Let's talk!

From Around the Web: 20 Awesome Photos of Référencement

  • click to rate

    Bing is the latest search engine platform by Microsoft. MSN or LIVE is history. Today, Bing has gained quite a number of new followers when compared its predecessors. If you log on to Bing, you can see that it is trying to differentiate itself from Google. It claims to be the first decision engine as compared to others.

    I tried searching on Bing and found that it delivers either highly relevant results or something less. I believe Microsoft has really spent the resource and effort on their search algorithms. If they want to be in the search business, they must start delivering relevant results.

    So for us search engine entreprise optimizers, what lies in the future when it comes to SEO for Bing and Google? In early June, Microsoft releases a statement stating that SEO is still SEO and Bing does not want to change that. Although the design of the engine is very different from others, I believe the foundation of ranking high on Bing is pretty much the same as what we used to know. SEO is about making your pages as relevant to what the searchers are looking for. So if we bear this in mind, we can definitely score well on Bing.

    The team from Bing also emphasizes that good content and website design is the key to rank well on Bing. This means that what applies to Google also applies to Bing too. Recently, Microsoft announces that they have merged with Yahoo and from 2010 onward, Yahoo search will be powered by Bing. So instead of optimizing for 3 different engines, we are now focusing on Google and Bing + Yahoo. After I did a check on some of my rankings on Yahoo, they are ranking well on Bing too. This is definitely good news to us.

    Although the Bing team does not reveal much other than empathizing on content and website design, I believe link building still plays a very important role when it comes to Bing SEO. So no matter what, do continue to build links consistently.

    It is still early to say that Bing will become a strong number 2 in the search engine world. They need to produce relevant search results in order to avoid turning off searchers. Although Bing has captured a substantial number of traffic since its launch, the rest remains to be seen. So now is the time to find out more about Bing optimization and prepare your website for the future.

    While most web developers have been lead to believe that using the bold HTML tag adds value in the eyes of search engines, the truth is, they may as well be using regular font styles. The best HTML tag to use when your goal is to emphasize text is the strong and emphasize tags. These tags tell search engines not only that the font style is different but that the content within the tags is important.

    While Google SEO has many components, using the strong and em tags help focus the topic of each page. You would always use the strong or em tags to emphasize the topic used in the page title and meta description tag to help your SEO ranking efforts. Careful strategy is important in assessing the frequency of use for the strong and em html tags. It is widely though that overuse will undoubtedly cause the opposite effect and actually hurt your SEO efforts.

    My experience is as follows: Use the strong tag once or twice depending on the length of the copy content in each page. Typically I follow the rule of using a strong tag or em tag once per every 500 words. So if my pages are very long, I can use it a couple of times.

    I tie the content of each tag to match some title keyword I'm optimizing for as well as the description tag content. Don't underestimate the power of the your header elements. I use the following rule when optimizing a page for SEO:

    Use 1 - H1 tag per page, which matches keywords in the title and meta description.

    Use as many as 5 - H2 tags which support variations of the H1 tag.

    This guide should give you a good starting point to help with your Google SEO efforts. Keep an eye of the next guide, which will help expand on the topic of Search Engine Optimization.