Bing vs Google: The SEO Differences

With Microsoft and Yahoo combining their muscle in the search space, it is imperative that you do not ignore it in your search engine optimization efforts, especially since it will be the Bing search engine that works behind Yahoo search as well. There have been countless articles written online and in technology magazines comparing Bing to Google, but you need to know the differences between how these two search engines rank their pages so that you can optimize your web pages for both of these as well as Yahoo.

Why Would You Rank Higher In One, But Not In Another?

Most small business owners get frustrated that their site either ranks highly in Bing, but poorly in Google or vice versa. Here are some of the reasons why this may be happening and more importantly some workarounds to tackle this problem.

1. Amount of text: Bing places a lot of importance to content, so if your pages have more than 350 words, then you have better chances of ranking higher in Bing. Not so in Google, for which it doesn't seem to be of importance. So, you need to optimize each and every page individually to meet Bing's page score requirements.
2. Natural Language: Bing places a lot of importance on relevancy, so if your website is optimized with LSI keywords, then you are likely to be ranked higher in Bing. Google is soon catching up, so maybe it's a better idea to optimize based on LSI rather than mindlessly repeating exact keywords. You can also get a firm offering professional link building services to help you out here.
3. Title tags: Bing places more importance on title tags than Google, so make sure that your keywords appear in your title tags as often as possible.
4. Back links and outbound links: Bing places more importance on links in general than Google, and the higher the number of relevant back links you have, the better your chances of a good ranking in Bing. Google used to penalize sites with a large number of outbound links, but Bing likes them, and so you may want to have a judicious amount of these as well in your site. Here again, if you get a professional to work on this area, their link building services team would identify the right places to place links for you, so that it actually translates to a better page rank.
5. Domain age: Both Bing and Google seem to favor older domains, so if you are trying to start off on a new business, it is better to purchase a domain name, that's been around for some time.

What This Means To You?

As a business owner, you would want all the traffic that you can get whether from Bing, Yahoo or Google and the best way to do this is to optimize it for all the major search sites out there. The best way out is to hire professional link building services to help you in your optimization efforts. If you do not do this, you may miss out on a sizeable chunk of traffic as more and more users start using Bing for their searches.