The internet has become quite the prestigious place for information seekers and researchers, but there is a reason it’s so easy to enter a search term and a well refined set of pages come back saving you time and energy surging through useless results- Google and Bing SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Since Google and Bing came on the scene and set the trends that quality, useful, and well formatted content is king, people have been racing to try to please them so they will put their sites up high in the search engine rankings or on the first page where seekers of their content will find it. Quality pages have always been the product of these two companies and with newer and more sophisticated algorithms that’s exactly what they serve up.
Many, however seem to prefer Google over Bing but without even looking too deeply into what makes Bing tick. Both are phenomenal search engine technologies and for the most part Bing is just as valuable as Google when it comes to getting traffic to your site. There are some differences to note that make your chances better on either one or both in some cases. We’re going to discuss these differences here.
A few additional tweaks of a well built and optimized for Google page can make it rank well on Bing as well. In some cases if your page does well on Google it may not do so well on Bing but putting more emphasis on key components Bing looks at more will help you do well on both engines.
Google’s search engine algorithm has a lot stricter rules for how your on and off page optimization needs to happen. For the most part Bing follows the same parameters but puts more emphasis on different parts. Most of the optimization such as writing good, useful, valuable, content visitors want and need to read, inbound links from other sites and outbound links to other sites that help the research continue their journey are required on both engines but off page optimization is where this tends to differ a bit.
Having an exact match (for keywords) domain helps you on both engines but tends to help you more on Bing, especially if the domain is aged. Google tends to like fresh content but fresh content on an aged domain is better.
With Bing, page rank is not as important. Search results will often yield PR2 pages on the top 10 spots while on Google PR1 tends to always hog those spots. Bing also doesn’t seem to worry as much about content that is fresh over content that is good but not updated. Google rewards fresh content while Bing seems indifferent so long as it’s good content, gets a lot of traffic, is useful, and has plenty of quality backlinks (inbound links).
Links are also where Bing seems to differ. On Bing, your inbound and outbound links do better if the anchor text, the label of your hyperlink or theirs (inbound to your page from another’s) matches pretty closely to the title page of the landing page. If someone links to your page and their anchor text matches your pages title tag, Bing rewards it in their algorithm.
Bing tends to like flash sites more than Google. If your site has a lot of flash components it tends to slow the page load, and that seems to ding it. Bing doesn’t make a distinction there as many sites with flash components in them still seem to do well on Bing.
Google’s algorithm seems to give more emphasis on links where Bing seems to care more about authoritative sites or sites with inbound links from sites like .edu, .gov, and so on.
You can see from the aforementioned that generally a well optimized (but not overopomized) site built for google would likely do well on Bing but by putting some emphasis on links, anchor text, title and header tags, and authoritative inbound links, you can give your site a better chance to fare well on both sites. The two sites weigh things differently and some testing will help you figure out what would work best. Good Luck!