Bing continues to grow, making it more important for SEO

It appears that Microsoft continues to make a case for companies to factor Bing into their search engine optimization (SEO) strategy after the company saw its search engine market share in the U.S. increase in August.

According to comScore, Microsoft sites saw their share of searches increase 0.4 percentage points to 9.3 percent in August. Meanwhile, Google saw its share of the market dip slightly with a 0.1 point drop to 64.6 percent.

Overall, all the major search engines saw their searches increase last month, but Microsoft saw the largest gain with a 7 percent increase of 1.29 billion searches. This still leaves the search engine far behind Google's monthly search total of just under 9 billion.

Although comScore's numbers still have Microsoft in third place with less than 10 percent of the search engine market, these figures show that a Microhoo deal will likely make it important for companies to use search engine marketing for the new Bing/Yahoo partnership.

Together, Yahoo and Microsoft sites conducted more than 4.1 billion searches in August - giving them approximately 19 percent of the market.