Some search engine optimization tools are expensive, while others, such as Bing Webmaster Tools, are free. Some Helpful resources like site scans.
To use it, confirm Verify your site with Bing. If you’ve already verified it with Google Search Console, the process is easy: select (Import site from Google Search Console) and allow access from your Google account. Otherwise, verify with DNS, meta tags, or file upload.
Once the verification is complete, please allow a day or two for Bing Webmaster Tools to collect performance and optimization information, then go to the “Site Scan” section to start the crawl (it doesn’t start automatically).
The scan will take about a day, after which your SEO report will contain Errors, Warnings and Notices.
The Bing Webmaster Tools site scan report includes “Errors,” “Warnings,” and “Notices.” Click on image to enlarge.
error
This section lists all pages that have missing or incorrect components that affect organic search. For example:
- Missing meta description,
- Pages that return errors 400-499
- Broken redirects,
- Broken canonical URL,
- There is no title tag.
- Pages blocked by robots.txt,
- Pages that return server timeouts,
Of the reported errors, missing meta descriptions are the least of your worries as they don’t affect search results – Bing generates a description itself that it would have done anyway based on the query.
In my experience, all other errors require fixing. Clicking on an error will show you a description, resolution steps, and the pages that are affected.
For example, Bing provide See below for an explanation of the “missing tag” error.
What is the issue?
The page is missing a title in the header section. Search engines use title tags as an important signal to determine a page’s relevance for a particular keyword search. It is important to ensure that your title tags are unique, descriptive, and contain accurate information about the page’s content. Titles should be unique for each page on your website.
How to fix it?
Add a title to your page using title tags. Title tags should be placed within the source section of your page. Write a concise, descriptive, keyword-rich page title that best describes the content of your page.
caveat
The warnings section contains issues that may improve your site’s organic ranking but may not hurt it. My Smarty Marketing site received the following warning from Bing:
- No Image Alternative attribute,
- Pages with title tags or meta descriptions that are too long
- Pages that are missing H1 tags,
- The HTML is too long.
- Meta Language Tags do not have.
Not all of these are important. We don’t pay much attention to warnings about title tags, meta descriptions, metalanguage tags, or overly long HTML. Search crawlers are becoming more and more sophisticated and can handle long HTML and missing language tags. Moreover, Google has confirmed that it uses long title tags as a ranking signal, even if they are truncated in search results.
Still, Bing’s recommendations don’t hurt: certainly, image alt text and H1 tags can improve rankings.
Overall, Bing’s SEO report covers the basics and gives you a free overview of potentially significant errors.
