Are You Listed On Bing Search? You Should Be!

For a long time now search engine opti­miza­tion has almost entirely been focused on Google. The rea­son is because Google com­mands the largest share of the search traf­fic market.

That's start­ing to change some,though. Bing is at the point now that it's worth focus­ing some of your SEO efforts toward it.  Especially if your mar­ket is for searchers in the United States.

The Bing search engine respon­si­ble for 30% of all U.S. based searches. It's split about evenly between Yahoo (which,believe it or not,is now Bing-powered) and the Bing.com web site.

Prior to the Bing tak­ing over Yahoo's search traf­fic,it really wasn't worth time or effort to rank in Yahoo and Bing. The SEO meth­ods involved for rank­ing in them were dif­fer­ent,and some­times con­tra­dicted each other. So I always designed my SEO efforts to rank in Google and if that got me some­where with Yahoo and Bing,all the bet­ter. But if Yahoo and Bing rank­ings didn't work out… no big deal.

But now it's 30% on the Bing engine!  That's worth putting some time into. So it's time to start doing some extra work to get sites to rank in Bing now. Let's take a look at how to do that.

So how do you get your web­site ranked in Bing? The good news is that is a lot of over­lap between what you need to do for Google rank­ings and what you need to do for Bing. So many of the things you do for Google will lift all boats so to speak.

A cou­ple of things are dif­fer­ent which you should take note of.

1. Bing prefers links in the body of web­pages and blog post.

To get trac­tion for Google the main thing you have to do is build links.  The more the bet­ter. Links from high author­ity sites even count more,so page rank plays a fac­tor in the value you get from the mass of links that you build. Google want to see links and lots of them.

Bing,on the other hand,does place some value on all types of links,but the links that Bing val­ues the most are links that appears within a block of con­tent. This means Bing places a higher value for links within the content-portion of web pages and the text of arti­cles and blog posts. Think of like this.  If your links are attached to things like arti­cles and blog com­ments,that's one thing. But if your links are in the body (main con­tent) or a web­page,that means that peo­ple are not just "refer­ring" to your site,but they are talk­ing (writ­ting) about your site. Hey,that would carry more weight with me too!

So to rank in Bing you need to put more focus links com­ing from within blog post and arti­cles. The good part of this is that even when you are con­cen­trat­ing on rank­ing in the Bing search engine,all of these addi­tional links you will also help your rank­ings in Google. It's just that you have to con­cen­trate on get­ting bet­ter links.

2. Keyworded,Exact-match domain names count more in Bing.

The value of exact-match domain names has never been a mat­ter for debate,even for try­ing to rank in Google. They serve to give your site,even a brand new one,a head start. It will help your rank­ings out a tremen­dously to have the domain name "austincustomhomebuilder.com" or .org to get you rank­ing for that key­word phrase. Even if you have to use dashes and a pre­fix or suf­fix on it,it is bet­ter than hav­ing that key­word phrase in the title tag only. So if you're want­ing to start a new site or add a mini-network to your exist­ing site,it would be bet­ter to pickup a domain name match­ing the exact set of pri­mary key­words you want to rank for.

3. Placing more con­tent on each page you want to have rank.

It appears Bing wants to see more con­tent than Google does. With Google,you can rank an almost empty page if you have enough links point­ing to it. Bing,on the other hand,favors content-rich sites and you will be hard pressed to find good rank­ings for the aver­age "squeeze page," even if they are linked out the wahzoo.

So one plan of action to rank well in Bing is to make your pages con­tent rich and make sure that your site con­tains a lot of related con­tent that you can link to intra-page. That's right,links from one page to another,even within your own web­site is still a link!  So be sure to do that.

Getting "in con­tent" links to your site is prob­a­bly the best route to take for rank­ing higher in Bing. Ranking in the search engines is all about the links you have to any given page. The major dif­fer­ence between Google and Bing how­ever is that with Bing you have to get cer­tain kinds of links (which does NO HARM with Google as well! )

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