Haven’t heard of Bing.com yet?  They’ve dedicated over $80 million towards advertising, so chances are, you’ll be hearing more about Bing soon!  There is plenty of chatter about whether Bing will be a significant threat to Google or Yahoo and with Bing approaching a 10% marketshare, they are already poised to give Yahoo a run for their money. 

With a new search engine on the block, is it time to revise the optimization strategies for your industrial website?  What should you and your optimization manager keep in mind when thinking ahead towards performance in this new search engine? 

I did a bit of research and found that there are some strategies to keep in mind that will definitely help you in Bing, and these strategies will certainly help you in the other major search engines, also. Win-win!

Optimization tactics to consider for Bing:

Great content:  While this is important across the board for major search engines, it is especially important to Bing.  Bing seems to rank sites based on their content, so having well-written, descriptive and relevant content on your site is a major boost.  The ‘More Info’ popup in Bing’s results pages (see illustration) relies on the content contained in your site to provide information to the searcher–by ensuring that your content is strong and is sufficient to describe your products and services, you’ll have a leg up in Bing. Also, try not to cover more than one topic per page, in order to keep your content and keywords focused and undiluted.

Strong titles and meta descriptions: Having strong, descriptive titles that contain well-placed keywords is important to every search engine.  If your title tags are already optimized and you get good placement, you may want to leave them or change them only slightly, as you don’t want to affect your standing in other search engines.  Your descriptions might need some polishing up, to rank well in Bing, however.  Unlike Google, for example, the description in Bing is coming directly from the < meta name="description" > area of your code.  Make sure you have a compelling and descriptive meta description that contains a call to action to encourage visitors to click to your site.

Keywords in titles, H1s and link text: Bing seems to heavily favor relevant keywords in your titles, header tags (H1, H2, H3 etc), and link text.  Links on your web pages show up in Bing results (see circled area of illustration), so having good anchor text and descriptive links are imperative to encourage clickthroughs.

Older domain age:  The age of your domain seems to play into Bing’s ranking of sites, with older, established domains that are registered for long periods of time ranking higher.  If for any reason you are considering changing your domain name–don’t!  Think twice, because an older domain helps you rank better not only in Bing but in other major search engines, too.

Image and video search: Bing LOVES pictures and videos!  So do web users.  Continue to optimize your images with descriptive alt tags and to properly tag your videos.  It seems Bing has a lot to offer similar to Google’s Universal Search, with many media formats ranking well in Bing’s SERPs.  Industrial and commercial websites have a lot to offer in terms of multimedia, by promoting videos of technical processes, machinery, product demonstrations and more.  Images and videos can help your customers decide whether they are interested in your services or not.  Take advantage of Bing’s search preference for multimedia, and give your visitors the information that will catch their attention.

E-commerce:  This is a major focus of the Bing platform.  If you have an e-commerce site, you should continue to cultivate customer reviews, as these are one of the strongest influences on successful conversions on your site.  Bing pulls ratings information directly from CitySearch.com, Judysbook.com, and Yelp.com.  Get listed on these and other review sites and encourage your customers to review your business, for a boost in the search rankings!

Inbound links:  Authoritative inbound links that include a primary keyword in the referring site’s title tags seem heavily favored by Bing.  You want to ensure that during your link building process, you choose to cultivate links from relevant directories and websites that are extant to your business niche.  Referring sites that are themselves search-engine friendly and contain strong content will be your best bet for improving your rankings and backlinks.  The days of cultivating links from any general directory available are over.

Local optimization:  Local search is a core component of Bing, like e-commerce.  You’ll want to make sure that you add your site to Bing’s Listing Center, in order to show up on Bing Maps searches.  Similar to Google’s ‘ten pack’. Bing also serves up a ‘pack’ of local business results.  You can influence your placement in these results be making sure you include as much information as possible in your business listing.  The more information you provide, the better you will rank and the more customers will want to do business with you!

While MSN maintains that you cannot manipulate your rankings in their search engine, they do offer information to help site owners ensure their sites are best positioned for indexing within the Bing engine. Bing Webmaster Center provides lots of helpful documentation and tools, including technical and content guidelines similar to Google’s Webmaster Tools.

I’m excited to see what developes with Bing!  What are your experiences with Bing so far?  Let us know!

Additional Resources:
“SEO for Bing”-Dante Monteverde, Website Magazine
“Optimizing for Bing” -Julie Batten

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 10:01 am and is filed under Advanced SEO Concepts, General, Industrial SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.