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.

BBC Pays Google For SEO & Internet Marketing

Despite Google’s claims that it does not sell better search engine ranking, it has been discovered that the BBC is paying the search giant to place its website at the top of listings for a series of keywords, as part of its internet marketing plan.

The BBC is using £100 million of its £3.5 billion yearly revenue, from TV license fees, to promote itself.

The Corporation said: ”Promoting content like the Mercury Prize online is an effective way to inform the licence fee payers who will want to watch it or read about it. The BBC has an annual budget for marketing and value for money is at the heart of how decisions are made about spending it.”

So how can smaller webmasters and bloggers, who don’t have the luxury of being able to network with Google bosses, compete for a high rank in Google?

As regular readers will be aware, I’m an SEO geek so here’s a few ideas, although non webmasters might lose interest around… now:

We all know the importance of using the correct keywords - but many who aim for broader / more general keywords often wonder why their site isn’t doing too well in Google. The trick here is to increase the number of target keywords, maybe move away from the near-impossible two word keyphrase and consider a ‘longtail’ keyword, containing a three or four word keyphrase.

Once your site or blog starts to become more established you can then begin to lose a keyword or two and move towards your original target. An effective method for small businesses is to include your location within the keyword phrase.

That is of course just one thing to consider in your overall SEO strategy, as I’ve said before, there’s at least 60 minor tweaks needed for top rankings, but it is quickly achievable - even if you have zero technical knowledge.

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.