good set of tools for beginners, allowing them to analyze most of the information needed to make their website search-engine friendly. Visually, it may be somewhat dull and could use better explanations of some ranking systems. It currently cannot compare to Google Analytics, but considering that Bing is still relatively new, we can commend it for a solid start with its tools and expect significant expansion in the coming year.

How to Submit a Sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools?

1.) Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and click “Webmaster Tools Sign In.”

2.) Sign in with your Hotmail or Windows Live ID account.

3.) Add your website and complete the verification process (confirm that the website is yours).

You can verify your website in two ways:

• Upload an XML file to your web hosting server
• Use a meta tag

Click “Verify website.”

4.) Now we can add our sitemap. Click on “Add Sitemap,” as shown in the following image.

You can also submit your sitemap using the following method. Copy the following URL and paste it into your browser:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Simply replace yourdomain.com with the name of your website.