Bing (by Microsoft) has been around for awhile but they are ready to 'come out' in a big way.  Shortly Yahoo will start serving Bing's organic search results.  Good news for us! 

While analysts are predicting that Bing will garner only about 30% of the search engine market, don't be lulled into thinking they are not important.  According to Website Magazine, "data indicates that this percentage of users will be statistically closer to purchase than Google’s much larger share. That’s more than enough reason for e-commerce merchants not to ignore this significant change in the search landscape."

Bing's Webmaster Tools are really good.  Set up  is very easy.  After you create your account, simply type your url into the space provided.  It will ask you if you want to put a file in your hosting account or a line of code in your site. Whichever you choose, after you do it click on 'verify site' at Bing.  They tell you it will take about 3 days before data starts appearing.

When you see data in your account you can generate a list of back-links (incoming links)  This is great for your commenting strategy.  You can also generate a list of outgoing links – see who all you link to and spiff up that strategy if needed.

The summary tool gives you the most recent crawling data and other info about your sites, and checks the domain score and page score and the estimated number of indexed pages.

The main thing you want to do is put up a sitemap.  Apparently Bing will be paying much more attention to your sitemap than Google does.  Since it's important for your sitemap to be up to date, it's a good idea to use a plugin to create (and update) your sitemap. A good sitemap plugin is Google XML Sitemaps -  just put google xml sitemaps in the search box at Plugins -> Add New and install it.  It's really easy to configure and is for all search engines – not just Google.

Cathy Perkins – The WordPress Wizard