Advertising Marketing & Promotion

When business owners approach a search engine optimization provider to talk about their organic search results ranking, they don’t usually need to mention what search engine they have in mind. Everyone understands that it’s Google – the search engine that two out of three Internet searchers choose. Bing is barely mentioned. Anyone interested in reading up on Google SEO has thousands of in depth articles to choose from. You’d be lucky to find a handful that dealt specifically with Bing SEO.

The 16% share that Bing boasts today is impressive – one out of six people on the Internet use Bing now. This is reason enough to care about ranking on Bing. There are other reasons, too.

• While Microsoft does invest in improving Bing’s algorithms, it doesn’t have the experience that Google does in dealing with spammers, content farmers and black hat SEO practitioners. All of the simple SEO tricks that people used with Google three or four years ago still work on Bing. You should simply practice Bing SEO for the reason that it is easier.
• Very few websites optimize for Bing. Anyone who does is immediately given a good ranking. There is very little competition.

If you’re convinced that Bing SEO would be a great investment now, use the following tips.

1. Even one year ago, you could win points with Google for using keyword-based anchor text. If you wanted to have a backlink on some website pointing back to your website, you would not simply say Click here! and turn it into a link. You would, instead, choose the main keyword for your webpage – Best Boston Dentist or something – for the text of the link and then turn that into a backlink. Google would think it was meaningful that the very keyword was in the text of the backlink. Ever since Google’s new Penguin algorithms, though, these easily manipulated linking methods no longer work. Fortunately, keyword-based anchor text still works on Bing. Since Bing might come out with its own Penguin-like algorithms soon, it could be an idea to simply use related keywords instead of exact ones.
2. If you have a brick-and-mortar establishment, list it on Bing Maps. You will rank better then.
3. While Google’s Caffeine places much emphasis on fresh content, Bing takes the opposite tack. Microsoft’s search engine likes well-aged webpages. To Bing, the older a page is, the more tested its backlinks are likely to be. It sees a greater assurance of quality, reliable content in an older page. When adding new content, try to place it on an existing page rather than on a page that is new. This way, your new content will gain from the credibility of the old page.
4. Bing SEO should be directed at improving click-through rates. The search engine’s algorithms rank a website higher when it attracts user interaction.

For those who long for the good old days when Google would simply allow them to pull a few quick moves and climb in the rankings, those days are still here – only, they are on Bing.