After all the rumours, Microsoft and Yahoo finally agreed to merge their search services to compete with the grand search engine, Google.
Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing will power the Yahoo search engine, while Yahoo Search Marketing will be powered by Microsoft AdCenter. Yahoo rankings are going to change once it is replaced by Bing, so if Microsoft’s search offerings have not been of any concern to you before, now is the time to become familiar with it’s rules and ways to optimize your website for Bing. Bing is an open search engine to webmaster’s optimization efforts and you can get your website, even the brand new one, to be listed at the top of Bing much faster than on Google. Once your website is well ranked on Bing’s listings you can move on to optimization for Google.
Five simple steps to get noticed on Bing:
1. Choose the oldest domain – the older the domain, the more chances there are of getting your site a high ranking.
2. Pick the best keywords in the title tags of every page on your website – Bing places a lot more emphasis on title tags than Google does.
3. Come up with excellent text – for Bing the amount of text on pages holds more value than it does for Google, so aim for at least 300 words.
4. Outbound links are OK – Google is cautious of the number of outbound links you have on a page whereas Bing seems to like them.
5. Get as many backlines from relevant sites as possible – Bing’s attitude here is “the more, the merrier” but make sure the links are coming from relevant sites.
It takes time to get good rankings with Bing, so the sooner you align your website with Microsoft’s search policies, the better chance you will have to ride the wave of change to the top of Bing’s–and Yahoo’s–search results