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.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips and Info - Bing, Yahoo, and Google

Bing is doing its best to differentiate itself from Google. Attempting to claim some high ground, Microsoft is positioning Bing as the world’s first “decision engine” as opposed to its predecessors, the search engines. Differentiation requires using different algorithms and a new design on the search engine results page. New design or not the SERP’s on Bing do resemble Google’s at first glance.

Depending on the search, Bing delivers either highly relevant results or something a little less so. Searches in Microsoft’s wheelhouse of health, local, travel, and shopping are better than most others on Bing. The wheelhouse group was not arrived at by accident. These markets carry high potential for advertising revenues and have historically been among the highest revenue generators on the internet.

Bing isn’t going as far as saying that it will change search engine optimization, yet. In early June, a whitepaper released by Bing’s Webmaster Center Team stated “Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design.”

The Bing Team emphasizes that good content and search engine optimization are crucial elements in website design so it appears that what applies to Google and Yahoo will work with Bing. It also appears that attempts to optimize for Bing will bring similar results to the other search engines as well. The Bing team hasn’t given much other information beyond emphasizing on page content and standard SEO practices and maybe that what’s important at the moment. Based on PowerSet, Bing will definitely give more weight to content, at the expense of visuals.

Still in its infancy, Bing will need to broaden its wheelhouse to avoid turning off searchers that come over for a try, find a bunch of irrelevant results and never return. Initial traffic numbers were conflicted but it appeared that Bing had attracted some significant numbers, whether at the expense of Google and Yahoo, or not. The rest remains to be seen.

What Bing, Twitter, and Facebook Mean for SEO

Google is traditionally the main area of focus when it comes to search engine optimization. With the search engine giant so far ahead of the game in terms of search market share, it's not hard to understand why.

Search is changing though, and there are always new elements coming into play. Since social media has come into its own, more opportunities and questions have come along with it. Now Microsoft is going for Google's throat with a new search engine and an aggressive marketing campaign. What this means for the future of search market share is yet to be determined, but there's no denying Bing is capturing some attention, and that means there are people searching with it. Altered your SEO strategy for Bing? Tell us why.

SEO for Bing
Microsoft's stance on search engine optimization really doesn't appear to be all that different from Google's. You're not going to get the same results on both Google and Bing in many cases, but that is after all why the two can co-exist. The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy.

Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam. Bing in fact, hasn't really changed much (from Live Search) in terms of crawling.

"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," Microsoft says in a Bing white paper for webmasters (pdf). "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn't changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog."

Sidenote: Webmasters will want to acknowledge that Microsoft has increased the size limit of sitemaps from 10,000 URLs to 50,000. Google is also now supporting up to 50,000 "child sitemaps" of sitemaps index files.

Like I was saying, the biggest difference between the two search engines is in the presentation. Bing of course separates (some) results into categories. This has worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up. Bing also has the explore pane (navigational menu on the left-hand side of search results), which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google's recent addition of "search options."