SEO for Bing
Lately there’ve been a lot of questions about Search Engine Optimization for Microsoft’s new search engine Bing.com. Microsoft is heavily promoting Bing as a “decision engine” (as opposed to a search engine) that can help users cut through “search overload” to find what they’re looking for, and organizations want to make sure that they’re listed among the top results when users search for the products they’re selling or the services they offer.
The good news is that SEO for Bing is nothing new. The majority of Microsoft’s magic is actually in how results are displayed and organized, rather than how information is found and ranked. The basic theory is the same: a ‘bot’ crawls the web reading and cataloging millions of pages. When a user performs a search, Bing serves up sites that are deemed ‘more relevant’ based on a mathematical algorithm. Bing.com is new, but its algorithm is actually a tweaked version of Microsoft’s old search tool “Live.com,” and optimizing a page for Bing isn’t much different than optimizing for Google and other search engines.
Microsoft’s thoughts on Bing SEO
Microsoft actually answers the question of Bing’s SEO impact head-on in its white paper, “Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters white paper”. According to the Bing team, “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… 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.”
Microsoft does highlight some of the differences that might change how sites rank – and consequently how SEO experts will have to work with sites:
- Bing makes it easier to compete for broad terms, because it surfaces more categories automatically, increasing the number of results on the page.
- Keyword searches are presented with Quick Tabs that present branches of the parent keyword. This surfaces many websites that rank highly for those keyword combinations.
- Multi-threaded [search engine results page] design surfaces many more pages that will be associated with the searcher’s primary keywords than would have surfaced in a single-threaded [search engine results page] list.
- Bing removes duplicate results from categorized results lists, which allows other, lower ranked pages to be shown in the categorized results on its [search engine results page].
Essentially, according to Microsoft, the category listings should enable more pages to make it to the top. Sorting out duplicates, for example, and suggesting related search terms or more specific variations of a search term should help niched sites rise to the top.
SEO Process
This actually highlights one of the best parts of G.1440’s SEO process – research! Search Engines keep their algorithms under tighter security than the Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices, and rather than guessing what factors might impact search ranking, we specifically compare hundreds of characteristics of your site to the sites that are currently getting top results for the terms you want. By evaluating the sites that are currently positioned where you want to be, we’re able to identify the SEO factors that actually have an impact for any given search term on any given search engine – Bing included.