
Unless you haven’t paid attention to the world of search engines for months, you have probably heard of Microsoft Bing. Microsoft’s latest attempt to finally challenge Google in the search engine game. And by that, it is destined to complicate the game which we call search engine optimization. When Bing and Yahoo! join in the upcoming months, they are going to become the sole main challenger to Google, and if you are a marketer who makes a living out of search engine optimization, you are going to have to figure out how to show up on the first page of Bing for fairly generic terms. You can still dominate the long-tail market but getting ranked for highly competitive terms can be a challenge.
Danny Sullivan put it best when he talked about the differences between Google’s and Bing’s algorithms:
You’d effectively have two pages, one for Google and one for Bing
You may not see too many differences in results as far as highly competitive terms are concerned, but there are major differences for those keywords in the middle of the spectrum. Google does pay more attention to links whereas Bing pays more attention to content and tags. Both search engines still highly value having the exact keyword in a URL. But that’s never going to change.
Is Bing worth going after? I am not so sure. With the field of social media exploding the way it is, you are better off focusing on a long-term approach than something as fleeting as the Bing’s rankings. The best strategy to have is to figure out the common areas between Bing and Google algorithm and try to optimize in a way that strikes the right balance for both engines. But I have to choose two places to drive traffic to my website, they’d be Twitter and Google. Let’s not forget about Facebook either. (more…)






