Is it time to start paying more attention to Bing?
It is a fact that for internet marketing agencies, that the main objective is often to achieve high organic rankings for their clients in Google. This is understandable given the huge market share that Google has and the sheer quantity of users that are active on Google in some form every day. It might even be suggested that optimising for Bing is rarely considered due to Google's overwhelming dominance – but is it time to change that point of view and start appreciating Bing as a valuable search engine, both for search marketing experts and businesses. There are even some unique features that Bing possesses that, arguably, make it a friendlier search engine for webmasters and for users as well.
The first feature of Bing that is worth mentioning is located in their Webmaster tools and it provides a guaranteed method of having your URL or website indexed by Bing. The feature is simply the option to 'Submit URL' directly to the search engine itself, and it offers peace of mind to the webmaster because they can be confident that their website, or a specific webpage will be indexed. After this process, they can begin to analyse the relevant metrics related to SEO that are available in Bing Webmaster Tool Accounts.
A main focus for Bing in recent months and years has been developing their Webmaster Tools. SEO has evolved at an incredible rate in recent times and people are now realising that keyword-loaded Meta tags and optimised URLs are no longer effective in terms of achieving higher rankings. Times have changed, and this is what Bing are trying to help webmasters understand by providing them with incredibly detailed and accurate analytic reports that have one purpose – to help webmasters improve user experience.
In a recent interview conducted by Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting, Duane Forrester, a senior Product Manager with Bing's Webmaster Program, spoke at length about the how their Webmaster Tools provide site owners with a holistic data set that presents a 'world-view' on the quality of a website, as opposed to getting bogged down in minutiae and technical detail. Forrester himself says, "The tools are a space where we have a conversation with the owner of the website. The goal is to give them something of value that will help them create a better product." This means that Bing wants to help webmasters improve their product, because this is going to help Bing itself become a better product by offering up more relevant and better quality search results. Bing see their tools almost as an opportunity to educate the webmaster about why their website is running a certain way, and how they can modify it to improve results.
There are several other key points key takeaway points that Forrester made in that interview relating to how Bing is aiming to become a closer rival to Google – at least in terms of search:
• Forrester said the ranking of priorities for web publishers should be as followed:1. Content 2. Social Media 3. Links.
• Bing also have their own internal metric known as 'Static Rank', which is used to judge the value of a webpage as they perceive it.
• Bing have an allowance of 1% for what they call 'Dirt' in Sitemaps. 'Dirt' means following a URL and seeing a redirect, a 404 error or a 500 error. After this 1% allowance they begin to lose trust in that website.
• Bing are going to use RSS feeds to locate content as a cost saving measure.
• Page performance is NOT a ranking factor for Bing. Forrester states that a page with a 4 second load time may well be more useful to a user than a page with a 1 second load time – the important thing is the quality of the content.
So, is it time that we in the digital marketing industry started paying more attention to Bing as another hub to base search marketing strategies? Here at Click Consult we are able to strategize and build campaigns across all the major search engines – but please feel free to comment and give your opinion on the matter.
