How To SEO Your Site For Bing

How To SEO Your Site For Bing

Bing SEO TipsIt’s a bit early since Bing was launched, in terms of figuring out how to SEO your site. After all, like Google, Microsoft isn’t exactly going to publish white papers and big how-to manuals that may expose their algorithm. Like Google, lots of SEO’s like me will need to shift their daily tasks to include additional efforts testing and examining this new Search Engine, dubbed a ‘Decision Engine‘. Floating around the industry some are already calling the optimization for Bing, DEO (Decision Engine Optimization), whether that’s a joke that will die off, we’ll soon see.

Microsoft + Yahoo! Equals One Search Engine

As you are probably aware, Microsoft and Yahoo have partnered up to combine forces against Google. More importantly, Yahoo! will be using the Bing search engine all across Yahoo’s Web Properties, ditching their own engine by selling it to Microsoft.  Historically, most SEO’s optimize primarily for Google first, knowing that much of that work will translate to Yahoo! and Bing results as well. After all it doesn’t make sense to spend 80% of your time working for something that may net you only 6% (Bing) or 9% (Yahoo!) return.

Once this new “Mic-Hoo” partnership is fully integrated, Bing will have an immediate market share of at least 15% and perhaps as much as 30% (depending who you speak with) once the full roll out is completed and Bing continues to gain steam. This will undoubtedly force industry folks to stand up, take notice and give Microsoft some due props for being innovative and not laying down to continue being steam-rolled.

Microsoft & Yahoo History

Just an interesting little history lesson in search…
Way back in 1997, Microsoft didn’t have a search index and announced a partnership with Inktomi Corp. (anyone remember them?), who at that time was considered a “search-technology leader”. You can read the full press release here, Microsoft Joins With Inktomi to Provide Comprehensive Search Capabilities for Microsoft Online Properties
Wow, 1997…  Back then Inktomi claimed to have indexed 75 million web documents. The next year, in late 1998 Google opened it’s doors and almost exactly one year ago, Google announces it has reached 1 Trillion indexed pages.

In 2002, Yahoo! purchased Inktomi.  For Microsoft, what a kick in the teeth to have a major competitor purchase one of their most important vendors. This is what prompted Microsoft/Bing to start work on their own search engine. Now Microsoft buys Yahoo’s search engine!

Optimizing For Bing

Bing’s Whitepapers

ON June 1, Microsoft released the whitepapers for Bing. Of note, is the following that was said in relation to SEO.

What do I need to do for SEO with Bing?
All of the benefits from these enhancements are available to websites that invest in SEO. Webmasters can help their websites get more visitor traffic by helping Bing best represent their content to searchers in our SERPs. Webmasters can easily do this by adding unique titles and meta descriptions to each page. If webmasters don’t provide search engines with good, keyword-oriented, well-written caption source data, the resulting captions created by algorithm, no matter how hard we try, won’t represent your website as well as those websites whose webmasters did provide this unique and important data.

The use of consistent data structures between pages on your website (such as placing similar data between pages using a similar tree structure, similar class names, support standard markup technologies, such as microformats, etc.) will also help improve the effectiveness of our crawler, which puts more of your content into our index.

Best of all, the type of SEO work and tasks webmasters need to perform to be successful in Bing haven’t changed—all of the skills and knowledge that webmasters have invested in previously applies fully today with Bing. Moreover, investments in solid, reputable SEO work made for Bing will bring similar improvements in your website’s page rank in Google and Yahoo! as well.

Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design.

What Do You Need To Take Out Of This?

The good news is that we don’t have to completely over-haul how we do SEO with regards to Bing.

With Bing being so new, ultimately how we look at SEO’ing for Bing will change however, I’ve had a chance to do some preliminary testing, and you will notice that many of the SEO techniques we use for Google also apply to Bing, so here are some findings.

1. Keywords in URLS

Bing seems to like keywords in the url, whether it’s part of the domain name or a page name

2. Domain Age

How old a domain name is seems to be a factor here. So if you are planning to launch a new website/domain any time soon, you may consider purchasing an existing domain.

3. Titles & Meta Description

The title tag, as well as meta description appear to be a big factor in SERP weighting, so make sure you are crafting unique, relevant title tags and meta descriptions.

4. Linking Inbound & Outbound

Much like Google, inbound links especially with relevant anchor text seems to be well liked. In regards to Outbound links, there are plenty of mind-sets when it comes to Google. Many feel that outbound links should be avoided since it will leak PR (PageRank), however, i have the opposite sentiment, in that if the outbound link supports your web page, and is relevant then you should do it, and Bing agrees. Just don’t over-due the outbound linking.

5. No Love For Blogs?

I am hearing that Bing doesn’t seem to have the same kind of love for blogs, as Google does. More research will be needed before i can quantify this.

Stay tuned for my next Blog, where we explore Bing’s user interface.

It's a competitive market. Contact us to learn how you can stand out from the crowd.

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10 Comments

  • avatar

    I used all these steps before reading your article. And result is I can’t understand what Bing follows because several blogs made in one rule are placed on different positions.

  • avatar

    I read somewhere Bing ignores meta tags as well. Is it True?
    Colin says : “The title tag, as well as meta description appear to be a big factor in SERP weighting, so make sure you are crafting unique, relevant title tags and meta descriptions.”
    How important are keywords and meta tags for Bing?

  • avatar
    Jomer Gregorio 

    on 

    I love bing and yahoo. I am number one on their searches for my main keyword. But in google. I am only no. 2. I tried my best to create solid backlinks with high PR rank website but I am still no 2. and google hasn’t already indexed my blog that I installed with in my domain.

  • avatar

    We have some good rankings in a series of search queries in google but not found anywhere on Bing 🙁
    This sounds very strange, Bing has different algorithmic spiders.

  • avatar

    Thanks for the comments:
    @Jim – Haven’t you heard the news? In the Yahoo/Microsoft deal, Bing will be the search provider for all Yahoo properties, which effectively means Yahoo search will no longer exist.
    This instantly makes Bing #2 and we will have to take notice.
    @UK Webmaster – I tend to agree that Bing has a slight edge with on-page over in bound linking. Bing cares about anchor text, but doesn’t utilize the same kind of PR weighting that big G does

  • avatar

    Nice post! According to this article optimizing for Bing does have much difference expect for them not loving blogs, google loves blogs because its usually updated often.
    However, i think Bing does put more weight on on page optimization compare to google and backlinks are of less importance to the SE compare to google.
    Compare the first few results in Bing and Google, it will be noticed that all the first sites that rank high in Bing have less backlinks than that in Google search result.

  • avatar

    Nice post
    Just curious why you would want to SEO for Bing? They have no market share at all compared to Y! or G. SEOing for Google is where it’s at.

  • avatar

    Very relevant post!
    I have one concern though. What will be the fate of the sites that had a good ranking in Yahoo! How will Bing treat them?

  • avatar

    As far as I see it SEO and good rankings have much to do with using your common sense. People search for products/ services using certain key phrases and if these very terms are found prominently in some websites and the topic dealt with in detail by using relevant content, I see no reason why search engines should think differently. It applies equally well to all search engines. Linking is important. But what ultimately matters is good relevant content found in titles, descriptions, headings, text etc.

  • avatar

    Great post and relieved to know that webmaster’s who have already optimized their sites for google doesn’t have to spend any time to get listed in bing. Bing&Google will show results in both Bing and Google in separate frames. Now let’s wait and see the online war – Search engine vs. Decision engine.

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