Microsoft /Yahoo Deal - Are Your SEO Vendors Prepared?

The July 29th announcement of a search deal between Yahoo and Microsoft means that the search landscape is changing significantly.

It's said that the combined share of the market that Microsoft's Bing search engine will have is nearly 30%. Time will tell if that percentage holds true.

Key Takeaways of the Mergers

• The term of the agreement is 10 years.
  


• Microsoft’s Bing will be driving search engine results on Yahoo properties
  


• Yahoo will provide the sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.
  


• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business.
  


• Self-serve advertising for both companies will go through Microsoft’s Pay-Per-Click platform (AdCenter)
  

What Does This Mean for SEO?

Being Bing’s results will power search results for both the Bing and Yahoo search engine. Organizations can’t afford NOT to optimize their career sites to perform within the Bing search engine.

How to Optimize for the Bing Decision Engine

Since Bing is MSN with new name and slightly upgraded algorithm the SEO techniques for Bing will remain somewhat the same as for MSN. Here are few SEO tips for Bing

1. Content is king - This holds true for all search engines but keyword rich content seems even more important on Bing, given the way that it organizes and presents information in the search engine results pages (SERPS). Preliminary research indicates that Bing favors pages with at least 300 words of text.
   


2. Domain Age is Key - Bing appears to put a lot of stock into how long a domain has been registered. Since there’s no way to artificially build up a domains age, if you have a newer domain concentrate on all the other factors.
   


3. Keyword rich domains do well - Domains that include keywords seem enjoy good visibility in Bing.
   


4. Sitemap Submission is important - Be sure to submit your sitemap to Bing webmaster tools
   


5. Keyword placement matters - Ensuring you have your keywords in all the right places is imperative with Bing, especially within page titles, header tags, and link text.
   


6. Authoritative inbound links are important - Although this is agreed to be essential for any search engine, Bing appears to act even more favorably toward inbound links, particularly those that are from sites that also have a high number of quality links.
   


7. Linking Out - In the past SEO's have been very careful abut linking out to external websites as yo not to decrease their page rank of the site being optimized. However, it appears that Bing likes external links and increases the page ranking of those pages that have more of them.
   


8. Title Tags of Other Pages - When you link to an external site, ensure that the title tags of the pages you have linked out to have the keyword that is most relevant to your page.

As SEO's become more familiar with Bing and its algorithm I expect that this list will change. If you have additional tips on optimizing for the Bing decision engine, feel free to post them here.