Don’t Get Dinged by Bing

Posted by Paula Glover | February 24, 2010 | Posted in: Industry Perspectives, Marketing | 1 Comment

search-seoAccording to a joint press release from Microsoft and Yahoo! on February 18, the firms have received final clearance from the U.S Department of Justice and the European Commission to execute a search agreement they first proposed last summer.

The deal means that Microsoft will now provide Yahoo! the same search result listings that Bing provides. Yahoo! will augment those listings with additional content designed to be relevant to the user. In addition to search changes, businesses that advertise on Microsoft and Yahoo! ad networks can also expect changes and those details will be posted on searchalliance.com.

But even if you don’t advertise on these networks, should you be concerned about SEO and how potential customers find your service on search engines in light of this new alliance?

You bet.

Challenging Google
Google has held the majority of the search market, with other players battling for second place. The Bing-Yahoo! alliance consolidates two major players and makes it easier to gain ground against Google.

bing-google-before-after

Optimizing for Google and Bing
It’s common for most sites to optimize for Google, but now is the time for web site owners to consider Bing. According to Janet Driscoll Miller, President & CEO of Search Mojo, visitors referred from Bing have a lower bounce rate, view more pages and stay on the site longer.

While many of the same search engine optimization (SEO) techniques hold true for both Google and Bing, they’re not always going to rank the same page in the same way.

Google

Bing
  • Gives more weight to links, so generating inbound links to your site is critical
  • Results chosen by automated algorithm
  • Gives more weight to a site’s domain name, so keywords should be present in the URL
  • Some results are hand-selected by real people
  • Displays more content in the search results, so content should be thoughtfully organized and optimized

The good news is that Bing has a Webmaster Center, just as Google does. Web site owners can go to bing.com/toolbox and get a list of the inbound links that Bing has cataloged for your site, as well as submit an XML site map to Bing (hint: you can use the same one you sent to Google).

More SEO Resources
If you’d like more information on optimizing your site for search, refer to SEO and SEM basics
and SEO tips on Bing or the SEO Starter Guide on Google.

Make a few tweaks to your content and keywords and let us know how it goes. Are you getting more traffic from Bing,or is Google still the king of search?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 10:30 am and is filed under Industry Perspectives, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Author: Paula Glover (40 Articles)

Paula serves as a consultant to ZCorum’s rural and suburban Internet service providers and is also involved in developing ZCorum’s corporate marketing strategy. In addition to blogging on marketing and operations topics, she also tweets as @paula_zcorum.

One Response to “Don’t Get Dinged by Bing”

  1. Richard Weaber says:
    May 11, 2010 at 3:22 pm

    Great post can you recommend any forums to join?