Bing is Microsoft’s own version of a search engine. As it becomes even more popular, the search engine is fast becoming a serious threat to Google. Bing has a complete guideline for webmasters when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Its white paper is provides an in-depth tips on how to create easy to index sites, friendly content, and how to generally make the web pages appealing to search engine spiders.
Webmaster’s Center
Similar to all search engines, Bing’s primary mission is to connect web publishers to readers. So what makes Bing stand out from the rest then? One crucial factor that differentiates Bing is its “categorized choices” feature. The side toolbar contains more targeted selections which will drastically reduce the number irrelevant results. It is designed to save searches countless hours in research.
Best Match
With the feature called “Best Match”, Bing is able to provide excellent search results. For example, if you type brand name companies into the search box, the “best match” will appear at the top of the official website. Basically, you will be able to easily distinguish legitimate websites from other web pages that are targeting the same keywords.
Long Tail Strategies
If you type “plasma television’ into the search box, chances are, the results you get will be quite mixed. Everything from reviews, videos, shopping sites, and videos will appear on the results page. Microsoft aims to help individuals sift through these selections through long tail strategies. Web owners will most likely want to target relevant audiences and Bing lets them do just that.
Data Extraction
The advanced data extraction capability of Bing enables it to give useful information in the hover link. Some information you can derive include address, email links, and phone numbers not only from the specific website but from other legitimate sites on the internet as well.
Hover Links Preview
Hovering the mouse over the search results will enable you to get a glimpse of preview of the website, summary of the query result, and related links. For many web masters, this is an amazing feature because it increases their web traffic significantly. The searchers don’t need to leave the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) to find what they’re looking for.
Flash Recognition
One problem with other search engine is its weakness in detecting readable meta text. Bing has a new technology that’s able to extract data from Flash websites and Silverlight-based content pages. Empty-tagged websites will be noticed by web crawlers and brought out of anonymity.
Local Listing Center
Bing’s local listing center is extremely advantageous for both businessmen and their customers. This is because local searchers typically want to get products or service from companies within their vicinity.
It is easy to see that Bing has integrated a lot of technically-advanced features on their service. Microsoft, with its introduction of Bing, has made the playing field even more competitive among search engines. Searchers can expect that the industry will be made for the better because of this.