Google SEO vs Bing SEO has been a topic of discussion throughout the industry since Bing was launched. With Yahoo and Bing coming together sometime this year, it is necessary to start thinking about including Bing in any SEO strategy.

Tom Costello (Cuil founder) has recently published an interesting article sharing his findings on the differences between Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. Here is a quote from the article;

“A second major question is whether Bing is using any new signals, beyond what are usually used in search engines. Search engines use traditional signals like title, URL, emphasis/heading, document length and number of occurrences on page to generate an on-page score. They then make an off page score from a count of matching anchors, possibly weighted by the quality of the source page. They combine these scores with some proximity information, and some notion of page popularity (e.g. PageRank). Finally they demote spam and they promote pages that are clicked on for this query more than one would expect.”

Most small business owners get frustrated that their site either ranks highly in Bing, but poorly in Google or vice versa. Here are some of the reasons why this may be happening and more importantly some workarounds to tackle this problem.

1. Amount of text: Bing places a lot of importance to content, so if your pages have more than 350 words, then you have better chances of ranking higher in Bing. Not so in Google, for which it doesn’t seem to be of importance. So, you need to optimize each and every page individually to meet Bing’s page score requirements.
2. Natural Language: Bing places a lot of importance on relevancy, so if your website is optimized with LSI keywords, then you are likely to be ranked higher in Bing. Google is soon catching up, so maybe it’s a better idea to optimize based on LSI rather than mindlessly repeating exact keywords. You can also get a firm offering professional link building services to help you out here.
3. Title tags: Bing places more importance on title tags than Google, so make sure that your keywords appear in your title tags as often as possible.
4. Back links and outbound links: Bing places more importance on links in general than Google, and the higher the number of relevant back links you have, the better your chances of a good ranking in Bing. Google used to penalize sites with a large number of outbound links, but Bing likes them, and so you may want to have a judicious amount of these as well in your site. Here again, if you get a professional to work on this area, their link building services team would identify the right places to place links for you, so that it actually translates to a better page rank.
5. Domain age: Both Bing and Google seem to favor older domains, so if you are trying to start off on a new business, it is better to purchase a domain name, that’s been around for some time.

As a business owner, you would want all the traffic that you can get whether from Bing, Yahoo or Google and the best way to do this is to optimize it for all the major search sites out there. The best way out is to hire professional link building services to help you in your optimization efforts. If you do not do this, you may miss out on a sizeable chunk of traffic as more and more users start using Bing for their searches.

Thanks to Web Master Tips and Search Engine Journal for most of this info.

Tags: Anchors, Cuil, Document Length, Google, Google Search, Google Yahoo, Natural Language, Occurrences, Page Popularity, Page Score, Relevancy, Score Requirements, Search Engines Search, Search Google, Search Rankings, Seo, Signals, Small Business Owners, Tom Costello, Workarounds
Category : Internet Marketing