Why Bing is so Crucial in an SEO Plan?

Bing LogoWhen talking about SEO the first thing that comes to peoples mind is Google, but you should not neglect other search providers such as Bing. Combined with MSN, Bing accounts for about 16% of all internet searches. Every search engine gives different importance to various factors in determining how the sites will be ranked. Along with basic things such as keywords and content relevancy for example which are the same in Bing and Google there are other factors more unique to Bing. One of them is considering spelling and grammar in determining positioning of websites.

Bing is obviously trying to introduce novelties in search and differentiate them selves from Google. Duane Forrester from Bing wrote a blog post on the Bing Webmaster Blog saying that Bing’s search ranking algorithms consider poor grammar, typing errors and poor language to be part of their ranking factors. She also said that if over time website shows patters of poor grammar page after page it may have a stronger negative impact on rankings and commented about one of the reasons for that criterion: “This might all seem a bit “down in the weeds”, but just as you’re judging others’ writing, so the engines judge yours. If you struggle to get past typos, why would an engine show a page of content with errors higher in the rankings when other pages of error free content exist to serve the searcher? Like it or not, we’re judged by the quality of the results we show. So we are constantly watching the quality of the content we see.”

All of this is done to increase the quality of search results and to bring quality content to the top. Things like sentence structure, bad spelling, lack of punctuation, over punctuation, etc. can hurt website rankings.

Google Vs BingConsidering other factors Bing can be quite different from Google. Backlinks are of less importance, if you compare results from Bing and Google the top ones in Google have more backlinks than the ones in Bing, anchor text is important for Bing as it is for Google, page rank matters less on Bing also fresh content, on Google new websites can appear faster in top results than they do on Bing.

One of the tools you can use to make your job easier is Bing webmaster central, it has recently been restarted. It gives you insight into how your site is performing and it you can see tips about what to look at on your site. Bing also looks at bounce rate; it shows whether users stay on your website or go to back to search in short period of time. If that is happening often it can hurt your rankings.

Those are some thing that you should pay attention to when doing SEO for Bing, most of the other things that work for Google will work as well for Bing, as always if you need to have good and interesting content for your users to have any long lasting results.