Bing! The search engine’s trademark sound never sounded so sweet — not to the internet marketing community, anyway. Yesterday saw the debut of the revamped Bing Webmaster Tools, revealing a three-pronged focus on crawling, indexing, and traffic.

New features include:

• The super-cool Index Explorer, which let’s you check out the Bing Index to confirm that the search engine has included all of your pages and directories.
• Submit URLS, a feature allowing users to manually suggest URLs for indexing.
• Another neat tool, Crawl Issues, which documents potential problems such as malware, redirects, and exclusions.
• Last, Block URLs, a way to submit the pages and directories you DON’T want to see in Bing search results.

Also, Bing is going to roll-out additional tools all the time. Watch your back, Google!

Now for the bad news: The main downside to Bing’s new set of tools is that they require you to first download Microsoft’s Silverlight 4, a development platform most of us would rather get to… in our own time. You can’t even watch the new Bing Webmaster Tools’ introductory video without getting Silverlight.

Overall, though, Bing Webmaster Tools is an exciting addition to the world of business marketing. We look forward to seeing new features, and otherwise reaping the benefits of the ongoing Google-Bing rivalry.