A Closer Look on Bing’s Search Engine Results for better SEO

Ever since Bing launched and when they finally closed the deal with Yahoo, I’ve been itching to do this review on Bing’s results and the implications it has on SEO’s.

Now that Binghoo has been in existence, optimizing for Google’s competition is growing significantly. If Binghoo will be capturing 1/3 of the search market it’s definitely worth your efforts of grabbing that pie of your traffic.

Let me give you a brief walk through of a few interesting features that Bing has.

Document/Site Preview – Aside from the ordinary SERP’s you have, Bing helps users by giving them a preview of the page/site. According to the Bing team, “it helps searchers find the content they want faster, without leaving the SERP until they are ready.” As a webmaster, you can also disable the document preview feature for your site in Bing. (By the way I’m not affiliated in anyway with the featured websites on the searches.)

Quick Tabs & Related Searches – Bing gives you a neat list of related topical searches at the left panel of every search. In our keyword “dubai business”, we have related search options of “online businesses”, “dubai business directory”, “business opportunities dubai”, and so on.

Another feature I like on Bing is the Quick Tabs section which gives you filtering options on a broad scope of search. For example, I was interested in finding out for “Nike Shoes”, it gave me options for Catalog, Coupons, and Jobs. The Bing team aims to let the searcher to “fully explore their subject without losing track of their initial query.

Best Match – If I remembered it correctly, Microsoft branded Bing as a “decision engine”. The best match feature has made this statement clear enough. Bing highlights huge brands and names in their best match feature. It isolates the search results if you’re looking for official websites and leading brands.

You can see that aside from the single listing for the Google site, it also features the site’s search box which you can use directly, a “Similar to this” section which listed other similar results which you might have in mind. And then there’s the usual quick tabs, related searches, and search history.

You can read the rest of Bing’s features on the New Features Relevant to Webmasters PDF they’ve released last June 2009. They’ve also mentioned a little bit on Search Engine Optimization (but I still think Google’s SEO Starter Guide was way way more interesting and informative).

Disclaimer: The two websites that I will be reviewing in a while were picked by the fact that they have ranked number 1 during the time of search on Google.Com and Bing.Com. I’m not in any way promoting any of the sites featured in this review.

Let’s get down to the face-off. I did a search for the term “dubai business” (don’t ask me why and how, it’s a random keyword I thought of) on Google and Bing. For everyone’s information “dubai business” has a search volume of 74,000 for the month of July from Google Keyword Tool (this means the keyword is worthy of traffic).

And let’s go tally the results:

BusinessInDubai.Com ranked number 1 for Google.Com (not Google.ae) and BusinessDubai.Com topped the results for Bing.

Optimizing for Bing is no different from doing SEO for the rest of the search engines. Content, keywords, structure and links will still rule the fundamentals. However there are notable results:

• This test supports one of the popular observations where Bing favors the aged domain. The older your domain gets, the better it will get on Bing’s rankings. I would also agree with Gyutae Park in his article 5 Crucial SEO Tips For the New Binghoo (Microsoft Bing Overtakes Yahoo Search) when he said: “Obtain exact match domains whenever possible. Both Google and Bing give bonuses to sites with domains that match the search query exactly (e.g. CreditCards.com can rank for the keyword “credit cards” with a lot less links than other more authoritative sites).”

• At first glance you may conclude that Bing favors link popularity but we also have to take into account 2 factors such as links coming from a variety of domains and the anchor texts which the links have. I haven’t dug deeply into the anchor text but a quick glimpse on the links gave me an impression that BusinessInDubai.Com has more variety of links. So if you’re ranking for Bing, be sure to have anchor text variety, links from diverse and related domains and pages, and quantity.

I also love Silver Rose’s analysis in How to get your website found in Bing:

Bing has been going for two months, and here’s what I’ve found analysing my own sites and those of others: Bing doesn’t like blogspot – not even blogs over 3 years old with decent pagerank on Google (pagerank 4) and about 20,000 backlinks according to Yahoo’s siteexplorer. You will find some blogspots in Bing’s results – but buried deep eg on page 6 or higher. There are exceptions – some blogs with a seriousamount of high quality backlinks feature on Bing’s first page, but if you are an ordinary blogger with an average amount of backlinks, you will struggle.

Haven’t found many WordPress blogs in Bing either. I don’t think Bing likes blogs, they seem to prefer static websites, possibly because it’s easier for their bot to crawl.

Here are my recommended reads for Bing Reviews and Optimization:

1. Microsoft Bing’s New Features Relevant to Webmasters
2. Bing’s Best Features are the Ones You Didn’t Know Existed on Live Search
3. Meet Bing, Microsoft’s New Search Engine
4. 5 Crucial SEO Tips For the New Binghoo (Microsoft Bing Overtakes Yahoo Search)
5. SEOmoz Interview – Lyndsay Walker on Bing
6. Top 10 Things the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal Changes for SEO
7. How to get your website found in Bing
8. Optimizing Your Website for Microsoft Bing

A Closer Look on Bing’s Search Engine Results for better SEO is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO