SEO tips and tricks for Bing

Microsoft's new search tool Bing has been out for more than three months, and it's gained a healthy 11 per cent market share in that time.

That alone makes it a search engine worth optimising for, but add in the recent deal with Yahoo – which will see Bing used as the search tool across both firms’ web estates – and any webmaster can't ignore Microsoft's latest search attempt.

We talked to Dan Cohen, MSN's SEO guru, and got some tips from the Search Technology Centre in London to help bring you up to speed and make sure everyone using Bing can find your sites.

Don't panic

The first thing to know is that there are no substantial differences between optimising for the rest of the web and for Bing, according to Cohen. Any site which uses best practice for design and optimisation will do as well via Bing as it does any other search engine, so if you've properly categorised and linked your site, and have good use of keywords, there's no reason to panic just because Bing's now on the scene.

He advised optimisers and webmasters that it's really business as usual, saying it still pays with Bing to do your keyword research, submit your sitemap, ensure code is perfect, use clean URLs – the SEO guidebook hasn't been rewritten in anyway, Cohen said.

What's new?

That said, there are ways to do better in Bing because there are differences, especially to the search engine results page (SERP).

“There's no special SEO… but it does change search behaviour,” Cohen said of the new search features. “The change in search behaviour means there's more broadly distributed traffic.”
For example, the new document preview feature will change how surfers select sites, he said. In Bing, when the search results are surfaced, sites have a little dot next to them. Rolling over that dot brings up a preview of the site, showing what information is available there.

“Document preview means that as an SEO it is less important to get into the number one slot,” Cohen explained. “People take time to look at all 10 links.”

“You can expect to see a lot more traffic going to the second to 20th spots, instead of just position number one,” he said.

Webmasters can't affect what's shown, but can ask for a page not to offer a preview.

Another feature which will help better distribute traffic are the new categories. Alongside the left hand side of Bing search results are a series of suggested categories, surfaced for about a fifth of all search topics.

If a web user enters in a city name, it will suggest tourist sites, transport information, weather and more. So instead of just the top five organic results on the SERP – the ones most likely to be clicked – there are also a series of keywords, giving users one-click access to a refined search.

Alongside this, there is also a list of automatically generated related searches, to give users even more options to choose from.

“Categories mean users can expect to pick a bit, they can find search terms they wouldn't have thought of,” Cohen said, explaining surfers using Bing will semi-search and semi-browse, extending the options available to users, and in turn, widening the traffic going to sites not surfacing as the top few results.

In its testing, Microsoft's search team found that the click through rate for categorised results was better than that for organic rankings from six through to 10, meaning users found the categories more useful for the search than digging through endless results.

“The impact is going to be more traffic going to sites not in the top three,” said Cohen. “As SEO, there's a better chance of getting traffic.”
Other changes

There are other changes optimisers and webmasters should keep in mind.

Bing also now shows results with three separate levels of confidence. The first is the standard result, which is what most sites will see on most SERPs. The next is called “best match”, which is when Bing has a very high level of confidence in the top ranked result, and therefore offers extra data from the site, such as extra links to important information on the site or contact details.

The third result type is “best match” – but with no other results on the page. When Bing is confident it has found exactly what a searcher wants, it hides other results and shows just the top one. While the top results are always chosen via the algorithm, the Bing team chooses on a case-by-case basis, which will become “best match” results, based on how many people are looking for the term. There's no way you can ask for your site to become a “best match”, but if it does end up as one, webmasters can update the information displayed on the SERP, meaning traffic can be directed to the best place.

Another new feature, which may affect SEO is instant answers. They aren't new to Microsoft's search tools, but have been upgraded for Bing. Essentially, this type of result brings back an answer, rather than just a link to a page. Searching for weather in London will bring back the forecast, for example.

Another addition to Bing is data extraction from Flash and Silverlight. Bing can read what the image or animation-based pages say, pulling the pertinent data out so it can be indexed in the Bing engine.

Bing research has shown that a fifth of empty page descriptions in the index are from Flash, so this should help those sites be more easily found.
What to do

Any webmaster or search engine optimiser who has already worked with Live Search will find there is been little change to Microsoft's Webmaster Centre. All logins and authentications remain the same – as does the crawler being used.

So, if you've already submitted your site map, you need not do it again. If you haven't, you can submit it via the Webmaster Centre.

Other than that, the best tips to do well in Bing is to use best practice in your optimisation. Bing surfaces more results automatically, letting sites compete on more terms, but that will increase the competition on SERPs you've traditionally ranked highly.

The Bing team advised the best way to win traffic is keeping with best practice, so use unique titles and meta descriptions for each page, and use consistent data structures across your pages.

But, as the Bing team notes, “all of the skills and knowledge that webmasters have invested in previously applies fully today with Bing.”

Bing SEO tips offered

A number of search engine optimisation (SEO) tips for Microsoft´s Bing have been offered by IT Pro, three months after the service was launched.

According to the news provider, the search engine has gained 11 per cent of the global market share and so is worth focusing on when it comes to online marketing campaigns.

Dan Cohen, MSN´s SEO expert, spoke to the tech-news website telling them the best way to improve rankings on the new search engine.

The first tip he offered was that doing keyword research is the key to boosting a website´s profile.

"Any site which uses best practice for design and optimisation will do as well via Bing as it does any other search engine, so if you´ve properly categorised and linked your site, and have good use of keywords, there´s no reason to panic," IT Pro claimed.

Recently, ratings organisation Nielsen Online said Bing remains third in the battle for search engine supremacy.