In our previous post, Bing, Yahoo & Google: Are You Following Same SEO Strategies for All 3, we discussed the need for different strategies. In this post, we will be evaluating what strategies you need to follow when optimizing for Bing/Yahoo search engines.
As per the stats accumulated by Search Engine Journal, Google holds a significant share in search engine market and contains 67% of the search market while Bing and Yahoo settle for 29% of the U.S. So, despite the whopping difference, both the search engines still manage to come up as influential search engines. So, for making your brand visible online, you will have to focus on each of the search engines to get discovered online.
In the last, Firefox had ended the deal with Google and had opted for Yahoo as their default search engine. Google’s agreement with Safari had come to an end, and eventually, Bing and Yahoo have been trying to secure the spot.
Considering all this, there is a need to optimize for Bing/Yahoo.
Here are the techniques that you need to do to get your site optimized for Bing/Yahoo. Most of these techniques must have already been managed if you are already opting for Google.
1) Submit over Bing website, and you get indexed in Bing
As per Bing, to get indexed in the search engine, the first step is to garner some traffic from Bing. To make this happen, you will have to submit your website to Bing Webmaster Tools and wait for it to get crawled. The wait could be a little longer as compared to Google; this is because Bing does not update their index the same way as Google.
2) Technical Requirements that you should consider
Bing focuses well over some predefined factors when ranking your website. Below listed are those technical factors:
- The website should have an impressive page load speed.
- Your site should have Robots.txt so that Bing robots could understand what to crawl and what not.
- Make sure that your sitemap is kept clean and does not contain unnecessary URLs.
- It is best when you make use of 301 redirects in case you have switched content between websites.
- Bing has recently started acknowledging Canonical Tags, which helps the search engine to differentiate between original and duplicate pages.
3) Focus Upon Title tags
As compared to Google, Bing emphasizes more upon the title tags. That is why, to get better ranks in Bing, you will have to use relevant keywords in the title tags of every web-page. However, you will have to refrain from using too many keywords, as this will get you penalized by Google.
4) Use Simple and identifiable keywords
Bing is not that good at analyzing broad-matching keywords. That is why when you start optimizing, you will have to ensure that you make use of exact keywords to get the best-ranking on Bing’s search results. Wordstream has a great tool that will help you pick the perfect words and phrases for Bing optimization.
5) Local Listings
Bing favours websites that have well-optimized local listings, so make sure you claim your listings like a champ with www.bingplaces.com.
In addition to these to-dos, it is also crucial that you use the same ethics and standards as Google and avoid the following:
-Building backlinks
No matter what search engine is it, Backlinks are the core for search engine rankings. But, for Bing rankings, you need to focus a little extra. As per Searchmetrics, “on average, 52-53 percent of the backlinks of websites ranked among the top 30 results on Bing contain keywords in the anchor text (which is about 10% more than Google).” So, while making backlinks, make sure that they are coming from authorized websites.
