Web Publishers: Are You Optimized for Bing?
Updated Aug. 17, 2010
The time has come to optimize your Web site for Bing. That’s because the long-awaited deal between Yahoo and Bing is in effect. Microsoft Advertising’s Tina Kelleher explains in a blog post today the change is underway. Initially, the change will take place on English-language Yahoo searches.
Why is optimizing for Bing important? In terms of market share, Yahoo and Bing are expected to combine for 30 percent – hence, the need to act.
Bing is powering the search for Yahoo. However, each will still have separate identities. You might recall that Yahoo and Bing signed the advertising deal for a 10-year duration.
This column originally quoted a Website Magazine report about the change. Website Magazine also suggests you check out Bing’s new webmaster tools.
The magazine 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.
“It also indicated that Yahoo! hopes to migrate its paid-search ads to Microsoft’s adCenter by the beginning of the 2010 holiday season, but that it may wait until the start of 2011 to take that action,” states Website Magazine.
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, to save time from having to review other linking sites, I simply don’t allow back links with a Google Page Rank of less than 3. Even then, I do check to see the site’s focus before allowing it to back 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 in place for four weeks.
- Bing is very cognizant of social media. The more relevant social media you have, the better. Twitter and Facebook are good. Despite what you’ve read about sharing blogs on Digg.com, Digg is still a player. LinkedIn is terrific.
On a side note: If you want to reach professionals — LinkedIn is outstanding — if you participate on a frequent basis. LinkedIn members respond well to good content, especially if you introduce your content with a question. Actually, LinkedIn provides this Web site with more visitors than Google.
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, if you’re launching a new Web site, try to use HTML. That will help you make faster progress than you will with a blog format, such as WordPress. Google gives more preference to HTML, especially if you want to be inserted in Google News. WordPress simply will take you a little longer for success.
Here are some other basic pointers: Startup Toolkit – How to Make a Hit on the Internet.
