Change normally causes a shake-up, the bigger the changes, the stronger the earthquake effect it can have. In May this year Microsoft launched Bing onto the world’s Internet users. Now everybody has grown used to Google being the king of the search engines with roughly 70 to 75% of the search engine market today. Google of course is not showing any signs of slowing down in the least.

So what does the launch of Bing mean to websites that have mostly targeted their optimisation efforts for Google? It is still extremely early days for Bing, but it is also natural that website owners will get into a tizzy and want some answers. To make wanting answers even more urgent, Microsoft has brought in innovations with Bing.

Decision engine

Bing is not described as a search engine, but instead is called a decision engine. What this means is that Bing focuses on delivering the best results in an organised manner. It aims to help users make decisions quicker. Bing includes features not used before, such as Price Predictor. This will help users get the best prices for products they are searching for.

Another feature is the compare and contrast function. This allows the searcher to do product, price and shipping against similar products. For business websites this is an excellent feature as the primary goal of all business websites is to get searchers to convert to paying clients.  These are but two of the features of Bing that will have an impact on businesses.

Impact on SEO

What worries most people is that Bing will not display the customary 10 organic listings, but only 5. This means that some page one listings will move over to the second page. But Bing also displays other sets of results. These results centre on the results of others searching for similar products. Due to this multiple results sets; it gives SEO far greater capacity for using long tail key phrases. For instance if you have optimised for ‘Liverpool accommodation’, normally Liverpool would not show up. Bing picks up that Liverpool accommodation is a common search phrase and automatically includes precise results for Liverpool in the SERPs.

Conclusion

Does this mean you immediately have to change your SEO strategies? Not really because the optimisation tactics used still holds. It must also be remembered that Bing is in it’s initial phase. At this stage it is no threat to Google and websites that have targeted their optimisation efforts for Google. What it does mean is that Bing makes it more difficult to rank for search terms that are generic.

However, by using highly targeted long tail key phrases, you will rank well in the SERPs. In reality, competition is healthy, even for search engines and only the future will tell how well Bing will do. It means that everyone will have to dust off their optimisation techniques and do some tweaking. This is healthy as it freshens up everything.

The buzz at the moment is the new kid on the block; Microsoft’s Bing that was launched in May this year. Because it is still so new, there is much website owners want to know about optimising for Bing. They want to know how they will have to adjust their SEO to include Bing, but at the same time still fully optimise for Google.

It is understandable that existing website owners need to know what to expect. Basically Bing provides a general search as well as a category search. Microsoft is billing Bing as a decision engine and not a search engine per se. The goal of Bing is to bring intelligent search that will make it easier for users to make decisions.

Differences

It is logical to want to know if the same optimisation techniques will work for Bing that works well for Google and Yahoo. Yes, it is true that Bing brings new factors into search that might produce results that that slightly differ from that of Google and Yahoo. The thing to keep in mind is that best practices for SEO will work in Bing just as it works in Google and Yahoo.

Analysis and comparisons

When analysing the results of Bing SERPs what comes to light is that the same factors that Google have used since the beginning is mostly incorporated in Bing. Comparing top rated websites in Bing to top websites in Google shows that factors like domain age are relevant. Inbound links are still as vitally important and so is the use of the primary keywords in title tags.

From this it can be seen that optimisation success for Bing relies on the building of quality inbound links from directories as well as other SEO sites. Link building from unrelated websites count as little in Bing as it counts in Google. This shows that in the relevancy of high quality inbound links Bing stands as firmly as Google. This means your optimisation for link building stays exactly the same. Organic optimisation techniques still stand firmly as a top priority.

Content is still king

Concentrating on quality content works just as well in Bing as for any of the other search engines and that is how optimisation efforts should go ahead. To rank for competitive keywords you have to add power to quality content. You need to do this through making it as appealing as possible for others to link to your content. The relevancy and quality of your content will give others reason to wish to link to you.

Reports from various sources believe that Bing valuates the relevance of a website on mostly the same factors used by Google. Therefore, the best advice possible is to keep using white hat SEO methods for onsite as well as offsite optimisation.

In reality, you will be optimising your website for all the search engines at once and as time goes on minor tweaks will keep it flowing. Keep your website optimised, well maintained and freshen the content regularly. Then concentrate on link building to well-established, authoritative websites that have high quality content.