Until recently, optimising your website was pretty easy. Google is god, so optimise for Google, and that should also cover you for the other search engines as well, but who cares, because all your traffic comes from Google.
But is change afoot? Bing (formerly known as MSN, MS Live or simply Microsofts poor attempt at a search engine) is starting to grab market share.
After a huge marketing campaign, partner deals with the likes of Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter, Bings star seems to be on the rise.
Check your analytics, compare over the last 6 - 12 months, are you seeing an increase in Bing traffic? My Local Services has seen an increase of about 8%, so although not huge, its significant.
Don't worry about it too much, this may be one to watch, or you may find that if you optimise, you can rank for some great organic keywords in Bing, that you could only dream of in Google.
I've struggled for years to get any decent Microsoft traffic, so the rise in it must mean that the algorythm they are using must have changed, or I have made changes which have also worked for Bing.
But how do you optimise for Bing?
I found a good article detailing someones findings, and with all things SEO, it is speculative, so draw your own conclusions from your own stats, but I'll summarise their findings, and you can read the full article which backs up its findings at the bottom. But remember all the search engines, and especially Google update their search algorythms all the time, so expect plenty of changes in the future!
On Page SEO
eg H1 tags, canonical issues (does your site show as www and non www address)
Bings algorythm seems to weigh heavily compared to Google in onsite factors. In otherwords, Google is more forgiving if your onsite SEO has a few holes in it.
Domain Profile
eg domain age, number of indexed pages, server location/geographic location
These factors don't appear to be as important with Bing as they are with Google.
Keywords in Domain Name
Using targeted keywords in your domain names offers some strong advantages in Bing SEO compared to Google.
Link Analysis: Comparison of Off-site Related Factors
Google is known to rely strongly on link analysis and quality of links
To rank in Bing, you need more links using the targeted keywords in anchor text. The more exact, the greater will be the impact. You will need to concentrate on getting a high percentage of links that contain the targeted keywords in the anchor text.
But following the above approach will not necessarily give you a high ranking in Google, these factors are not considered "important" in Google link analysis, because Google's algorithm focuses heavily on the relevance, location and authority factors of the linking domain, and not just on the number of links.
For more detailed analysis, visit:
Bing SEO Analysis: A Comparison with Google Ranking Factors
Thanks for the intersting article and post. I defo need to look into this more
and Bing also has webmaster tools similar to google webmaster
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
Thanks. Very useful. I did a quick check. We rank higher on Bing than on Google. Our main site used to rank highest on Yahoo. Now we seemed to have lowest ranking on Yahoo. On some Google and Bing, come Page 1 for 2 important keywords. But on Yahoo, on several pages later. As far as I am concerned it creates another layer of complication. Ryan
Also did a quick check after reading this post and we rank one spot lower on bing than google for our homepage but some important keyword pages are listed page one on google and a few pages back for bing. Ah well, something more to keep me busy  , thanks for making me aware.
Interesting post, but still not getting many Bing hits?  Mark Pitts
Very interesting Steve thanks.. I would say it I agree with you. For example our latest site cloud4 Computers, has been live for 3 weeks and we have already been indexed, and over the last couple of days received 16 organic visits from Bing, Zero from Google as we're still not even indexed.. The other thing I have noticed about hits from Bing across our other company site is a dramatically lower bounce rate for the same pages than google. Average google bounce 54%, Bing 18.6%. Even if you factored in the additional volume form google the quality of hit from Bing seems to be far superior, long time one site, more pages per visit etc.. So Bing,, watch this space. Phil Cloud4
Just noticed that my recent blog on "can you smell Gas" and our "Page on how your swimming pool works" are both on the 1st page for Bing? Mark Pitts |
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