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Bing although still relatively new is gaining market share from Google (searches for October were up 7%) and as a result it is important to understand the changes needed to an SEO strategy to ensure you are well placed on this search engine as well.
Bing has different algorithms from Google but even so they both still look for good content which is in context and relevant links so it is not so much that they search differently but that they display their results differently which is the important difference.
Bing separates searches into categories, so in essence it is not just important to get to the top of the results for a given search string but to get to the top of the correct category as well. You will need to look at the keyword phrases you want to be ranked highly for and see how Bing breaks these up. For example mobile phones is broken into categories such a shopping, buying guides, providers, accessories, brands etc. and you should therefore write content to maximise on the correct category and not just on mobile phones. This is not a lot different than the recent addition of search options on Google and like all things whilst it may mean more work is required to achieve success it gives more opportunity to be on page 1 on searches that are relevant to you and your site and not to be lost in the frequent jungle that occurs in some sectors at the moment.
In a white paper, Microsoft says: “There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing. However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog.”
In my opinion there are changes required but these will only help fosuc your mind on where you want your site to appear and as a result this will also help with your listing on Google and other search engines 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,” says Microsoft, as quoted on Webpronews.com.
The above statement confirms my thoughts as well, searches will need to be more refined and defined as the internet gets more and more crowded otherwise search results will start to become non relevant and this is of no use to anyone.
Rick DeJarnette of Bing recently posted a Blog that gives clues as to what Bing regards as good and bad links so bear these in mind when devising your strategy. In summary he suggests the following but see the blog for greater detail.
- If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to it
- Don’t seek links from sites whose content isn’t worthy of your endorsement.
- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)
- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links
- Avoid receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known “bad neighborhoods” on the Web
- Avoid hidden text
In conclusion therefore you will need to assess your SEO strategy and if you are not already concentrating on ensuring your techniques are oriented towards helping users then you should be as these are ultimately far more effective than doing SEO specifically for search engine crawlers.
If you need help or have not yet got a sound strategy then let us know and we will be more than happy to help you.
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