Bing Search Engine
With the launch of Bing earlier this month, Internet marketers have something new to work on. Going by the basic scheme of things, let me keep this blog post extremely simple.
What is Bing?
Bing represents Microsoft’s quest to beat Google in the search engine war. The company is advertising Bing as a “decision engine” and aims at keeping searches simple and organized. It attempts to help people deal with information overload and make decisions faster and with greater ease.
How is Bing Performing?
According to a report published by Web traffic tracking company Statcounter on June 4, Bing accounted for 16.28% of the US search market, surpassing Yahoo’s 10.22%. Of course, Google still had the lion’s share (view graph). Although Bing did receive a large number of hits in the first week of its launch, it is currently behind Yahoo (and of course Google).
Top 5 Search Engines from 29 May 09 to 04 Jun 09
Should you SEO for Bing?
Of course! Whether or not Bing will take over Google is yet to be seen. Microsoft has budgeted $80 million for marketing the decision engine, which is sure to draw new visitors.
How is SEO for Bing Different?
Till now, Google dominates more than 70% of the global search market. However, when it comes to the SEO race, no one wants to be left behind. So, here are some tips that will help you SEO for Bing.
Domain Age: Bing is a lot harsher about domain age than Google. The longer your domain has been registered, the more favor it will find with Bing. One may consider acquiring older domains to enhance the chances of being picked up by Bing.
Length of Text: For Bing, size does matter. So, ensure that your webpages have content of at least 300 words. The length of the text is more of a significant factor for Bing than it is for Google.
Link Out: Google alters your page rank based on the relevance of the link out webpages. Often, people are unsure of how a particular link out would impact their webpage and steer clear of this option. However, Bing likes link outs and increases the page ranking of those webpages that have more of them.
Title Tag of your Page: The title tag is of utmost importance for Bing. Without the relevant keyword in this area, your complete SEO efforts could be wasted.
Title Tags of Other Pages: When you link out from your page, ensure that the title tags of the pages you have linked out to have the keyword that is most relevant to your page. Bing simply loves this.
Link Popularity: Google is more fascinated with link popularity than Bing.
The author, Priya Nigam, is the Chief Content Development strategist in the organization.
June 18th, 2009 at 12:33 am
Thanks for the Tips Priya. Bing is not bad at all. I love the way image search works on Bing. Good work by Microsoft.
June 18th, 2009 at 1:04 am
Yes, I love the mouse-over effect for the image search on Bing. MS can surely do a better job with the maps, however. I think I need a little more time to grasp what bing can do for me as a “decision engine”…
June 18th, 2009 at 1:20 am
In my experience I find that Bing take a great importance of domain name. First results for a search is often a domain name composing with the terms of the search.
Don’t you think ?
June 19th, 2009 at 4:28 am
yaa Interesting update i think MS search engine (Bing) won’t catch Google but it’s very difficult because Bing’s results are way better than Yahoo’s but not up to Google’s standards yet.
June 20th, 2009 at 5:23 am
Interesting !!
I am not getting visits from bing but hope for the best in future
June 24th, 2009 at 3:48 am
Thanks for the tips. I am already getting visits from Bing, but obviously not as many as Google. I have never been very successful with Yahoo, but every bit counts.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:57 am
Interesting. I am getting as high as 6% of traffic from Bing on one of my sites, but the others are 3% or less. If age of domain is a big deal, not much one can do about that. How big a factor do you think linking out is? What kinds of tests have been done?
June 24th, 2009 at 5:41 am
Still early doors to measure any Bing efforts with any kind of accuracy but a lot of the usual rules still apply so we will see when their market share increases.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:33 am
This is one great idea though but I don’t know if everyone would love to use Bing as their “decision engine” for users are firstly introduced to Google, Yahoo and MSN and I don’t know if they would still need to transfer to another search engine. That’s the thing to decide though!
July 7th, 2009 at 1:55 am
This is excellent and will be much needed by people, from the sounds of it, its not that far from Google’s policy. can i just add one thing is that to get the right description on the SERP when it comes up you need to put a meta tag, other wise it comes from DMOZ. see here http://www.impactmedialtd.co.uk/blog/search-engine-optimisation-seo/seo-resources/bing-using-dmoz-description/.
Sorry if this comes across as spam, i don’t mean it to, just that its relevent
July 14th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
[...] Some bloggers noticed variations between Google’s SERPs and Bing’s SERPs and used that to guess about algorithmic differences between the two sites. While these initial studies were pseudo-scientific at best, they at least noted a difference and tried to identify which ranking factors were more important for a given search engine. [...]
August 6th, 2009 at 12:14 am
nicely presented and great tips for bing…im looking forward to this
August 12th, 2009 at 3:47 am
[...] Bing SEO from content is good. Writing about SEO, the article might link to other SEO sites like Veda Informatics, ReelSEO, etc. Also if talking about search engines then certainly link to them in the text will be [...]
September 14th, 2009 at 11:08 am
Tips on Bing are quite useful. For any SEO professional, these are quite handy.
October 29th, 2009 at 5:32 am
Thanks for the tips. I just checked my rankings in Bing and it looks like its time for me to tackle my SEO for this search engine!
November 4th, 2009 at 8:53 am
I’ve been using Bind since its release to help my clients (specially in the Travel area) and so far it’s been very successful. I guess the new kid on the block is doing a remarkable effort to compete strongly with Google. In the end, the big benefits are for us, since we have more options to choose from.
Awesome post. Keep up the great work!
http://www.localtraction.com
December 8th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Very well written. This is the kind of information that is useful to those want to increase their SERP’s. Keep up the good work.
January 8th, 2010 at 7:49 am
I think I should try it, Who knows it will increase visitors to my site.
January 26th, 2010 at 5:47 pm
Thanks for the list of Bing tips. Domain age and title make sense. But how did you determine that having at least 300 words is important, and why 300? jack
February 27th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
[...] ran across a few SEO Tips for Bing, and decided to expand upon them. In this article, I will post some tips that will help your web [...]