Last week, Yahoo announced that the organic search results on Yahoo will be powered by Bing beginning in August/September. Yahoo is already testing Bing results on some result pages.

Is the Yahoo-Bing change relevant to your website?

According to the latest comScore data, Yahoo and Microsoft sites had a combined search market share of 31.6% in June 2010.

Yahoo sites had 3.2 billion search queries and Microsoft sites had 2.2 billion search queries in June 2010. That’s a total of 5.4 billion search queries in one month.

If your website is listed for the right keywords in the Bing results, you will get a lot of website visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.

Getting visitors from Bing will also make your website less dependent on Google.

How to optimize your web pages for Bing

Optimizing your web pages for Bing is not much different from optimizing your web pages for Google. Just like Google, Bing requires optimized web pages and good inbound links if you want to see your website on the first search result page.

The difference is the weight that Bing puts in the different ranking factors. Things that work well with Google might not have the same effect on Bing and vice-versa.

Here are some tips that will help you to get the best possible results for your website:

• Optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your site for Bing. By targeting the exact algorithm of a search engine, you increase your changes of getting listed on the first result page.
• Do not optimize the same page for more than one keyphrase. It is much better that a web page is highly relevant to one keyphrase than somewhat relevant to many keyphrases.
• If possible, optimize each page of your website for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination. The more targeted the optimization, the more likely it is that the web page will be listed in the top results.

Check if your web pages are ready for Bing

If you want to make sure that your web pages are perfectly optimized for Bing, analyze them with IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer. The Top 10 Optimizer will analyze the content of your web page based on Bing’s current algorithm and it will tell you how to change your web pages so that they will get top 10 rankings on Bing.

The Top 10 Optimizer also analyzes the backlinks to your page and it will tell you how to change the links so that you get better results. In addition to Bing, IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer also works with Google and the local variations of these search engines.

You will lose a lot of traffic if your web page currently has high rankings on Yahoo but not on Bing. Yahoo’s own results will be dropped after the transition to the new Bing results. The sooner you start to optimize some of your web pages for Bing, the better.

source: Axandra.com

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