I think too many webmasters focus all their resources and efforts into optimizing their site for Google and they forget that they could increase their traffic with less effort if they spent some time optimizing for the other search engines. The big two I’m thinking of are Bing and Yahoo. Bing has a great Webmaster Toolbox and that’s why I’m going to explain how you can easily to some basic optimization for Bing.
When you visit Bing and do a search you’ll notice that results are relevant, but they are very different from the results in Google. Google and Bing have algorithms that are different enough to show many different results for the same searches. We’ll go over some of those factors, but first you should make sure Bing can find your pages.
When you first log in to the Bing Toolbox, you should go to the Crawl tab and select Sitemaps on the sidebar navigation. I think it’s more important to submit a sitemap to Bing than it is to submit a sitemap to Google because I’ve had problems with Bing indexing. You will want to make sure that all of your pages are in Bing’s index before you do any other optimization, so go ahead and submit your sitemaps. You can also submit up to 50 URLs each month that Bing should recrawl; that’s a nice feature if you do some major changes on any of your pages and you want them to be refreshed in the index faster.
The keywords meta tag is another difference between Bing and Google. Bing encourages webmasters to use the tag, saying “the payoff is relatively low.” I don’t use the keyword tag because it would be difficult to automatically generate keywords for pages, but if you own a site with a small number of pages you could try using the tag to get some higher rankings in Bing.
Another difference between Google and Bing’s algorithms is how page trust is calculated. Compared to Google, Bing tends to put less weight on external links and more weight on the content of a page and internal links to that page. That means you could have a page without much content ranking high on Google but the same page wouldn’t rank as high on Bing. Bing also puts more weight on the anchor text of the internal links, so it’s important to use good anchor text (and the title attribute) on your links, and relevant ALT tags for your images. If you run a blog, this would be a great reason to use some related posts plugin to get links to other relevant pages with great anchor text. It’s also a good idea to create some new in-content links in your articles if you’re trying to oprimize for Bing.
Bing puts more weight on domain authority. The only thing to say about that is that it’s probably bad news if you like to change your domain very often.
Bing may allow sculpting authority. While Google tells us that people can no longer sculpt their pagerank by using nofollow, Bing hints that you can use nofollow to stop the bot from visiting pages with little or no helpful content so resources can go toward your content filled pages. We can’t say for sure that this would be a way to sculpt authority around your site because Microsoft could be referring to sending Bingbot to only crawl pages that have great content so you don’t waste bandwidth. I think it wouldn’t hurt your site to exclude low quality pages from being indexed, so it could either have no effect or it could help you (so why not do it).
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
So why not reach the #1 spot on search engines that aren't targeted as much? I think it would be easier to optimize for Bing before Google because there's less external stuff to do.
Techie can you please tell me what should I do if I already submitted a site map to google and bing , a feed to yahoo and when I search my keywords they only show me a version of my site from 5 days ago in cache… Can I do something or I just have to wait for the search engine spiders to come, visit my new pages and rank higher in them? Thank you for your answer.
You could use Google Webmaster Tools to set a custom crawl rate for your site if you want it to be crawled more often and content to be more fresh. Bing doesn't have anything like this for now but they might roll out something soon with their new crawler.
Well I have a quite different opinion, I think you should begin with optimizing your site for Bing and Yahoo once you reach the number 1 spot on Google. Thanks for the share!
I would suggest optimising for Google above Bing, as generally I've found sites SEO'd for Google tend to be picked up by Bing anyway. In addition, the volume of searches is far higher on Google – it might be more competitive and harder to rank on, but if you have a decent SEO strategy it's certainly possible.
I'm not aware of those things that you had mentioned but since we are talking about optimization they say that Google is the biggest search engine that is why your site must rank higher in it. Since you enlighten me with info probably I'll try Bing.
Is it worth optimising for Bing? I don't think so – in a lot of countries outside the US Google accounts for 85%+ of the search market – I wouldn't even bother with it's 5-10%, which would only be possible to capture with very good rankings. Yahoo now uses Bing technology, so wasn't it a waste of time for all those who went after Yahoo rankings?
You can't just "go after Yahoo." SEO is SEO for all search engines. We're just talking about things that Bing puts more weight on.
So why not bother for 5-10%? If you were working for me, I would not be happy about that attitude
If you get 100k+ visitors, 5-10% is a nice number of extra visits, perhaps clicks, perhaps income. And it's never bad to keep different search engines in mind. After all, and I know this might blow people's minds, Google may not forever rule supreme. They've not been around for that long (no, I do not think 13 years is long for a company), and there was a time when people could not imagine a world in which Microsoft was not the absolute dominant player in the computer market. Times change, and so do the leaders of an industry.
Great post! I'm glad that Bing is here, Google can often be hard and takes time and Bing is something new that we haven't seen yet and so far it seems interesting. I already got a few visits from it and will soon start checking out.
Hopefully there'll be some articles on this site about Bing in the future
Great tips! And with Bing now powering Yahoo Search, optimizing for Bing is more important than ever! Their combined 35% market share (in the U.S.) means that even if you're struggling in Google, you can get meaningful traffic by making sure you're also optimizing for Bing.
Nice article. I hadn't considered optimising for Bing or Yahoo before (never use either of them), but I think there may be potential that everyone is overlooking by going to Google.
However, I am worried that I would spend my time optimising Bing/Yahoo and not see as good a return for my efforts as if I'd concentrated on Google. Isn't 80% of web traffic supposed to come from Google searches?
When it comes to search engine optimization, quite rightly, there are three major search engines worth worrying about: Google, Yahoo! and BING. To optimize just for one is to miss out the opportunity of considerable niche traffic brought by the others.
Good post, thanks! While Google is still the primary search engine to optimize for, Bing and Yahoo are important as well. And these other search engines can provide some insights that Google doesn't readily provide. For example the Yahoo site explorer provides a more relevant list of backlinks than Google's webmaster tools. I will definitely check out the Bing webmaster tool box for my next round of Calgary Web design projects.
Personally, I think that the quality of the results on google have depreciated recently. I'd bet that more users are on bing for that reason alone. Either way, it would certainly help to diversify your traffic sources.