Does Bing like SEO? You bet your ahrefs we do...

As with so many things in life, perspective is important.  On the surface its easy to say Bing likes SEO.  But what does this actually mean?  Do we actually care whether you have clean URLs, H1 tags and properly written meta descriptions?  Sure we do, but the reasons might not be what you're thinking.  At the very core of it's work, SEO is about improving a website.  In today's ever-populated SERPs, that's important.  Small things can help your website appear ahead of a competitor in the results, and with so much money online today, every advantage counts, right?

Well, yes and no.  Ranking well today requires so much more than just tweaking basic, on-page technical factors.

And you can never escape the basic rule of business: that being you need a positive ROI to stay in business long term.

As an SEO, you've been asked before "What's the return if we insert an H1 tag on that page?"  And your answer usually began with "...er...", "...umm..." or some other general stammering.  Savvy amongst the SEO crowd would gravitate towards an answer that started sort of like this, "Now, you see, SEO isn't about individual items, but the sum of all the parts combined..."  The bottom line remained however, that in your heart of hearts you knew the actual, direct answer to the question is "The H1 tag installation alone will likely net no measurable gain."  At some point you need to be honest if the work you're doing actually returns a net positive gain to the company.  Does chasing that one lingering on-page element change the balance sheet at the end of the month?

So what's the point of having the H1 then?

Blame Gutenberg.  With the advent of the printing press in the 15th century came an almost immediate need to figure out how content on the page should be laid out.  With finite space to print on, and news abounding, early newspapers understood the value of a headline.  This heading was precious space, designed to capture the eye with bold, large fonts, enticing the viewer to buy the newspaper.  Today's H1 tag fulfills much the same roll, albeit modified slightly.  Whereas the heading on an old-timey newspaper was meant to get you to buy the paper, today's H1 tag's job is to help you quickly understand the content of the page.  The sales "ask" being not money, but for your time.  Both then and now, part of the heading's job was to explain the content held within.  Sure, this information is helpful for us as an engine, but really, this is for the people.  It helps them understand what they are about to consume and determine of the content on the page matches their needs.  The H1 is more about usability than outright SEO.  If you subscribe to the idea that SEO is about usability, then you're on the right track.

What about clean URLs?

Not so many years ago you'd find plenty of websites with disastrously long URL strings.  Many still exist today.  Our crawlers can, by in large, get through these now.  Still, shorter and cleaner is better and easier to crawl, which we always appreciate.  We also appreciate the "hint" that the keywords in a URL can provide to us towards relevancy of the content.  An additional benefit from using clean URLs goes directly to how a visitors sees your website.  With today's tabbed browsing experiences, its harder to read the entire