Is Bing Included in Your Promotion Plan

Since its inception, Microsoft's Bing has been getting increasing attention in the search engine market. According to latest stats, Bing's market share has been up for the third straight month and occupies 9.70% share of searches in February 2009. Most of the rises are stolen from the market leader Google, who, on the contrary, has suffered from two consecutive months of slight drops in share of searches. However, Google's market is still far higher than its competitors, at 70.95% in February 2009.

The question is, whether webmasters should include Bing in their website promotion plan? Well, given its increasing weight in search engine market, one definitely can't afford to overlook Bing completely. The good news is, taking Bing into consideration when promoting your website won't take you any further efforts. Let's examine Bing's search engine optimization (SEO) guide first.

According to Bing's official guide regarding to search engine optimization, one should perform the following basic things in order to get a good position in Bing:

• Develop great, original content (including well-implemented  keywords) directed toward your intended audience
• Use well-architected code in your webpages (including images and Sitemaps) so that users’ web browsers and search engine crawlers can read the content you want indexed)
• Earn several, high-quality, authoritative inbound links

As you can see, the guideline above is quite similar to that of Google. This is also the case in reality, which means, a website ranking high in Google normally ranks high in Bing, too. There is only one point that I'd like to point out: New sites generally doesn't rank well in Bing, whereas new sites will have a reasonable rank in Google not long after its launch. Nevertheless, that doesn't change the fact that there are no fundamental differences between Google and Bing with regard to ranking criteria. I guess it's just because Bing doesn't have a update frequency as high as that of Google.

So, from my point of view, Bing should indeed be included in our promotional plan, given its rising influence in the search engine market. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that we need to spend dedicated efforts to learn Bing-specific SEO techniques. As long as both search engines are keyword and syntax based, the underlying fundamentals won't be much different. Only after a truly next generation search engine, which is more intelligent and semantic based, comes out can things become different.