With the pairing of Bing and Yahoo (which could amount to 30% of search market share), businesses can no longer gear their SEO towards Google alone. In this post we’ll look at some of the key differences in the way Bing ranks pages, compared to the old favourite Google.
Keywords Meta Tag
Bing seems to place some value with keywords meta tags, while Google overtly states they are not used in its algorithm. Most will choose to ignore the meta keyword tag unless Bing is of particular interest to them, but it’s worth noting their market share is increasing (albeit with a slight hiccup last month). Many SEO specialists have relegated the keywords meta tag to the history books, but some tests have suggested that their absence can significantly reduce a site’s visibility on Bing. They do not take long to implement, so we recommend that webmasters do so.
SEO For Bing
The ‘more on this page’ feature (appearing to the right of listing), which displays a tract of text from a given listed page (not the meta description) is one new aspect of Bing that should be optimised. As the search term being used is highlighted in this Ajax pop up, it is worth considering which piece of on-page text is likely to appear here, as it could attract more traffic if relevant.
Back Links
Bing does not appear to place quite as much weight on back-links as Google, which is arguably one of the most challenging aspects of SEO. Having said this, back links are still extremely important as regards Bing; high quality, relevant inbound links should be sought continually.
Relevant URLs
URLs comprising highly relevant words currently appear to do better with Bing. For example, a shoe retailer with a domain called “international-shoe-seller.com” will do well. If a domain has been in existence for a long time then it will also rank better on Bing. Putting so much emphasis on these factors suggests Bing may be slightly less focused on content than Google.
Bing Webmaster Center
Bing’s Webmaster Center (similar to Google’s Webmaster Central) will assist you in optimising for Bing. Bing’s Guidelines for Successful Indexing advises on technical and content issues, and highlights problems that can affect your site’s ranking. You should register all your sites with Bing’s Webmaster Tools. Additionally, the Bing Webmaster Blog is particularly good for keeping up to date on Bing SEO developments.
SEO Friendly Content
While there are distinct differences between Bing and Google, there is a significant amount of cross-over in terms of optimising for all search engines. High quality, unique content, moderately peppered with keywords is a must. As with Google, well architected pages also improve your site’s chance of ranking well on Bing – utilising sitemaps and images to their fullest extent.
The algorithm that Bing uses now will no doubt be modified over time in order to improve the relevancy of results. Relevancy will of course remain the major focus for both search engines. Crucially, the algorithms of both Bing and Google are constantly being updated, and so what is true today may not be true tomorrow.
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