With the arrival of Bing, there has been a keen interest in knowing if it will require updating optimization techniques that had been used for MSN.
Initial research is showing that Bing’s search algorithms are not very different from when it was MSN, though the results are being presented differently.
While SEO strategies for Bing will be similar to the ones being used for the major search engines, webmasters are watching closely for any major changes in rankings which may necessitate some additional updates in optimization.
[Microsoft statement:
"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," "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. 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
Bing website ranking is completely automated. The Bing ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as webpage content, the number and quality of websites that link to your webpages, and the relevance of your website's content to keywords. The algorithm is complex and is never human-mediated. You can't pay to boost your website's relevance ranking. However, Bing does offer advertising options for website owners.
That said, MSN offers quite a few Web sites and tools to help site owners ensure their sites are well positioned for indexing within the engine. Bing Webmaster Center provides lots of helpful documentation and tools, including technical and content guidelines similar to Google's Webmaster Tools."]
In summary there are some points that seem to be important:
- Just like other search engines, Bing places a lot of importance on good content. In fact, high quality content seems even more important on Bing, given the way that it organizes and presents information in the SERPs.
- Authoritative inbound links are essential. Bing places high value on inbound links, particularly those that are from sites that also have a high number of links.
- Keyword placement is also of importance. Ensure that keywords are present in titles, H1 tags, and anchor text.
- Domain age seems to be of importance to Bing.
- Focus optimization around one key phrase per page.
- Add a detailed site map and Robots.txt to the website.
- Use a flat Web site hierarchy.
- Ensure that the MSNBot can crawl your site.
- Validating code, fixing broken links, and employing appropriate redirects are strongly recommended by Bing. It also recommends static URLs over dynamic URLs, suggesting HTML content is preferable.
