According to searchengineland, you have until mid/late 2010 to prepare your website for Microsoft’s Bing search engine ranking. The bad news is, if you’re already ranking well in Yahoo! it will all count for nothing.
So how do you know whether you should worry about Bing? Start with identifying how much traffic Yahoo! is sending your way. If the number is significant, you should invest the effort to do what’s needed in Bing.
Check out David Shapiro’s great post on this subject.
His key points are:
- Identify the keywords you rank well for in Yahoo but do not rank well for in Bing. Between now and next year, you’re going to want to raise your rankings for these terms once Microsoft flips the switch and is powering all of Yahoo’s search results.
- Identify which Yahoo terms you rank 6-10 for that may return ‘Quick Tabs’. With the way Bing displays search results for these queries, ranking 6-10 is significantly less valuable. Bing returns the top five results for the primary keyword you entered, then displays the top three results for up to five related terms, providing a list of 20 possible listings for the user to select.
- If you currently rank 6-10 for any of these keywords you should work on building links to move up into the top five, and focus on achieving top three results for the terms that Bing has chosen for the Quick Tabs, especially considering these terms are more targeted and likely convert better. Due to this new layout, I’d imagine the difference in ranking #6 and #5 for your keywords will yield drastic differences in traffic.
- You also may want to consider temporarily increasing your paid budget to account for any keywords that you are unable to get ranked to make sure visibility doesn’t fall off completely for those terms. A longer term strategy would be to increase the amount of time spent on link building for that page you’re trying to rank for those elusive keywords.
On top of this, get all your sites listed with Bing Webmaster Tools (although when I tried to do it yesterday, there is clearly a bad, bad bug in the system that throws back an error message forbidding you to add a site. When I visited the forum, there were clearly a lot of people experiencing the same annoying problem).
But that doesn’t need to hold up your optimization efforts. Check out the SEO for Bing whitepaper put out by Microsoft that is designed to shed light on the Bing/Microsoft algorithm so you can get ideas as how to best optimize for Bing.
RELATED POSTS: Bing Ramps Up Battle With Google and Microsoft Versus Google: The Battle Intensifies.
