Bing SEO

Now that Yahoo’s search results have started to be powered by Microsoft’s Bing search technology, is it time to take a less Googlecentric approach to your search engine optimisation and investigate ways that SEO can be deployed for Yahoo/Bing too?

With the Yahoo/Bing alliance equating to a not insubstantial 30% of the search market, perhaps now is the time to start paying serious consideration to Bing’s search algorithms and to look at ways in which you can develop a Bing SEO strategy alongside your existing Google SEO. In other words, can any company serious about their SEO now afford to only have eyes for Google?

Of course there are similarities as well as differences. For example it seems that Bing places more value on a website’s home page compared to inner website pages. Google tens to see value though out a site more. Bing has slightly more accurate geolocation results and as opposed to having news crawled by Google bots you need to manually submit it to Bing by email if you want to be included.

Rather than get bogged down in a SEOmoz dissection of the comparative functionality and data though, perhaps it’s best to take a step back and consider what both are really trying to achieve. Instead of trying to evaluate technical solutions to strong placements, to see SEO an engineering assignment or a code that needs breaking – consider this – what is Google, or Bing or any other search engine for that matter attempting to achieve? What is their core service?

They all demand relevance – to deliver what users want – user experience is their life blood.

If you take this fundamental as your starting point and do your best to build a site that putting user experience before anything else then you are creating the sort of site that both Google and Bing wants to see gracing their top search positions.

Sure, there are tactical aspects to your SEO that you need to sort out with your SEO partner, but fundamentally the advice is to not chase strong search profile. Give your visitors a great user experience and actually get the search engines working for you.