Bing and Search Engine Optimisation

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has been out for a little while now. From the start, businesses held their breath to see how the search engine would affect their SEO strategy. Of course, no SEO strategy should be for one search engine alone, particularly one whose percentage of the search engine market is still doubtful. As months go by, however, sites are starting to take the new kid on the block into consideration.

So, what’s important for Bing? Bing is not that much different from Google and the old MSN Live Search. Reputation of a site is still important, as are links, and good content is still key to success.

The search engine seems to count the age of a domain as something to be desired. This is good news for anyone who has been on the net for a while, and not terrible news for everyone else. Purchasing domain names with an established positive history has been a way that some companies have improved their site’s chances in the past. It looks like, for Bing at least, this will continue to be a good technique.

Text appears to be important to Bing. Most design guidelines suggest you place between 250 and 750 words of text on your pages, but the new search engine seems to rank sites with the upper limit of text higher. In the same line, Bing places importance on nicely relevant titles, so keeping your title on-topic is important. Sadly, this could mean goodbye to witty headlines, but such is the world of SEO.

One thing that seems very different with Bing is that it favours sites with outbound links. When people have optimised for Google in the past, they have worried that too many outbound links will lower their ranking.

Strangely enough, at the same time as Google gears its searches up for real-time search and increasingly recognises the importance of blogs and social media in its results, Bing seems to devalue these things. Blogs seem to have a hard time ranking high on Bing’s SERPs.

As time rolls on, of course, Bing’s focus will necessarily change. The agreement between Yahoo! and Microsoft to power the former with Bing means that the search engine is being exposed to an even bigger market share. The real popularity of the new search engine is still uncertain, but if it becomes as popular as Microsoft hopes, tweaks to the algorithm are due in the near future.

There are some people in the SEO community who question whether Microsoft can cope with the search engine optimisation pressure. Google, which has been the focus of SEO attention for years, is able to effectively deal with the black hat techniques that will inevitably spring up. With a new approach to search, Microsoft will face different issues.

Although Google is naturally the main contender in the search engine stakes, many businesses are keeping a watchful eye on Bing’s development.