Bing, formerly Live Search and MSN Search, is the current search engine from Microsoft. Bing launched on May 28th, 2009 and was fully online June 3, 2009. On July 29th, Microsoft and Yahoo! joined forces and Bing will now power Yahoo! Search.

Other than just being a search engine, Bing has their Webmaster Center. Unfortunately, most of the features are in Beta and the ones that are functional are only available to U.S. Participants. Some of the features that Bing Webmaster Center has to offer are the Webmaster tools that help enhance your site which will then drive more traffic to your website and it provides technical support.

One great thing about Bing Webmaster Center is the Map feature. Bing Maps use either Silverlight or Ajax and the map feature works similar to Google maps, however, extracting the code is much simpler. A great learning tool can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/maps/isdk/ajax/

Bing Webmaster has a developer center allows you to retrieve information from the Internet, improve and enhance search requests and results, find location-specific information and translate terms and blocks of text as well as many other things.

Webmaster’s Community has forums and blogs to help find any answers to any of the webmaster tools, great discussions about SEO, and tons of information about how their search engine is suppose to work. The negative aspect of this forum is that there are no flaws or errors mentioned about their product and in the end feels more like a sales pitch than an open discussion.

The Webmaster Tools allow you to submit your sitemap, view statistics as well as troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site. There are 7 tools that you can use to help drive traffic to your site. Each tool is pretty self-explanatory and some steps are unnecessarily repeated.

The 7 categories are:

• Summary – Provides indexing and crawling information as well at your top 5 page scores.
• Profile- gives you the option to enter in your website’s sitemap to help Bing crawl and index your website.
• Crawl Issues – If for some reason you have a crawl issue, you can use the crawl issues tool to see where the problem might have occurred while crawling and indexing your website.
• Backlinks – Provides a list of URLs that link back to your site.
• Outbound Links – Provides you with a list of URLs leading to other websites on your site.
• Keywords – Use the keywords tool to evaluate how your website performs against search specific keywords or terms.
• Sitemaps – Allows you to provide your sitemap to Webmaster Center to help index your site (already included in the Profile tool)

After reviewing the Bing Webmaster Center and all the tools that they have to offer, they seem to fall short on most aspects. The maps section is really well executed and the Webmaster tools help check any crawl issues you might have, but as for any extra tools that can help with driving traffic to your website, you can use any analytics tool.

Perhaps, when other features are available outside of the States, there will be more to offer in the area of SEO, but until then, Bing Webmaster Center doesn’t really add any value to your website.