SEO For Bing

by Tim Grice – Original post is here.

Just a quick one today following on from my look at how Bing could be ranking sites yesterday.

I have had comments here on the blog, on twitter and even by email looking for a little more proof that Bing is putting their main emphasis on domain age and target anchor percentage. For anyone who missed the post yesterday, target anchor percentage means the percentage of backlinks that are anchored with your target keyword.

Today I wanted to back up the evidence from yesterday with some more lovely figures I decided to use linkscape and the SEOmoz tool set to take an indepth look at the keyword “make money”. I chose this one due to the competition and the fact that most sites targeting this phrase are heavily optimised.

Below are the results and again I have circled the areas “I” think Bing are putting the most emphasis on for ranking purposes.

The two sites are:

Experienced People – Number 1 on Google for “make money”.

Making Online Money – Number 1 on Bing

Some Points To Note

1 – As you can see from the above table the Google site is far better optimised on page, more quality backlinks, more target anchor links and a far superior PageRank. This makes it easy to understand why Google ranks it so high but why does Bing not?

The only thing I can put this down to is the fact that the Bing Site has a more focused link profile in that it has a higher percentage of anchored backlinks. It also is an older domain slightly, on every test I have done the domains have always been older than those on Google.

2 – Bing are obviously not taking the amount and quality of backlinks or PageRank into consideration or their top “make money” site would not stand a chance. PageRank 2??

3 – Something I picked up on from both sites was that very little link juice passed through their target anchor links. This says to me that you don’t need your anchored links to be high quality in order to pass on relevance.

4 – In order to rank higher on Google you need to view SEO as a total package leaving no area under optimised. If you want top results on Google ,who have around 80% traffic share, you need to be systematically implementing SEO on and off page.

In my opinion from the evidence I have collected, Bing are putting a strong focus on domain age and target anchor link percentage. It won’t allow many spammers to get good rankings for competitive keywords but what it will do is create a lack of freshness among their results, something Google accomplish with ease.

Thanks

Tim- Original post is here.

by Tim Grice – Original post is here

Well I am sure were all just about sick and tired of hearing about Bing? Have we all given it a whirl already?

Despite the widespread attention I though I would do a post on it anyway but as always from a 100% SEO point of view. What I really want to do with this post is look at what makes a site rank No.1 on Bing in comparison to Google? What SEO techniques are going to get you exposure on Bing that won’t necessarily do the same for you on Google.

In true SEO Wizz style I picked a keyword and took a look at the top ranking sites on Bing and Google.

“seo services” was the keyword, I figured we may as well keep it relevant plus this is a highly competitive keyword, with a top ppc price of £3.77, not overly high but competitive enough for our purposes.

Ok well we put together the following figues, take a look over them we’ll try to explore them a little.

The two sites I looked at are as follows:-

Whitehatmedia – ranked 1 on Bing

and

Smart Traffic – ranked 1 on google

Right let’s break this down a little.

On Page Factors

The Google site is slightly better optimised on page but in my opinion the differences are not enough to suggest anything major. Maybe Google takes into accounut on page optimisation more than the new bing search engine.

Every time I do these comparisons the top Google sites always seem to implement the meta keywords, yet they don’t use them to determine rankings anymore, right? I’d keep using them anyway, what’s the harm.

Off Page Factors

This is where we see clear differences between the 2 sites.

The Google No.1 has a massive link popularity and a better link diversity. The Google site even enjoys a more focused anchor distribution.

It’s nice to see the younger domain doing better on Google, half the age of the site on Bing

Linking Pages

The pages that link to a site have always played a major role when ranking for keywords. On Google the idea is that you should acquire links from pages that are as relevant as possible.

This part of the table shows that the Google site has a higher percentage of links from pages with the keyword in the body, however the bing site has more links from pages with the keyword in the title tag. Is this the key to better Bing rankings?? Could be.

Looking down the table it is quite clear to see what Google focuses on and why sites rank higher on Google. Link popularity, diversity, anchor distribution. On the other hand it is quite interesting to note that the site with the higher PageRank does better on Bing.

So top tips from SEO Wizz…..

If you want to rank higher on Bing:-

• Make your domain age increase
• Try to acquire links from pages with your keywords in the title tag

To be fair both of these tips would help your Google campaign but it seems that more emphasis is put on these factors by Bing.

Another thing I noticed was that both sites have implemented heavy article marketing, so keep writing and distributing that keyword focused content, it works.

More research needed for it to be conclusive.

Thanks

Tim