Bing SEO vs Google SEO – 5 Top Tips

Online Success Requires Balance

This article is an archived blog article, to view the latest news and advice from roi.com.au, select a category to the right or visit our main ROI Blog page.

If prior to the Yahoo / Microsoft deal you were ranking Bing as the least important of the Tier I engines, you may be forgiven for that, but if you have not put Bing under closer SEO radar after the deal, you are making a mistake.

Really, if you think about, the four search engines that generally make the charts, the news or capture market share are Google, Yahoo!, Bing and AOL. If you did not already know it, Google results power AOL and with this deal between Yahoo and Microsoft, Bing is now going to power Yahoo! search results. So, it would make sense to focus your SEO efforts on the two search engines that will be holding the reigns over their own search technologies and managing the search algorithms, namely Google and Bing.

SEO rankings and your website

If you look at the scenario from a market share perspective, according to U.S. figures, Google will hold 70% and Bing 30%. Even though that break up might be slightly different in Australia, with Google dominating the market even more, it would be foolish to ignore what will be the 2nd biggest player in search.

Bing SEO vs. Google SEO

The word on the street is already filtering out some useful tips on the differences between doing SEO on Bing and of course on Google.

5 Top Tips for Optimising your website for Bing:

  1. Just as Google has its Webmaster Tools centre, Bing also has a Webmaster Centre. If you are serious about doing SEO on Bing, you should set up an account.
  2. If you want your site to be found on Bing, your site needs to be cached and that means submitting your site to Bing.
  3. MSNbot will remain the crawler that will visit your sites, so ensure that you are not excluding it in your robot.txt file.
  4. A number of sources indicate that MSN’s algorithm is more keyword oriented than Google’s. However, when adding fresh content to your website do not be tempted to stuff keywords in, as this will hurt your Google SEO and the search engines quickly filter out sites using this poor quality tactic.
  5. As is a common factor in SEO for most search engines, ensure that your metatags are descriptive and include your important keywords. Bing seems to value this more than Google does. However, remember that metatag descriptions are not the core of your SEO strategy – it hinges on a number of inter-related elements working together.

Posted on September 4, 2009

What is your organic cost per click? Are your competitors paying more than you for clicks? Is your website performing at 100%?