Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has a webmaster center to help with search engine optimization. Submitting your XML sitemap is very easy. All you need to do is go to a simple URL like this:

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

and your sitemap will be automatically submitted to Bing’s crawler. You can also use a more traditional form page:

To request that Bing crawl your site, submit your site’s domain to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx.

if you don’t have an XML sitemap.

Also check out Bing’s SEO 101 guide.

Here are the major topics:

  • Set up your content pages like an org chart
  • Use strong tags to highlight keywords in body text
  • Ensure text content is not shown via scripts, Flash, or images
  • Avoid redundant content between pages
  • Organize your content with header tags
  • Make page copy actionable and unique
  • Don’t use hidden text or links

The last section talks about penalties for blackhat SEO practices. So be good. ;)

Don’t allow your legitimate site to be penalized because it used web spammer techniques. The search engines can see when such techniques are used and discount any value they might have added to a site’s relevance to the hidden keyword text, so it doesn’t even work, anyway. And the ensuing penalties imposed on sites employing this practice actually make this a very damaging technique. That’s the antithesis of good SEO!

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