Should You Change Your SEO Strategy For Bing?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Chris Crum is da man! His article about Bing and SEO provides some great insight into how Microsoft’s new search engine has, and will, affect search engine optimization. The question is, should webmasters change their SEO strategy?

My take? If your doing well with your optimization efforts right now, Bing doesn’t change anything. Still, you’ve got read Chris’s article. Here are a few highlights.

With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the SERP. It’s about getting to the top of the right part of the SERP.

That’s a brilliant statement. Personally, I like the categories on the search page because it’s an intuitive and a recognized way to narrow down a search query. Thanks to the popularity of blogging, people are already familiar with tagging and categorizing. So it will be natural to narrow a search result to a specific category if it fits what you are looking for. Therefore, Chris’s observation that you should focus on getting to the top of the right category for each search query is a great observation. But does that change how you should conduct your campaign?

Not really. But, realistically, perhaps a little bit. It will become more important to rank your blog content into the proper category. It might even become feasible, and perhaps prudent, to add categorization to your static website. Time will tell on that one. At any rate, Bing’s categories could very well make SEO strategies a bit more focused.

On links, straight from the mouth of Bing’s horse:

You can’t stop bad links coming to your site. “We take the approach that bad inbound links won’t adversely affect your site ranking unless most or all of your inbound links are from bad sites,” explains DeJarnette.

Bing’s link philosophy is not really any different from Google’s so your link building campaigns really shouldn’t change. As Chris says, the presentation Bing offers may differ from Googles, but your SEO goals should be the same.

One aspect of Chris’s article that I really appreciate is his discussion social media. I believe social media is going to be more important for optimization. It already is and I’ll tell you why. Traffic. Plain and simple. Social media delivers targeted traffic. If you can manage a successful social media campaign to deliver targeted traffic to your site that stays on your site then that increase in traffic coupled with a lower bounce rate can affect your rankings. We’ve discussed that before here and here.

So back to the original question: Should you change your SEO strategy for Bing? I say ‘not yet’. What do you think?