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Bing Optimisation SEO Tips
By Peter Yexley

Rarely can we read an article about Bing without it mentioning Google, this has to be flattering for Bing because its market share is shy of 10% compared to Google's 71.5% - massive gap in anybody's book. It is important to look at the fact that Bing is Microsoft and only fools will ignore it.

It is too early for anyone to declare themselves as Bing Experts but there are search engine experts closely watching, testing analysing Bing results to see how best to optimise websites for Bing.

It would be fair to say that Bing would have looked towards Google's success formula and tweaked it for its own uniqueness. Let's take a look at Bin's Search results at the moment and how I see Bing's priorities.

Age before beauty.
Age of a website is important too Bing. Not good news for newly developed domains but mature sites seems to get a priority in its rankings.

Anchor text
Anchor text is a hyperlinked word on a web page and this method of linking is favoured by Bing.

Backlinks
Whilst other search engines also favour back links, Bing prefers links from websites that themselves have a lot of backlinks.

Content
Let's go back to 'Age' I suggested earlier that Bing favours websites with some age as opposed to new domains. Another observation is that Bing isn't too concerned about websites that are not regularly updated. Whereas fresh updated websites get a higher priority with Google, it isn't such a priority with Bing.

Keywords
Bing has a preference for websites that have the keyword in the domain name. Despite the fact that keyword stuffing is a big no-no, there is evidence of websites appearing in top 10 of Bing that are heavily stuffed with keywords.

Page size
Images heavily increase the page size but a page with no images ought to be less than 150 KB in size for Bing optimisation. Take advantage of this by creating another page when nearing the weight limit.

URLs
URLs that are static and not dynamic appear to be preferred by Bing.

Website architecture
Website architecture relates to the design and planning of a website. Traditional architecture as we know it involves aesthetic and functional criteria as well as technical detail based on user requirements. This is no different to website architecture each web page ought to be only one to three clicks away from the home page.

Web standards and markup compliance
Some high ranking search results in Bing have shown websites with several markup errors but indications show that Bing generally favours websites with current and well formed markup.

These findings are based on the current algorithm of Bing based on research by Peter Yexley. The worldwide web never remains static and such algorithms change frequently so always check that any SEO changes are to current requirements.