Fortune Web Marketing Blog

Yahoo/Bing Search Alliance: Organic Optimization Tips

01 Sep 2010 1 Comment

by fortuneweb in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Marketing Strategies Tags: bing, search engine optimization, seo, yahoo

 On August 24, 2010 Yahoo organic results began being powered by Bing as part of the Yahoo/Bing Search Alliance in the US (other markets to follow, with complete transition by 2012).   If you receive traffic from Yahoo organic listings now, especially if the Yahoo traffic is higher than Bing organic traffic, this switch could impact your overall organic traffic values. 

Every engine has different algorithms, and thus different optimization techniques. Since listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change (according to comScore), it’s important to take a look at how well your site is optimized for Bing.  Here are a few tips:

What to do first:

• First make sure you are using Bing’s webmaster tools to submit your site, submit an XML site map, see what pages have been indexed on Bing, measure back and inbound links and see what keywords are performing. There is a wealth of information on here for marketers and developers, so it should be your first stop.
• Review your Yahoo organic traffic and identify the terms that are working.  You may need to go back to previous analytics reports, but you want to find any differences in rank for these keywords now that results are powered by Bing.
• If you run paid ad campaigns on these engines, compensate for any potential organic loss by adding keywords to your campaigns.

How Bing ranks your website (from Bing Webmaster Center):
Bing website ranking is completely automated. The Bing ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as webpage content, the number and quality of websites that link to your webpages, and the relevance of your website’s content to keywords.

Optimizing for Bing:
The good news is that optimizing for Bing is not too much different from optimizing for other engines. We’ve compiled a list below of some SEO techniques that are good for all engines and some that are more specific to Bing. The most important thing is to keep checking your sites performance using Bing’s webmaster tools and identify any areas of improvement.

• Continue to develop keyword rich, orignal content that is geared to your audience; obtain high quality inbound links and develop your site’s architecture in a way that crawlers can understand. 
• Fix any broken links on your website or broken tags within the code of your website.
• Make sure you allow MSNBot to crawl the pages of your site by specifying so in a robots.txt file or meta tag.
• MSNBot searches websites for links to other websites. So one of the best ways to ensure that MSNBot finds your website is to include valuable content that other website owners want to link to. (from Webmaster Center)
• Keep web page size reasonable.  Bing recommends covering one topic per webpage. An HTML webpage with no images should be under 150 KB. We’ve also heard a minimum of 300 words is recommended.
• Make sure you create an HTML and XML site map, submit the XML site map to Bing via webmaster tools.
• Each page on your site should be accessible by at least one text link.
• Each webpage should be 1 to 3 clicks away (flat hierarchy).
• Avoid link farms and hidden text or links on your web page.
• Bing crawls up to 69 characters in the title tag and 150 characters for the meta description tag.
• Domain Age: Bing puts more value on domains that have been registered for a long period of time.
• Bing likes pages that link to each other which have similar topics. meaning your target page will receive a boost if the page that is linking to it has a similar topic.
• Bing displays the H1 tag in the preview box. So make sure the tile tag and H1 tags of each page are different. Put the wording of choice in the H1 tag.
• The first paragraph of text on your web page will generally be displayed, make sure it is keyword rich and gets your point across.