Yahoo, Bing and your website’s SEO

On July 29 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced a deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced with Microsoft’s Bing technology. The deal is expected to be finalized sometime early next year.

What does this mean for your website and its SEO?

Bing now instantly has over 22% market share of search engine traffic. Therefore business owners who want to stay ahead in the game should optimize their websites for Bing as well as Google.

The good news is that Bing isn’t very different from Google – most good SEO practice is universal among all search engines. However, here are a few tips to give you extra points on Bing search results:

Domain Age

Bing gives precedence to older domain names. So if you are just starting out a business, it might be worth it to buy a pre-owned domain name.

Length of Content Text

The amount of words in your content matters to Bing more than it does to Google. You get points on Bing if your content is at least 300 words long. Also, Bing is able to scrape Flash content (Google ignores Flash), but they only do so if no other content is present. Therefore Flash designers might want to start putting more content into their Flash files rather than just fancy graphics and animations.

Keywords in URL

Bing gives a lot more weight to keywords in the URL than Google does. A study showed that Bing’s search results contained 15% more sites with the keyword in the URL than Google did. Therefore using tools like mod_rewrite for Apache will help your rankings for Bing more than it does for Google.

Page Titles

Some people claim that Bing places more emphasis on the title tag than Google does, while others have rebuked this claim. Whatever the case may be, the fact remains that title tags are one of the most important things to consider for good SEO. With a relevant and keyword rich title, both Google and Bing will be very happy… one may be happier than the other.