Do you pay much attention to Bing and Yahoo?

[MarieHaynes]

I'm enjoying seeing my reports filter in for my campaigns.  One of the things that I am noticing is that there are many keywords that I have top ten rankings for Google.com, but 3rd or 4th page on Bing and Yahoo.

I know most traffic comes from Google, but I'm wondering if I should put some effort into optimizing for Bing and Yahoo.  Any tips on how to make my site more attractive to these search engines?

[AaronSchinke]

Same thing here. I watch Bing and Yahoo but optimize for Google.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I could tell you to just wait until next month at SMX Advanced - I'm on the "Google Survival tips" panel.  However that wouldn't be very helpful here now would it?

Here's the issue - 1.  If you could find a way to increase site visits by 10% to 20%, and if a reasonable percentage of those were to convert into customers, would that be worth the time and effort to at least consider how to get better rankings in Bing and Yahoo?

Of course there are no hard and fast numbers that can be applied to all sites in every situation, however it's my perspective, and thus why I recommend to clients, that the ability to focus on how to improve Bing rankings not only increases potential customers from a new source, it actually improves Google rankings for deeper content.

Among several tactics, 1 that I find the most simple to check for - how many pages do you have indexed at Google, and how many are showing up in Bing?  Quite often I find clients have submitted sitemap.xml files to Google but not Bing.  Bing actually has a more challenging time discovering pages on a site than Google does, and this one action can sometimes boost not only the total pages Bing indexes, but in turn, increase existing indexed page rankings.

And then there's the (currently unlikely) possibility that Google collapses.  Then where would you be?

[AaronSchinke]

That is a great point about the xml sitemap submission. Something so simple it's worth the extra effort.

[MarieHaynes]

Excellent points!

My site has about 18% fewer pages indexed in Bing as compared to Google and 40% fewer in Yahoo.

I will be submitting some sitemaps tomorrow!

Are there any other suggestions for becoming more attractive in the eyes of Bing and Yahoo?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Yes - sign up for the Bing Webmaster Tools service - similar to Google Webmaster Tools.  If there are issues or problems Bing encounters that's where you'll get reports on them.

And if you are lacking regarding inbound links pointing to inner pages, you'll see gains in Google and Bing by getting some.  Bing likes to see exact match anchor text links that come from other sites already ranking well in the Bing eco-system. So do some research when finding inbound link sources - to see how they're doing in Bing.

[SteveOllington]

I know it's bad of me not to pay much attention to them, but I don't. I'm in the UK and so are most of our clients, and Google have an even bigger market share over here so we don't really go for anything but Google... even though I know that really we should. It's a time/resource balance though.

Having said that, I do tend to find that optimizing for Google often brings up good results in the others anyway as a bi-product, which is handy

[Matt_Wilson]

I'm in the same boat as Steve, Google's got it locked down in the UK and in my experience clients aren't willing to pay for anything other than Google optimisation. However, as you say Steve, good ranking on Yahoo / Bing usually follows success on Google.

One thing I am looking into though is the Yahoo's Shopping search (Product Submit). It seems to be a largely untouched space in the UK and I'd be interested to hear if anyone's seen success with it. From my investigations so far it seems that you have to submit your feed in $s which is obviously a problem for UK merchants, however I see listings in £s. Do we have any UK experts in this field?