Bloggers and webmasters now have one more reason to verify their site on Bing Webmaster tools. Bing has recently added some more features to their webmaster tools service which now shows detailed traffic data for websites, search queries, an approximate number of impressions on search result pages and an expected click through rate for key phrases and keywords.

This is quite useful, when you want to know how your blog or website is performing on Bing.com and which keywords or phrases are more popular on Bing than on Google, Yahoo or other meta search engines.

When compared with Google Webmaster tools, Bing Webmaster does not provide additional details which are missing in Google Webmaster tools traffic, indexing and crawl reports. Some months back, Google did improve Google webmaster tools with traffic charts and enhanced search query data. Nevertheless, if you want to keep a closer look on your site’s SEO – there are some reasons why you should regularly monitor your site’s performance on these services.

1. The webmaster center of Bing, Google And Yahoo are provided for free to all site owners and all you have to do is verify site ownership only once. In return, you get detailed diagonostic reports, crawl errors, indexing status and the average page load time (Google only). This is indeed valuable data which can be used to optimize your site and get rid of technical errors which occur time to time.

2. All search engines keep a close eye on your site’s performance, internal linking, keyword densities and other on page SEO factors. Ignoring these reports, thinking that they are not so important is certainly a mistake.

3. These reports can sometime reveal whether your site has malicious codes being injected as an accident or whether your site is considered safe to be shown in SERP’s.

I take these webmaster reports very seriously and have set up email alerts to receive notifications when abnormal activities occur in my site. Here are some of the new features of Bing Webmaster tools which are worth a look:

Page Traffic

The Page traffic tab on Bing Webmaster tools lets you review up to six months of traffic for particular pages of your site and see their performance for the course of up to 6 months. Using this tab, you can quickly find the following:

• Which pages of my site receive the maximum traffic from Bing.com ?
• How does the number of impressions vary between months ?
• What are the keywords and phrases for which that particular page is ranking on the search result pages?
• What is the average click through rate for that page on Bing.com’s search result.
• What is the average impression count and average SERP position of the page in Bing’s SERP.

Wow !

Lots of important metrics being shown, using which you can have a good idea why a particular page is receiving tons of search traffic while other pages aren’t. Here is how the Page traffic data look, when you select a particular page for analysis

You can further export the search query data as a CSV file and import it in Microsoft Excel or Google Docs for comparison, building graphical analysis and so on.

Index And Crawl Status

The other tabs available in Bing Webmaster tools is the “Index” and “Crawl” tabs which shows you detailed insights on how many pages of your site has been indexed by Bing, how many crawling errors were encountered and which pages are frequently crawled by Bing search spider.

The crawl tab also shows the different HTTP error codes the Bing search bot encountered, when they were trying to crawl the deeper pages of your site. This gives a brief idea on what are the things you should do on your side, to make your website for freindly on the eyes of Bing.com. Note: All these details are also available on Google Webmaster tools crawl error reports and indexing status.

One of the things which caught my attention was the “Query parameters” tab which allows you to define specific query parameters which you want the Bing.com crawler to ignore. For example: If you own a website that passes query parameters to URL’s whenever a user comments or buys a product, you can block these query parameters from the Bing.com crawler.

Illustration: Let’s say one of the pages of your site is www.domain.com/example/?p=123 and after passing a query parameters, the page changes to www.domain.com/example/?p=123&query=xyz.

You can define this query parameters and block the Bing.com spider from crawling the pages that occur as a result of user’s behavior or as a result of a particular query parameter.

Try Bing webmaster tools today at bing.com/webmaster and let us know what you think about it in the comments section.