We all know about Bing and their “Decision Engine” technology to perform their ranking results but do you really need to care? At first I thought it was a little cheesy and figured it was the same old thing that Microsoft spun out when they launched Live, but there is something to it with the increase of market share Bing is receiving and the Yahoo merger on the horizon I think it is time to rethink my initial thoughts.
Bing Gaining Market Share
Hitwise shows Bing gaining share for the third straight month, and its 9.7% share of searches in February was up 4% over its January numbers:
Bing Market Share on the rise
Most SEO’s think of Google when performing Search Engine Optimization and how to achieve a higher amount of referral traffic from Google but there is still a lot of traffic from Yahoo and Bing to get and the world of SEO is changing fast.
Decision Engine Optimization
Marketing hype aside, the majority of SEO techniques used for Google applies to Bing in terms of optimizing your web site. The difference is how Bing decides the search results and for us SEO’s that’s all that matters really.
Like I mentioned before, both search engines are going to reward web sites that have quality and relevance in the forefront. Bing is also a tickler for spam and black hat SEO practices. Crawling is done similar to Live Search and usage of MSN’s Webmaster Central is a great way to initiate and monitor this. So as I preach about having your Google Webmaster Tools account, I say the same for Bing and MSN Webmaster Central.
Difference in Search Results
Overall the search results are different between Google and Bing. A comparison search for a very popular phrase, “car insurance”, really shows off the difference between the two engines. Bing offers additional results that correspond to the SERP categories that they display on the left hand side. This really gives the visitor a more targeted, relevant, and accurate result set and helps SEO marketers as they only need to optimize for a category and not a specific phrase. The jury is still out on this but the theory is that decision engine results will also provide a a higher quality visitor that will convert more. I tend to agree with this theory as I have seen MSN search traffic convert higher as a whole than the other major search engines on both paid and organic listings.
Next Steps
I think what you need to evaluate is how your current site (s) are ranking in Bing. If you are seeing good placement I would be hands off as the Bing Gods are smiling upon you. If not, then I would invest in link building heavily as Bing really loves quality links (and what engine doesn’t right?). Use your Bing Webmaster Central to find the incoming links Bing is seeing and how they view the site from a keyword perspective. Microsoft also has a real nice SEO toolset to use. The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators to improve their Web site’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make the site content more search engine-friendly. The IIS SEO Toolkit includes the Site Analysis module, the Robots Exclusion module, and the Sitemaps and Site Indexes module, which let you perform detailed analysis and offer recommendations and editing tools for managing your Robots and Sitemaps files. You will need a computer running windows to run the toolset but it can analyze any site. I think if you continue to produce good quality content and dive links into your site(s), you should be good to go for optimization of any kind.
{ 0 comments }
