As the new search engine rolled out, went through the initial hype period and survived it taking a significant amount of search industry share, questions about bing SEO started to rise.

About bing:

As a major search engine, bing respects most of the rules we’re already used to following when optimizing for other major search engines (Google & Yahoo!). However, there are significant differences in search results and it’s plain easy to see that algorithms of Google and bing differ a lot.

I have took new Microsoft‘s search engine on a intensive test run and have it set-up as my homepage for some time now. I really like bing’s localization and how it actually targeted the international market pretty well. Results localized by country are pretty good (it’s not Google, but hey, give them some time ) and relevant. Yahoo for example is as useful in localized search as yesterday’s newspapers when searching for fresh news. This is why Google is a major leader in international search engine market and now, bing has got a chance to change this.

We’ve also seen a nice income of traffic from bing while Google Analytics still doesn’t recognize bing as a search engine at all. Our search engine rankings positions are in most cases much higher on Google, but that’s mostly because of difference in bing’s and Google’s algorithms and the fact we’ve been optimizing ourselves for Google since the time our site first came out.

About bing SEO:

According to the recent studies you probably can’t really optimize your website for Bing specifically. You can optimize it for major search engines and Bing will be just fine with it.

Most of the studies that were taken in this small amount of time show that:

• There is no difference in on-site optimization between Google and Bing. There might be some differences in how much importance these search engines give to various on-site ranking factors (title, h1, h2, h3, alt tags, meta data etc.).
• It appears that Bing gives more importance to the title tag then other major search engines.
• Bing seems to value the domain age factor a lot.
• Bing seems to like backlinks even more then Google does.

Bing vs Google:

Some additional information about search engine optimizing bing can be found here.  Also some good ideas can be seen in this post.