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Optimizing Microsoft Bing

This week Microsoft made a bold move by taking over the Yahoo! search business. The alliance makes Bing the technology for all Yahoo! and Microsoft search. It establishes a credible competitor to Google and a search player that marketers need to consider as part of their strategy. However, most people have very little idea how Bing works and how to optimize for it.

Understanding Bing

Microsoft Bing is an innovative Search Decision Engine designed to compete with Google by providing more meaningful results. Although search is now about brand as much as anything, this does seem like a smart move for Microsoft.

Bing is largely based on Powerset, a start-up semantic search solution that Microsoft acquired for a small fortune last year. It looks like a great deal now. The Powerset technology is designed to extract semantic meaning and relationships from web content. The power of structured or semantic content is that it may be assembled in much more meaningful and ultimately helpful ways.

If you search for "Seattle Opera" on Bing it returns maps and directions, schedules, ticket ordering, and other helpful information. Rather than mixing the closest matches by popularity in one jumble of listings, Bing tries to organize or "cluster" information around a topic. Google does this as well, but it is territory that Bing is staking its business on just as Google used popularity as its secret sauce.

With Bing links are semantically connected and pivot on different facets - McCaw Hall, Seattle Opera house, and via inference Seattle Shakespeare festival, sporting events, and other events and performances in Seattle. The faceted navigation is really the breakthrough with Bing. You can see an example of the facets on the screenshot I took on my phone.

On a side note, Bing and Google both have great mobile search, which to me is more useful than web search because of the location services.

Semantic Search - The Future?

People have been experimenting with semantic and Bayesian search algorithms for years with various levels of success. The Ask search engine provides a pretty good level of semantic clustering, although I believe that most of this is artificial around common terms. Mahalo uses human editors to bake out popular search results with semantic relationships. The experimental Hakia Search Engine (http://www.hakia.com/) has made some interesting progress using natural language processing.

Many people believe that Semantic Search is the future - "The Semantic Web" is Web 3.0. As an XML web vendor I hate to argue this point (although I think Web 3.0 has a lot more to with what Google is doing with Waves than the semantic web, but that is for another post).

The Impact of Bing in your Web Marketing

The less academic and more pragmatic question for Bing is, "what is the importance of Bing for a website marketer?" Before last week I week I would have said, "Not much." But with the recent announcement that Microsoft is taking over the Yahoo! Search business, Bing has catapulted its position in the search market. The combined "Micro-Hoo" market share may still only be 30% in the US and much less worldwide, but it is 30% of a big pie, and suddenly worth considering.

I think that Bing is especially important for lifestyle and consumer markets because of the traffic it generates off of portals like MSN and Yahoo! which have more defined demographics than Google. You would think that the combination of portals, content, and user information would be an advantage that Bing can bring to advertisers. Time will tell.

Regardless of your market, Bing is now a good portion of search traffic, and it is worth considering your Bing strategy.

Optimizing for Bing

The good news is that optimizing your site for Bing is not too different from optimizing your site for Google. Of course there is not an authoritative reference for optimizing Bing. Search algorithms are as closely held secrets as the recipe for Coca Cola. But from my experiments it appears that the biggest difference is that Bing ranks your site by "on-page optimization" much more than Google.

With Google your rankings are heavily determined by off page factors, like how many sites link to your website, the authority and trust-level for those sites, the anchor text that is used in the links. The determining factors for Google are things that are generally out of your control. With Bing authority and popularity are still very important, but the scale tilts towards the things that you can control.

In my research the following elements are highly important for optimizing Bing:

Domain Name: Bing put's an inordinate amount of emphasis on the domain name to determine relevance. I think weighting is excessive because most domain names have little to do with the relevance of content. Most sites with generic domain names are farming links not providing quality information. So I do not see how domain name should be so important, but with Bing it is.

As an example of the weight on domain names for Bing, compare a search for the term "Social Networking" on Google and Bing. On Bing six of the top ten results use the term in the domain name. On Google none of the results use the term in the domain name. Assuming you do not want to change your domain name, you can still use the keywords in your path URLS and get a boost...

Search Friendly URLs: For anyone not using the structured URL features in Ingeniux CMS, it is time to start. Like domain name, the URL keywords weigh heavily in Bing.

Title Elements: Like Google, Bing loves Title Elements. Use them wisely and often. They are the most important SEO element you can control.

Web Content: Despite the weighting of the domain name, Bing's real focus is looking at the content and trying to determine its meaning. The more you structure your content and information architecture in a meaningful, directed way, the better your site will perform in Bing. Back to the opera example, make sure that your content like Tickets and Schedules is clearly stated in your navigation and authoritative pages. If you use Ingeniux CMS, Bing will love the semantic structure of you content and navigations. Like any SEO effort, try and avoid duplicate content or redirect the authority using internal linking and Bot instructions (canonical, no-index, no-crawl, etc).

Meta Keywords? For years I have been advocating that customers stop using Meta Keywords. Google does not use them. And I think it is too much effort for too little payoff for the rest of the market. In Yahoo! the keywords are only synonyms and have no ranking weight, and of course the Yahoo! Engine is going away. The trouble is that I do not know if Bing uses the keywords content in their algorithm. I doubt it. MSN did not and I do not see how Bing could derive any value considering it is semantically crunching content. But I would love to hear from the community if they have had any experience with meta keywords and Bing.

Conclusion

Personally I welcome Bing and am glad they are making a run at the search market. Competition is inherently good for markets, for consumers and vendors alike. I really like Microsoft's strategy of using semantic search. It is a strategy I have been advocating Microsoft take for years and it is exciting to see it evolving so quickly now. As a web marketer I think that the combined reach and more "decision" / action aspect of Bing and Yahoo! is compelling and worth putting on the radar for organic SEO or pay-for-click campaigns.

Let me know what you think about Bing and any SEO insights you may have.

Posted by David Hillis at 4:00 pm