3 reasons to make sure you're on Bing!

Microsoft's replaced their Live Search engine around 3½ months ago with Bing! - a completely new search engine. Is your site listed?

We've noted that quite a few sites which rank highly on Google and Yahoo are nowhere on Bing! and if you read some of the Bing community forum posts, there are quite a few concerned webmasters out there.

If your site is not listed or doesn't rank highly there are a few things you can do, but for a minute let's consider if a good ranking in Bing matters.

Google's the main game in town, right? So who cares about Bing?

Well, let's discount any of the marketing hype that says why their features might be better than the others. There are three very good reasons to be on Bing:

1. Bing currently has about 11% share in search, and it's rising
2. Bing is the default search engine when you buy a Windows PC - some people will never change this setting
3. Yahoo and Microsoft are going to combine their search capabilities into a single search platform - Bing - effectively more than doubling its importance

For these reasons, no-one should be ignoring Bing, so make sure your site is listed.

You might not be on Bing if your site is new or has had historically poor listing on the other search engines. If you're not listed, you need to let Bing know and the easiest way to do that is :

• Submit your site address to Bing URL submit
• Add a sitemap file to your site so Bing knows about all your pages

Or you can just wait and if you're indexed by the other engines, Bing will probably get around to you in due course. If I were you, I'd prefer to get on, RIGHT NOW!

One last thing, we've seen it take a long time for some sites to get on Bing - sometimes as many as 8 weeks after submission, so you might have to be patient - another good reason to do it as soon as possible.