Recently, we looked at how it might be worth your while to optimize your website for Bing and Yahoo as well instead of just focusing on Goo...
Recently, we looked at how it might be worth your while to optimize your website for Bing and Yahoo as well instead of just focusing on Google. We promised to give you more insights into the Bing search engine to help you get along with it. Today, we'll take a look at how Bing Search selects a title for your post to display in search results. Just like Google, Bing doesn't always serve the title that you want in search results.
Bing explained the process behind the selection of the title tags in a recent blog post. According to Bing, their goal is to "help the users complete their search tasks as efficiently as possible." To that end, Bing does the following things in the search engine result pages.
- Titles are most powerful when it comes to showing how a result is relevant to the user's query. Hence, the titles are optimized for relevance
- It optimizes snippets as well, since they're the most important after titles, and help users decide whether they want to click-through or not
- Last, but not the least, Bing optimizes the display of URLs. Sometimes, URLs will help users gauge the authenticity of a website, or the possible relevance of a result. An Apple iPhone 6 review is much more convincing on www.smartphonereviews.com (just an example) than on www.abc-iloveiphone.com (again, just an example).
When optimizing titles, URLs, and snippets, Bing follows a complex set of rules that involve combinations of multiple pieces of information.
Long titles might get truncated to fit in the available space. Bing may also incorporate pieces of information in the title based on what it has learned of searchers’ preferences. For example, Bing knows that users like to see business names in titles, so the name of your business may be moved to the front of the title tag.
Bing explains that in some cases they may use other pieces of information from a web page such as OpenGraph annotations, or prominent text extracted from the page. Bing may even use external data sources such as anchor text.
How to make sure Bing picks up the right title?
It is not always easy to come up with the right title for your article. And it's a shame really when Bing decides to override it with another title of its own choosing. After all, you are human, and humans know best, right? If you don't want your titles overridden by Bing, there is something you can do.
- Trying to keep your title relevant to user queries as best as you can. Avoid long titles with repetitive stop-words such as "and" "or" "is" "they" etc.
- Avoid using generic titles such as "Contact Us" or "About"
- If you embed OpenGraph, etc., make sure it is consistent with the title you want, and that all the fields are correct, for example that your site name is correct
- Is your site listed on online directories such as DMOZ? If so, then make sure your website entry is correct
- Don't block crawlers unless you absolutely have to
As always, the best way to look for problems is to become a user. Try reference your URL from another source, and ensure that any meta data associated with it is correct and matches the way you want it to be represented.
That's it for today. We'll be back with more tips and tricks on optimizing your website for Bing. Until then stay tuned! :)
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