SEO tips for Bing

Think you have a good SEO strategy for Google? You better adapt it for Bing

Following yesterday’s news that Microsoft’s Bing is gaining share on Google (its searches are up 7% for October), I thought I’d look into the company’s stance on search engine optimization (SEO) – you know, now that people are flocking to the site.

Microsoft’s stance on SEO doesn’t appear to be all that different from Google’s, however, users won’t get the same results on both Google and Bing, which is how to two can coexist in the first place.

The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy. Remember that Microsoft’s Bing is the “decision engine”.

Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam.

In a white paper for webmasters, Microsoft says: “There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing. However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog.”

Bing separates results into categories, which has so far worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up.

Bing also has the explore pane, which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google’s recent addition of “search options.”

Look at the keyword phrases you want to rank for, and see how Bing breaks it up. Let’s say “mobile phones” for example. Bing gives you categories like shopping, brands, buying guide, providers, accessories, images, videos, and local.

With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the results, it’s about getting to the top of the right set of results. Having quality and relevant content is the best thing you can do. Incidentally, this will probably help your cause in Google (and other search engines) at the same time.

“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,” says Microsoft, as quoted on Webpronews.com.

Curious About What Bing Looks for in Links?

Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently posted a pair of blog posts looking at what makes some links good and some bad:

- If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to them

- Don’t seek links from sites whose content isn’t worthy of your endorsement.

- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)

- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links

- Avoid “bad neighbourhoods” like dedicated domains or IP ranges that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges.

- Avoid hidden text

So that’s where Microsoft stands on SEO practices. Remember that when you are thinking about SEO and how to rank higher, the rules as they were set out on Google when we first starting talking about SEO have changes. Search engine marketing is about to become a whole lot more complicated.