Web Publishers: Are You Optimized for Bing?

 

Updated March 7, 2012

The time has come to optimize your Web site for Bing. Bing is generally recognized for leapfrogging over Yahoo in search market share – it has a 16 percent share compared to Yahoo’s 14 share. So with Bing powering Yahoo’s search as a result of their marketing partnership, it’s important to optimize for Bing so you don’t miss out on 30 percent of the Internet. (Yes, Google, has 65 percent share. The remaining 5 percent is held by several smaller less-known search engines, which are powered by Google.)

Bing and Yahoo continue to maintain separate identities. You might recall that Yahoo and Bing signed the advertising deal for a 10-year duration.

Website Magazine originally reported the change, and Website Magazine also suggested you check out Bing’s new webmaster tools.

The magazine also reported an alert by Yaho0 to optimize for Bing “…if organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website.”

You know what? Success in organic search listings is indeed noticed by most Internet users.

In my experience, Bing has kept its promise to improve its method of organizing searches compared to MSN. The navigation has proved to be easy. While it’s similar to Google in many ways, personally, I’ve found it to be a great search experience.

Moreover, it’s fairly easy to optimize your site for good placement on Bing.

Here’s a checklist:

• Make sure you add your site to Bing. It has a dashboard for analysis of your summary, profile, links, keywords, site map and crawl issues. Don’t forget to add your site to Bing’s Local Listing Center.
• Like Google, Bing more easily recognizes domain age. Both recognize title tags and keywords for your content.
• Unlike Google, Bing is not as concerned about the quality of back links as it is anchor text. But my sense is great content attracts great links. (In my SEO work for clients, I simply don’t allow back links from sites with a Google Page Rank of less than 3. Even then, I do check to see the site’s focus before allowing it to link to my client.)
• Be extra careful with your content, especially the headlines and blog summaries. Bing has a great feature, a document preview, which is a text box that shows up next to your mentions on Bing – the verbiage is copied from your site.
• As both Bing and Google pay homage to flash with stronger prominence, be sure to consider inserting such videos.
• Bing is far more amenable to publishing quality press releases than Google, which accelerate your success. Here’s a sample from Bing News of how some of my press releases appear. They’re usually in place for four weeks.
• Bing is very cognizant of social media. For B2B sites, concentrate on LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter and Facebook. Bing powers the search for Facebook. Unlike Google, Bing shows updates of tweets from Twitter. The more relevant social media you have, the better. Despite what you’ve read about sharing blogs on Digg.com, Digg is still a player.

To summarize, it’s important not to dismiss the potential of Bing. Bing is attractive and is doing a good job. You’ll find it to be a fairly simple process to optimize for Bing.

From the Coach’s Corner, here’s a startup toolkit – how to make a tit on the Internet.

“The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.”

-Dave Barry

 

__________

Columnist Terry Corbell is also a business-performance consultant and profit professional. Click here to see his management services (many are available online). For a complimentary chat about your business situation or to schedule Terry Corbell as a speaker, why don’t you contact him today?