SEO for Bing & Yahoo vs. Google: How to Rank for the “Other Guys”

As Google dominates the search market, people seem to forget that ranking among the search engines is not achieved through one uniform strategy. Last year, Microsoft made a deal with Yahoo! for their search property. They kept the skin of the Yahoo! search engine, but it is now powered by the same algorithm that serves Bing. This merger increased their combined market share to 30% of all searches, quite a sizeable audience when you consider that that’s over 36 billion searches per month.

So how do you optimize your website specifically for Bing and Yahoo? Follow these tips to rank where your competitors are not.

• Meta Descriptions: So maybe it’s because people stopped keyword stuffing meta descriptions once Google started ignoring them years ago within their ranking algorithm, but Bing/Yahoo still pay attention to these. Make sure you use your keyword 1-2 times and close to the start of your description. Try to keep it less than 14 words so it is more user-friendly since this allows for the full description to show up in the search engine results page (SERP). 
• Backlinks, PageRank, and “Fresh” Content Matter Less:  Comparative testing has shown that these factors matter less within the Bing/Yahoo results as compared to Google. This is important to remember because you may be able to rank higher than your competition on words that are extremely competitive in the Google market.
• Inbound Anchor Text, Domain Authority, and Domain Age Matter More: Testing has shown that Bing’s algorithm cares more about the anchor text of links pointing to your website, the authority of the domain (as in Amazon.com), and the domain age.

Leverage these actionable insights and you’ll be outranking the competition in the Bing/Yahoo market or contact your SEO Team to find out how to create an SEO campaign targeted at each of the search engines. Want to check a side by side comparison of the search engine results pages for a given term in both markets? Just type it into Bingle.

For more technical analysis, please check SEOmoz’s coverage.