Should I Optimise for Bing?

Google is still, by a long way, the largest search engine.
Yahoo and Bing both formed a partnership around August 2009. Google receives around 65% of all internet search results. Over the last few months, from around November 2011 in fact, Bing has overtaken Yahoo in the number of searches and results per month. Many used to, and many still do, believe Bing is “small fry” when compared to the “mighty” Google. It very slightly reminds me of David and Goliath, but as we all know, one should never underestimate their opponent, though I do not believe that Google will be toppled by Bing, but I do firmly believe that the market place will slowly have a more balanced share of searches in the coming years. This then leads us towards how differently the search engines work from each other, thus leading to how companies will use their variety of SEO tools to accommodate the different search engines. At the moment a website will not receive as much traffic from Bing as it does from Google, but if the site is optimised for Bing as well, I believe the Bing rankings will immediately increase, not by much because that takes time, but an increase should obviously be visible. The age group of surfers that are more inclined to use Bing is 45+. There may be several underlying reasons for this, but I actually believe it is a much more simple one.

When buying a pc with windows the default browser on the machine is going to be Internet Explorer (IE), Bing is Internet Explorer’s default search engine. Older people, who are generally not technical when it comes to changing settings, will tend to use whatever they are given. The windows mobile phone is fully integrated with Bing. It has been around for a few years and sales are increasing at a steady rate.

More recently, both Bing and Yahoo announced search results would be supplied by Bing. This, however, is still only in the testing stages. Yahoo and Bing will not merge into one, well not yet or in the foreseeable future, they will still be separate entities, but all the search results will be from Bing. Microsoft are hoping to have this fully functional late Summer this year in Canada and the USA.
If one has a ranking website in Yahoo and not in Bing, then the site’s ranking will drop, but if it is ranking in Bing, it will rank the same in Yahoo as well.
If a site is not ranking well in Bing, then something needs to be done sooner rather than later. Google SEO is different to Bing SEO in many ways, so it is crucial that this is carried out with precision.