How can you optimise your website to cater for the two main search engines, Google and Bing.  What about Yahoo? Yahoo hasn’t been forgotten, but Yahoo results are pretty much the same as they use a very similar algorithm, as it’s now run by Microsoft.

So everyone wants to know how they differ in ranking the same websites. What are the ranking factors for Bing.  How much do they differ compared to Google and is it possible to SEO for both search engines?  Read on to find the answers;

Many SEO companies and experts started analysing their rankings in Bing when it launched over a year ago now.  The following information is based on experienced SEO analysts and observations from a wide variety of websites.

Bing Ranking Factors:

Bing takes more note of on page content, especially the Title tag, H1 headers and bold text. Google less so in comparison.

Google takes more notice of older and trusted domains aswell as keyword rich domains. So if you can purchase a 5 year old domain called www.cheapshoesonline.com, then you are 75% there.  Bing also takes the domain name in to consideration, but does not value this as high in the algorithm calculation.

Google is a lot more fussier about the quality of inbound links.  If you want to rank in Bing, using your target keyword as the anchor text will get you to the top quite easily. This used to work for Google, but it is more important for a link to be more natural (eg. linking from a relevant site with the domain name as the anchor text – you don’t need anymore to give Google a heavy signal through anchor text. It already knows if the site is relevant or not, by the title tag, domain name and focus of the content/keywords of the site.)

So How can You Target Bing and Google at the Same Time?

Well this can depend on the website, the back link profile and the content, but the best approach is to get a keyword analysis and backlink tool like Market Samurai amd ascertain what pages are ranking highest for which search engine, or you could use the services of a reputable SEO design company to help you save time doing keyword analysis.

Often, you will find that inner pages with very focussed title tag, and on page content will rank well in Bing, where as Google may favour the home page due to the higher number of back links to that page.  Therefore you can often build back links with a slightly different strategy in mind for Google and Bing.   At the current time, you can afford to build targeted pages with keyword anchor text based back links to your inner pages for Bing, but you’ll need to be more particular of the back links you source for Google.  Mind you, that can easily change if Bing decide to align their algorithm with the Big G.