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Posts Tagged ‘seo’

Optimizing your website for Bing

24 Dec

The results made me curious and this lead me to find several aspects concerning search engine optimization for different search engines. Although the basic SEO techniques are the same (backlinks, title, url, headings, bolds, etc) there are some differences on how Bing and Google interpret the same results. One way to prove this using Bingle a search engine that shows Bing and Google results side by side. You might find the first results are pretty much the same no matter what the search but from position #5 and down you’ll start noticing different results on the search engines as the following image shows:

Bing SEO

Since Bing’s search algorithm is not for public display, some SEO experts tested several search queries in order to find possible patterns to interpret what Bing weights and doesn’t and came across the following conclusions:

Bing Search ranking factors

The following list show’s several points compared to Google seo optimization techniques

  • Inbound links anchor text. Bing gives more weight than Google to this so think well when linking internally. Although the quality of these inbound links can provide a good value to the page you are linking to, Bing attributes more weight to the anchor text of this link rather than the quality of the page the link is coming from.
  • Domain age and site authority are more important on Bing than on Google.
  • Bing seems to be more Flash SEO friendly.
  • On-page optimization matters. Bing seems to give more weight to on-page factors than Google does.
  • Number of backlinks is less important to Bing. It’s still in the gray zone if the nofollow attribute is or not a ranking factor
  • Fresh content weights less. Bing prefers older results to new fresh content

For now it is too early to say which factors are of primary importance with Bing. But the fact that their search results are relevant means that their algorithm is really precise. Well, maybe the relevant results in Bing are due to the fact that web masters were taken by surprise and they haven’t had the time to optimize for Bing. As a result, the content is authentic, there are no SEO gimmicks and artificial pumping. We’ll see if this will stay so in the future, when web masters learn how to optimize for Bing as well!

Bing Optimization – How to optimize your website for Bing

Like Google, Bing has it’s Webmaster Tools an excelent way to help improve your results and track your website performance. Bing also has several articles that might help you:

If you want good results keep creating good, original content, apply basic seo practices and techniques and after having your base ready start improving for specific search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo but keep in mind, users come before search engines.

I’m interested in what you are thinking so consider leaving a comment :)

 
 

Which search engine has better click through rate

24 Nov

Google Analytics still does a lousy job at filtering click information such and the source from where the visitor that clicked on AdSense came from, number of clicks, etc.

My first goal was to isolate website mediums so I turned to some PHP and decided to show ads only to visitors coming from a given site: Bing, Yahoo and Google.
For this I used PHP HTTP Referer variable.
I ran this 1 week for each search engine, and came up with the following results:

Search Engine Clicks

As you can see, Bing has the best CTR of all 3 followed by Yahoo and in last place Google.
Techcrunch as written an article on this subject called Are Bing Users Twice As Likely To Click On An Ad Than Google Users?. This study was backed up by Chitika and that meaning it’s United States and Canada based so if you are from another country like myself where Yahoo represents only 5% of search traffic and Bing somewhere from 10 to 15% I advise you to make a case study before making any assumptions.

On Chitika’s study it’s pointed out that Bing users click around 50% more on ads than Google users and 20% more than Yahoo! users.

Here’s the table from Techcrunch:

impressions clicks CTR % more clicks (Bing)
Google 26,929,367 260,518 0.97% 55.11%
Yahoo! 3,157,648 39,008 1.24% 21.47%
Bing 2,236,366 33,558 1.50%
Total 32,323,381 333,084 1.03%

Reading this data you have to be aware of one particular variable. Google is by far the best traffic source sending somewhere around 70 – 90% of traffic and Bing is somewhere around 8-15% of traffic to websites thus making Google achieve a worse CTR but from a much larger network explaining why the Click Through Rate is so low.

On the other hand Bing has, without a doubt, better CTR quality than any of the other search engines. From much less traffic came much more susceptible ad clicking visitors. I guess all doubts about optimizing websites for Bing have been shredded right now.

 
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