Most search engine optimisation tends to focus on Google, understandably. It is thought in most parts of the industry that spending time working out strategies for other search engines is a bit of a waste of time, particularly as the market share left after Google is so small. Since the arrival of Bing on the scene however, many
SEO experts have been looking into running several streams of SEO in order to give pages a more general appeal.
The main issue with optimising for the other search engines has been that they mostly followed Google’s lead. This made any separate optimisation strategy simply not worthwhile. Bing, however, seems to have a few points of difference:
*Outbound links matter with Bing. Most sites are reluctant to give outbound links because they’re afraid it will affect their ranking with Google. Having the wrong associations can make a big impact on your standing with the search engines. Bing appears to actually favour sites generous with their outbound links.
*Bing favours content-heavy pages. The usual advice for content is between 250 and 400 words of text per page, but Bing appears to favour pages with around 750 words per page. You can talk to us at Stuck On about your page content.
*Domain age is even more important to Bing. Google has been taking site history into account for quite some time, but history factors in a little more forward in Bing’s algorithm. There’s not a lot you can do about your site’s history, apart from looking into investing in an older domain.
Bing’s market share is still tiny, so if you have limited resources you should still want to concentrate on optimisation strategies for Google. Tactics for Bing are certainly worth keeping an eye on though.
