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Is your Web site optimized for Bing? Microsoft is spending over $80 million dollars advertising their new “decision engine” Bing. Currently, Bing has achieved only a 10% market share but that equates into a significant amount of traffic.

Bing is ushering in the new realm of decision engine optimization (DEO) that returns more relevant results by digging deeper into filtering search results. With its capacity to gain market share, it is worthwhile to understand how current SEO practices affect site rankings in Bing.

Bing returns searches in four major categories in order to give users better search results faster. When a user submits a search term, Bing organizes the results into categories called the Explore Pane and the links within the pane are termed Quick Tabs. The four major categories change according to any given search so optimizing a site for a certain category will be useless. Therefore, it’s best to see where your site is ranking for your brand, product, service, etc. and focus on where you rank in those areas instead of in the categories where you want or think you should be.

The title and description displayed in the results is taken directly from a site’s tags. Even if your tags do not “read” well in the search results, do not change them drastically as this may impact your ranking on other search engines. But a little tweaking to improve the call to action and “readability” wouldn’t hurt.

Bing displays Sitelinks and the anchor text comes from anchor text from a site’s internal pages. Review your internal page links and change any “Click here” links to more descriptive text like “yellow widgets.”

On the right of each search result is a Quick Preview feature. Hover the mouse over the orange dot and a pane appears containing a longer site description, internal links on that page and contact information. Once you find your site on Bing, review the text that appears in your preview pane. Check that appropriate content appears and add contact information to every page on your site to leverage this feature to your benefit.

Bing places an emphasis on images and video since they are becoming more important to users. If you haven’t done so already, addtags to all of your site images and tag your videos with descriptive keywords to improve your rankings.

Online commerce is a Bing focal point. If your site is an e-commerce site, this is especially important to remember. User reviews have a huge impact on others’ decisions to buy. Bing pulls its Web site ratings from CitySearch.com, Yelp.com and Judysbook.com. To improve your sales conversions on Bing, encourage your customers to leave feedback and make sure to list your site on those 3 review sites.

Check that your business is listed correctly in the Local Search section. If it is not, add all the information you can in Bing’s Listing Center.

Whether Bing will be a success or not remains to be seen, however, it’s always best to be prepared and optimize your Web site for the next generation of DEO.

By Brenda Galloway

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