Lately there’ve been a lot of questions about Search Engine Optimization for Microsoft’s new search engine Bing.com.  Microsoft is heavily promoting Bing as a “decision engine” (as opposed to a search engine) that can help users cut through “search overload” to find what they’re looking for, and organizations want to make sure that they’re listed among the top results when users search for the products they’re selling or the services they offer.

The good news is that SEO for Bing is nothing new.  The majority of Microsoft’s magic is actually in how results are displayed and organized, rather than how information is found and ranked.  The basic theory is the same: a ‘bot’ crawls the web reading and cataloging millions of pages.  When a user performs a search, Bing serves up sites that are deemed ‘more relevant’ based on a mathematical algorithm.  Bing.com is new, but its algorithm is actually a tweaked version of Microsoft’s old search tool “Live.com,” and optimizing a page for Bing isn’t much different than optimizing for Google and other search engines.

Microsoft’s thoughts on Bing SEO

Microsoft actually answers the question of Bing’s SEO impact head on in a it’s white paper, “Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters white paper“.  According to the Bing team, “Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design… Best of all, the type of SEO work and tasks webmasters need to perform to be successful in Bing haven’t changed—all of the skills and knowledge that webmasters have invested in previously applies fully today with Bing. Moreover, investments in solid, reputable SEO work made for Bing will bring similar improvements in your website’s page rank in Google and Yahoo! as well.”

Microsoft does highlight some of the differences that might change how sites rank – and consequently how SEO experts will have to work with sites:

• Bing makes it easier to compete for broad terms, because it surfaces more categories automatically, increasing the number of results on the page.
• Keyword searches are presented with Quick Tabs that present branches of the parent keyword. This surfaces many websites that rank highly for those keyword combinations.
• Multi-threaded [search engine results page] design surfaces many more pages that will be associated with the searcher’s primary keywords than would have surfaced in a single-threaded [search engine results page] list.
• Bing removes duplicate results from categorized results lists, which allows other, lower ranked pages to be shown in the categorized results on its [search engine results page].

Essentially, according to Microsoft, the category listings should enable more pages to make it to the top.  Sorting out duplicates, for example, and suggesting related search terms or more specific variations of a search term should help niched sites rise to the top.

SEO Process

This actually highlights one of the best parts of G.1440’s SEO process – research!  Search Engines keep their algorithms under tighter security than the Colonol’s 12 herbs and spices, and rather than guessing what factors might impact search ranking, we specifically compare hundreds of characteristics of your site to the sites that are currently getting top results for the terms you want.  By evaluating the sites that are currently positioned where you want to be, we’re able to identify the SEO factors that actually have an impact for any given search term on any given search engine – Bing included.

It may not be perfect, But It’s Not Google… this is the Microsoft stand on the new search engine, named Bing… www.bing.com.  Check it out. I think you will enjoy the experience.

On June 1, Microsoft released a new search engine to compete with Google. Microsoft’s Bing search engine is marketed to be more than just a search engine, but a “decision engine”. Bing’s goal is to surface information you’re looking for faster than Google does by providing the most relevant information to the top of the listing that is returned from a search. How they determine the most relevant is the cause for debate with some.

Reports indicate that approximately 25% of searches are not satisfactory to the searcher. I can agree with this as I am not a big fan of getting 4 million hits based on my keywords and then having to search to find something relevant. Even after refining my keywords, I can still be buried in links to wade through. Information overload is a growing issue and is being addressed by more and more companies….remember the report we ran a few weeks ago on chacha.com?

Bing is initially designed to provide a much richer search experience for people looking for information in four categories: shopping, travel, health and local businesses. I used the engine the other day while performing the same search on Google and then on Bing. Bing presented categorized the information for me during my searches which I liked. For example, when searching on Home Depot with Bing, I get a category of Home Depot jobs and related links, then a category of Home Depot Coupons and related links and so on. The user experience is pleasing and the callouts for each link were nice. All I had to do was mouse over a link to get more information.

When searching on plane flights, I get specific links to specific deals on Bing. Bing also provided me with a forecast on what the most likely trend would be with the fare that I was searching which I found very helpful.

As you can imagine, some people like the engine and some people don’t. A bit of a surprise is that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is a fan. On the other end, people don’t like the “big brother” aspect of Microsoft bringing what they think is the most relevant information to the top of the listing… sort of a “Who is Microsoft to decide” this type of issue.

In another effort to drive searching, people can get cash back when they buy products from certain merchants that have a Bing symbol displayed next to their links. Click on shopping on the www.bing.com and see the cash back listings.

The world of search is still very new and all the engines are working to optimize your searching. If these new features with Bing turn out to be popular, then Google will most likely just incorporate them in to their engine. In either case, I am glad to see the focus on improving searching for information.