Bing is continually making it easier and more streamlined to get your website pages submitted and indexed. This is especially true for WordPress users as they can verify their site for Bing Webmaster Tool with the use of the Yoast Plugin and submit URLs automatically with the new Bing URL Submission Plugin. These quick and easy steps will get you set up easily allowing your content to be submitted to Bing automatically as you update your website pages.
The first step will be to set up Bing Webmaster Tools which is a free tool that will allow you to manually submit URLs to Bing but will also give you additional tools to use in your SEO strategy. You will first need to create a free account which you can do here. In order to finish setting up the account, the verification process can be done in a few different ways. With WordPress, we would suggest using the Yoast Plugin as this will add the code to the appropriate placement on your website. To do this, go to your Yoast Plugin, click on “Tools” and then click on “Webmaster Tools” tab. This will bring up the screen as shown below where you can add the meta tag Bing gives you in order to verify ownership.
The next step will be to access your unique API for Bing Webmaster tools to use for the Bing Submission Plugin. To do this, go to the settings icon within Bing Webmaster Tools. Under settings, click “API Access” and then click “API Key”. On that API Key screen you will see your unique ID that you will need to add to the Bing URL Submission Plugin.
The last step in setting up the process will be to download the Bing URL Submission Plugin. Once you have added this plugin to your site and activated it, you will need to add the API key from the step above. You have now completed the setup process!
We would recommend that you submit your XML Sitemp to Bing through Bing Webmaster Tools, but you can also being to submit your URL’s manually through the plugin by submitting 10 a day. You will see in the screen shot above that as you do it will count down these steps. Moving forward, your content changes will be submitted automatically to Bing through this plugin. This is a new plugin so we can’t wait to see the impact on visibility and click through rates from Bing.
