Bing and SEO – The Game is Always Changing
What is this Bing you speak of?
With the recent release of Microsoft’s “decision engine” Bing, there’s a new player in town. The goal behind Bing is to assist searchers with excessive amounts of information by simplifying and organizing search results. Bing as a “decision engine” exists to allow users to make decisions more quickly and easily. Microsoft reportedly spent around $100 Million Dollars on the Bing marketing campaign, so it may make sense to pay attention to it.
How does it compare?
Statcounter reported on June 4th that Bing accounted for just over 16% of the United States search market, beating Yahoo at about 10%. Google is still king with over 70%, but it’s important to consider that those results were within days of it’s general release. Looking at the data now shows that Bing has dropped to about 7.8%, while Yahoo has remained at 10%. Google is now back up to almost 80%, where they’ve historically lived. This graph shows it all:
Tips to optimizing your site for Bing
It’s important to understand that Bing looks at several important areas when crawling your site:
Title Tags: Critical importance for your pages, High importance for other pages. Bing relies on this to “categorize” pages, and if done well, your page could become the only result.
Domain Age: Bing really factors in domain age: older is better. You may want to think about acquiring older domains if available.
Content: If you think Content is King on Google, it’s even more important on Bing. The recommended length of content is 300 words or more.
Links: Bing likes outbound links, but doesn’t seem to care much about link popularity when compared to Google.
– Andrew Vick
Director of Sales & Marketing