Having spent over 80 million dollars in advertising, it’s not surprising that everyone is starting ask about Bing.com and whether or not it could really replace Google as the premier search engine for all things internet.
Bing is Microsoft’s latest web search engine, or “decision engine” as it is being advertised. It was unveiled on May 28, 2009 by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the All Things Digital Conference in San Diego, California, replacing Microsoft’s Live Search.
By marketing Bing as a “decision engine,” Microsoft affirms that its search functions produce more relevant results and organizes the results in a way that makes more sense. Bing provides tabs for different searches similar to Google including “images,” “videos,” “news” and “shopping” but, Microsoft has also crafted some intuitive search features to narrow Bing search results by related topics. As an example, searching for “Microsoft” on Bing will provide the user with the typical links to Microsoft’s website, the Wikipedia entry, etc.; but in addition Bing will give the user “smart” tabs that sort through links for subjects particular to Microsoft such as its products, online services, investor relations, jobs at Microsoft and the like. In some ways, these “smart” tabs represent a successful spin-off of Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, which nearly no one uses.
For those online marketers that want to know how to receive high SEO rankings, or maybe we should be calling them DEO rankings (decision engine optimization) with Bing, they should know that Bing puts emphasis on elements of web pages that Google does not, and vice versa.
Here are some tips important SEO tips from bizzia.com, a business news and commentary website, to ranking well with Bing:
1. Importance of Domain Age
Bing appears to put a lot of stock into how long ago a domain was registered. For marketers, this means that you may look to purchase older domains if you want to get on good position in Bing.
2. Bring on the Text
On most search engines the amount of text on the page usually isn’t usually a huge factor. However, Bing seems to really like pages with at least 300 words of text.
3. Linking Out
With Google especially, some marketers are scared to link out to other websites because they don’t want their Page Rank to be lowered. On Bing, linking out actually appears to be smiled upon.
4. The Blogging Blues
Google seems to appreciate the blogosphere more than Bing. This is especially true when recent news events occur and bloggers battle with major websites for space on the search engine results page.
5. Bing Loves Titles
It is important for marketers that are wanting to make it to the top of Bing to have a title tag and header that correlates to the subject at hand.
Although Bing does offer s some new features for users to explore, Microsoft dos not anticipate Bing replacing Google. Instead, Microsoft hopes that the changes being made are just a start to future improvements on their search engine, but even now it is definitely a useful tool for online marketers to explore and use to their advantage.
So what should you do if you want to rank well on both engine ranking pages? Well Google is still the dominant player, however, we have closed a good deal of business off Yahoo! search rankings, and I suspect we will off Bing as well. The lesson is to make sure you have backlinks from a variety of sites including article banks, public relations wires, print publication, e-publications, blogs and videos. You truly do have to be everywhere to rank well on all the engines.