It will be close to a year before Microsoft takes over Yahoo’s search infrastructure, thereby consolidating 28% of the U.S. search market and mounting the first credible challenge on Google in a decade.
According to Michael Learmonth of the New York Advertising Age The biggest challenge for marketers will be to figure out how to land among the top five spots on both Bing and Google.
But it’s not too early for marketers to wonder if they need to ask: Do we, uh, speak Bing?
Turning up on the first page of organic search results when someone types your product or brand into a keyword box is pretty much the cost of entry for any substantial e-commerce entity or marketer. For the past decade or so that’s meant pretty much one thing: optimize your site for Google, maybe a tweak or two for Yahoo, and everything else, well, didn’t matter that much at all.
In the past if you were well-optimized for Google, you were well-optimized for everyone else out there, The gap wasn’t significant enough to warrant the extra investment.’
But Bing is quite a bit different from Google and Yahoo, both in the way it ranks pages and the way it presents results on the page. And if search becomes more of a two-player market, it could mean a return to the late ’90s, when it was common for marketers to create separate pages optimized for Yahoo, Google, Lycos and AltaVista, and as they do now for the iPhone or other mobile devices.
You’d effectively have two pages, one for Google and one for Bing, If all goes according to plan, Yahoo will make the switch to Bing’s organic search results in the third quarter of next year, and then fold in Bing’s paid search results soon after.
Shooting for the top five
The big challenge for marketers will be to figure out how to land among the top five spots on both search engines. That is particularly true for Bing, which often shows only five organic results on its first page — after which it groups results into categories.
Position six on Google may mean users have to scroll down to see the result; on Bing users have to click to the second page.
If you don’t come up in the top five [search results] it may mean you loose out on 70% to 80% of searchers.
Bing also offers different placements for photos and video, which means opportunities for marketers that produce both.
How much to invest in Bing is a calculation marketers will make this fall as they plan website development and put together budgets for 2010. While each has its own goals and search strategies, if Bing/Yahoo can retain 25% share, it will be too big for most marketers to ignore. And with apologies to Ask.com and others, it will be the first time in years that marketers will be able to optimize for two players and get virtually 100% of the search market.
Marketing Tips: “The Language of Bing” – (Thank you Rodney Mason of Moosylvania for these tips)
1) Focus on categories presented for your most key search terms. Use Bing’s categories in your key words and in your site navigation.
2) Domain Age is very important. Building micro-sites off your main site vs. independent new sites is key for Bing.
3) Text Rules – Bing favors pages with at least 300 words of text.
4) Linking Out
Bing favors linking out more than other engines as long as the links are relevant to the overall context of the site and keywords.
5) News Sites vs. Blogs
Bing favors news source sites over blogs especially for breaking news, although major blogs are recognized by Bing as major news sources. Blogs with less significant traffic are not.
6) Page Titles
As with any white hat SEO strategy, page titles should correlate well with the primary subject and keywords on page. Bing seems to follow this more stringently than other web sites.
7) Heavy Flash sites rank better with Bing than Google. A good strategy for a site with a lot of Flash is to emphasize SEO for Bing and continue your Google efforts. Bing and Google draft off one another indirectly as they are both continuously crawling off the web. That means Bing can help heavy Flash sites do better on Google over time as well.
Don’t overuse keywords in your content and also don’t use irrelevant keywords to increase a page’s keyword density.
9) Place average keywords in your meta tags and content.
10) Don’t use hidden text or links else your website can be blacklisted and ignored.
11) Avoid overused link schemes to avoid being banned.
12) Enable MSNBot onto your site and submit URLs for all sub-pages as it doesn’t automatically crawl all pages.
13) Keep fresh relevant content on your site and update it regularly.
Happy to chat or brainstorm your thoughts.
Regards
Jeremy Hope
