Optimizing for Bing – SEO after Search Alliance

As I mentioned in my previous post (Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance), the alliance is well on its way. Some Bing results have already started to show up on Yahoo particularly in US.  As a result of the testing,  some sites have seen fluctuations on their rankings.

The search alliance also impacts organic search (web, image and video). Microsoft will be responsible for the platform serving organic search used by both companies (Yahoo & Microsoft).

It is possible that the current ranking of your site on Yahoo changes when Yahoo’s organic search results are powered by Bing. Once the transition occurs, your ranking will be largely based on how Bing indexes and ranks your website for a particular search query.  Though there might be some adjustments on the way, the current Bing search results are a good indicator of how your site may rank on Yahoo! after the transition.

Comparing your organic keyword rankings on Yahoo and Bing will help you gauge the possibility of rise or drop in your organic traffic after the transition is fully in place. If rankings are doing better in Bing than in Yahoo, then there should be a rise in traffic and lower if your ranking is currently doing better in Yahoo.

Bing’s crawler is scheduled to come out of beta in October and will be re-branded as bingbot replacing msnbot.  Bingbot will still honor directives the same way msnbot does. Nevertheless, the main objective of this move is to improve crawling efficiency and increase the number of documents being crawled by Bing.

Given the fact that moving forward the combined traffic of Yahoo and Bing will account for almost 30% of the search market share, SEO consultants cannot ignore Bing as a rounding error anymore.  SEO specialists need to pay more attention to how their sites rank on Bing and take the necessary actions to ensure they improve their visibility. Some of the actions that can be taken are:

Create XML sitemaps for your web properties and submit through your Bing Webmaster Tools account.
Expand your link building campaigns for your important pages in your web properties. Make sure you create link baits to get more deep links.

SEO for Bing, in most part, works with Google SEO best practices. Nevertheless, in the next few months, Bing Webmaster Tools will be web marketers best friend. They need to create their webmaster account with Microsoft if not already in place, submit XML sitemaps, run diagnostics and examine performance indicators.

You might need to adjust your pay per click campaigns so that you deal with the traffic shift. In another post I will cover the impact of the merger of Microsoft and Yahoo search results on PPC campaigns.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization • SEO