Get Useful SEO Reports from Bing Webmaster Tools

Have you tried the useful SEO reports provided by Bing Webmaster tools? I recently logged onto my Bing Webmaster tools account and was surprised to see a vast array of SEO data, presented as useful SEO reports, which provided more information than Google Webmaster tools!

Bing SEO Reports

See the SEO reports of our sites as reported by Bing

You would realise that Bing has been smart enough to detect missing h1 tags, multiple h1 tags, missing META information in headers, missing descriptions, and missing ALT tags and images. Thus, Bing has been able to provide additional SEO data compared to Google Webmaster tools.

 

H1 Tag Errors

For example, Bing has told us about the h1 tag errors. While it would be surprising that some pages would have missing h1 tags / multiple h1 tags, yet the report was able to detect these errors and enabled us to fix these errors easily, which would have been impossible to identify otherwise. h1 tags are the most important information on any HTML page, and h1 tags goof up can really mess your search engine rankings. [FYI multiple h1 tags was caused by an embedded tool script on an article! Tip: always check embed script code tags by viewing page source.]

Missing ALT Image Tags

While we use ALT tags to label images as a routine, sometimes ALT tags are missed and it is very difficult to find on which pages these tags have been missed. Simply clicking on the Bing Webmaster reports shows all the pages (140 pages!) with missing image ALT tags.

Missing Descriptions

Similarly we were able to detect missing descriptions in over 30 articles. Considering we use the “All in one SEO” WordPress plugin which auto generates descriptions for posts, it was surprising that some pages could really miss descriptions. Checking all these pages, I was able to identify that all these pages contained some UTF character errors in the first line of the article, which was caused during site migration to new hosting. So in fact this was a boon in disguise as it helped us to identify those pages which displayed UTF text / character errors, which would have led to poor search engine rankings and helped us fix them.

I’m really excited about the new SEO data provided by Bing Webmaster tools. I am pleasantly amazed to see that Bing Webmaster tools has vastly improved recently and that now there are many new features and lots of new reports and free link analysis tools out there. While we are all fond of Google Webmaster tools, I would urge you to take a look at Bing Webmaster tools and try out some of the amazing SEO tools and URL link reports out there to help you improve your site and rank better in search engines.