This month, Yahoo announced that organic search results on Yahoo will be powered by Bing beginning in August/September.
Yahoo is already testing Bing results on some result pages and indeed yesterday there was a short downtime/outage that rumors said was due to Microsoft testing but Yahoo denies this claim.
Is this Yahoo/Bing change going to have an impact to your website?
Upon review of the latest ComScore statistics, Yahoo and Microsoft sites had a combined search market share of 31.6% in June 2010.
Yahoo sites had 3.2 billion search queries and Microsoft sites had 2.2 billion search queries in June 2010. That’s a total of 5.4 billion search queries in one month.
If your website is listed for the right keywords in the Bing results, you should benefit from a steady flow of website visitors that are interested in your product and/or service.
Obtaining visitors from Bing will also make your website less dependent on Google.
How to optimize your web pages for Bing
Optimizing your web site pages for Bing is not really any different from optimizing your web pages for Google.
As with Google, Bing requires optimized web pages and good inbound links if you want to see your website on the first search result page.
The difference is the weight that Bing puts in the different ranking factors. Things that work well with Google might not have the same effect on Bing and vice-versa.
Here are some tips that will help you to get the best possible results for your website:
Optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your site for Bing. By targeting the exact algorithm of a search engine, you increase your changes of getting listed on the first result page.
Do not optimize the same page for more than one keyphrase. It is much better that a web page is highly relevant to one keyphrase than somewhat relevant to many keyphrases.
If possible, optimize each page of your website for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination. The more targeted the optimization, the more likely it is that the web page will be listed in the top results.