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How to Set up Bing Websmaster tools

Getting started checklist

New to Bing Webmaster Tools? This checklist can help you get started. Steps 1 and 2 will get you up and running, while steps 3 and 4 are optional, but highly recommended.

Step 1: Open a Bing Webmaster Tools account

Go to the Bing Webmaster Tools sign-in or sign-up and open a free Bing Webmaster Tools account. You can sign up using an existing Microsoft, Google or Facebook account. Alternatively, you can create a new Microsoft account for your Bing Webmaster Tools account; just select Microsoft as the convenient account and click on Create one in the next step.

Step 2: Add & verify your website

Once you have a Bing Webmaster Tools account, you can Add Sites to your account. Next, you need to verify that you are the owner of the website. Check the Add and Verify Site section in the left Navigation to get step-by-step instructions on how to add and verify your website. There are multiple Ownership Verification methods; click on the option best suited to your site’s properties and follow the on-screen instructions. You can add multiple sites and manage access level permissions through the User Management feature.

If Bing Webmaster Tools is able to verify your site, you will see a green checkmark and a message saying that your domain is successfully added to Bing Webmaster Tools. If you see a red cross mark, look at the error message to check the site verification issue. Resolve the issue and try again later. You can also delete an added site, but you will have to reverify the site in case you want to add it again.

Step 3: Create and upload your sitemaps

Adding Sitemaps is a great way to tell Bing about URLs on your site and Bing supports different formats:

  • XML Sitemaps and XML Sitemap index files (as specified by www.sitemaps.org)
  • Atom 0.3 and 1.0
  • RSS 2.0, and
  • Text files (containing one URL per line)
There are many tools that can help you create sitemaps. You can start with a tool which best meets your needs. The sitemap typically lives at the root of your domain; if your domain is www.contoso.com (for example), its sitemaps location will be http://www.contoso.com/sitemap.xml.

After uploading your sitemap to the server, you can tell us about it through your Bing Webmaster Tools account. Refer to the Sitemaps section in the left navigation for more details.

Step 4: Create a search optimization plan

Use your Bing Webmaster Tools account to make your search engine optimization (SEO) plan easier. In the left navigation of the Webmaster Tools, under SEO, you can see a list of tools to help you in tasks like investigating backlinks, keyword research and analyzing SEO errors for your website. SEO Reports will run automatically on any domain, which you have verified in your account, every alternate week. So, twice a month (on average) you will get fresh reports with suggestions about the areas you need to address to improve SEO ranking. If your domain has been verified recently, you may need to wait a few days to get these reports.