With the culmination of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal I’ve turned up my Bing search testing and SEO analysis efforts. Using April 2009 Comscore qSearch data, Google owns 64.2% of the market as compared to Micro-Hoo with a combined total of 28.6% market share. Clearly Google remains in the dominant position yet, from my perspective, Google should be concerned as Microsoft is doing some interesting user experience things with Bing. More importantly, Microsoft is launching some good stuff this year (Xbox, Azure Cloud, Windows 7, Bing, etc.) and it may start to be “cool” again to use Microsoft.
It’s rather early, although I’ve been initially impressed with Bing as the search results are good. Many SEO experts are taking more of a wait and see approach, which makes total sense. For me, of course I like to play – And to make sure I am informed so as to make sound recommendations to partners.
If you are interested in testing yourself I recommend this tool that allows you to view keyword results from three search engines, then vote on the best one.
In the spirit of SEO Nuts and Bolts – I will stick to the 5 things you should know and do related to your Bing SEO efforts:
1) Stick to Your SEO Strategy – Regardless of Bing’s recently increased search market share, SEO basics remain the same. Search technologies (Google, Bing, etc.) have one primary goal – connect keywords to content that users want to consume (an make some $$$ in the process.) Yes there are some nuances that are different with Bing, yet making material changes to your SEO strategy only to accommodate Bing is likely a mistake. A good SEO strategy encompasses three critical criteria: a) Great and unique keyword-targeted content b) a smart architecture c) and a scalable and authoritative inbound linking strategy.
2) Submit Your Site to Bing – As you will quickly find out, Google indexes more pages than Bing. So, in some cases you will need to submit your web site to Bing to accelerate the time frame for Bing to index your site. My suggestion is to use Bing’s site submission tool and make sure they know your site exists so they can index it.
3) Sign Up For the Bing Webmaster Center – Just like Google’s webmaster toolset, Bing has its own webmaster center that allows you to do keyword research, test/verify pages, submit site maps, etc.
4) Early and Little Data – It is important to recognize that it is very early in our understanding of the intersection of Bing search results and consumer user experience of the search application. Clearly the interface is different (more content) from Google and only a small percentage of consumers have voted (with their usage patterns and overall clicks) on its effectiveness. The moral of this story is to be patient as more data and understanding will come in time.
5) Some Granular Bing SEO Observations to incorporate into your efforts:
a) Bing seems to give more weight (than Google) to domain names (www.xxx.com) from two perspectives:
i. length of registered time – the longer the better and make sure it is greater than one year
ii. content-related keywords in the domain name
b) Bing, just like Google, gives lots of weight to keyword-targeted page titles… super important you choose them carefully.
c) Bing seems to like pages with at least 300+ words. I suggest no more than 800.
d) Bing seems to give more weight (than Google) to outbound links to relevant pages.
e) It is my observation that Google is better at ranking new content, yet Bing puts more weight on sites with history. So, for a new site – you may want to think about purchasing an older domain than developing a new one.
f) Bing seems to monitor social sites well (ex. Digg)
g) http://www.impactmedialtd.co.uk points out that site descriptions are not generated from Meta Description tags (which Google typically uses,) rather the Open Directory (DMOZ) listings. They suggest including a specific tag to ensure your description is as you desire:
What other Bing SEO tips can you share?
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
it very useful