don't ignore Bing when planning your SEO

[HunkyLuke]

I found a good article about SEO and how Bing is being ignored entirely, which is a bad move as Bing is actually increasing in popularity and can provide you with good traffic.

The article also goes on to quote a study saying "Bing users are 11 percent more likely to buy than Google users, and 31 percent more likely to purchase than the web's general user". Add that to the fact that Microsoft is investing heavily in Bing, plus installing it as the default search engine for Internet Explorer users and toolbar searches, and you have a solid reason to keep Bing in mind when you are doing your SEO.

So how can you optimise for Bing? Here's what they suggest:

So what's it take to rank in Bing? Hearken back about 4 years to the old Google, it's pretty much the same (with a few important differences).

General SEO Approach for Bing

* Consistency: Ensure the signals are pointing in the same direction. URL structure and canonicalization, internal linking, rel=canonical tags, XML sitemaps, robots exclusions, should all follow canonical standards for your site.

* Efficiency: Enable compression and http conditional GET with If-Modified-Since to give the crawler a break. (Bingbot supercedes msnbot, but the latter should still be used in robots.txt and elsewhere redundantly with bingbot until officially deprecated.) Microsoft has a handy tool for checking both compression and conditional get requests.

* Quality: Have high-quality content. Don't try to squeak by with thin content and lots of authority pushed through the link profile.

* Links: While I hate to say it, Bing's engine certainly appears susceptible to link spam. Not a good thing, and I'm not advocating anyone follow the path of paid links, but they sadly seem to work all too well on Bing today.

Specific SEO Tactics for Bing

* Bing makes strong use of XML sitemaps (especially for large sites). Keep them up to date and use an index file to centralize multiple files. Use canonical URLs and ensure product-level URLs are included (or article-level if a publishing site). Any deep content should have explicit, canonical URLs defined in a XML sitemap file for Bing.

* For publishers, use a centralized RSS page featuring all new and updated content. Ensure this page is featuring canonical URLs that are relevant for the site. This is the best way to let Bing know about your fresh content.

* Parameter handling is the best way to deal with URL normalization for Bing, since 301s are problematic and rel=canonical isn't yet supported. The parameter handling tool in Bing Web Tools is your friend, use it.

You can read this full article at http://searchenginewatch.com/3641615

[zBUCKzDanny]

Thanks Luke! Interesting indeed. It will be interesting to see if they can compete with Google. Have they now taken a larger market share then Yahoo?

[nickbaer]

I just checked, and BING has a lot of mine. After having spent time with Google Analytics, I suppose now we need to spend more time with BING. I've lost track of Yahoo.

[HunkyLuke]

The last official stats I can find online are from Sept, they say:
Google Sites 65.4
Yahoo Sites 17.4
Microsoft Sites 11.1
Ask Network 3.8
AOL Network 2.3

It looks like these get published mid-month every 2 months, so hopefully we will see new stats next week for Nov.

[archer]

The last official stats I can find online are from Sept, they say:
Google Sites 65.4
Yahoo Sites 17.4
Microsoft Sites 11.1
Ask Network 3.8
AOL Network 2.3

It looks like these get published mid-month every 2 months, so hopefully we will see new stats next week for Nov.

are these seo market share numbers? (i've been meaning to look those up).
if they are i'm surprised that yahoo is still second. i thought that bing would have been a (distant) second.

[HunkyLuke]

yes they are % market share usage as of Sept 2010.