Have you taken a look at Bing lately? The perennial underdog of the search space compared the massive presence that Google has, Bing nevertheless has been up to some interesting things. Recently they released an update to Bing Webmaster Tools. There is actually quite a lot of functionality, and there is some nice visually appealing features to check out. 
When you log in and select the site you wish to look at Bing analytics for, you have several charts you can click through to get more details, including indexation, traffic and crawl. Bing will save up to six months of data and gives you a slider to scroll through the months of data that you can expand.
Many of the features available in Google Webmasters Tools are available in Bing with some twists.
- Lists of HTTP errors encountered.
- Submit and Block URLs.
- View inbound links over time.
- Handle duplicate content caused by parameters via “URL Normalization.
- Use “Index Explorer” to review indexation
SEOBook has done a comprehensive review of Bing Webmaster Tools if you would like to learn more.
But even if the suite of tools wasn’t useful, you still need to set up your website in Bing Webmaster Tools. A standard SEO check that I perform, is to check how much of the site has been indexed by the Search Engines. After looking at indexation for many sites, as a rule of thumb, I see that Google is the best at discovering pages and indexing websites. Bing takes longer and doesn’t seem to be as thorough. So even if you don’t look at the stats it provides, just being able to submit your sitemap to Bing is reason enough to use Bing Webmaster.
To get started you will need to create a Windows Live Id, then you will need to do the verification process, which will be familiar to you if you have setup a website in Google Webmaster Tools. Bing Webmaster is located at bing.com/webmaster and there is a webmaster blog.
