As Microsoft’s upstart Bing search engine continues to mature, its search results are becoming more refined and more in line with the results delivered by market leader Google; and adult search marketers are taking increased notice. Bing just keeps on gaining against Google across several metrics, capturing more than 30 percent of the U.S. search market away from its fierce and well entrenched competitor — and perhaps more importantly, reportedly delivering more clicks per listing than Google. Experts agree that this figure relates to users receiving more relevant search results; further fueling growth in the face of Google — a company once predicated upon those same relevant rankings.
Fortunately, for webmasters, basic search engine optimization will help boost the traffic received from all modern search sites, with any platform-specific differences declining in consequence. With this in mind, the following are a few ways in which you can get your share of this high quality traffic pool:
At the end of the day, savvy search marketers will want to take full advantage of the powerful tools offered by both of today’s search leaders, in their never ending quest for pre-qualified website visitors.
The first step that any Bing marketer should take is to familiarize themselves with Bing’s online webmaster tools (www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster). This resource allows users to see their site as Bing does and to view crawl activity, index coverage, traffic stats and more. Provided tools help optimize your site for better search performance, including keyword research, back link reports (including anchor text and URL), and also offers control over Bing’s crawler, sitemap configurations and a range of helpful options for configuring the search engine’s interaction with your site.
Likewise, Google Webmaster Tools (www.google.com/webmasters/tools) provides a similar array of services for marketers targeting its popular search engine.
According to the company, in addition to identifying any specific problems that Google encounters while accessing a given site, its tools help webmasters view, classify, and download comprehensive data about internal and external links to these sites and detail the search queries that are currently driving traffic to your website.
Neophyte Bing marketers seeking to transfer their knowledge of Google SEM into this unfolding orb will note that Bing provides stronger emphasis to keywords contained within URLs and gives increased weight to any capitalized terms, while preferring to list pages from large, established authority sites.
At the end of the day, savvy search marketers will want to take full advantage of the powerful tools offered by both of today’s search leaders, in their never ending quest for pre-qualified website visitors.
In doing so, they may find insignificant variations in service levels between these two providers and realize that modern search marketers must now cater to two corporate behemoths seeking supreme search engine dominance — by employing increasingly similar strategies.