Google Bing and Yahoo All Share These SEO Requirements   by Ted AMCS

in Search Engines    (submitted 2011-12-21)

Most people focus exclusively on ranking well in Google while pretty much neglecting Bing and Yahoo. You can't blame them for doing that because Google does have such a commanding market share when it comes to internet searches. Still, don't you think you are leaving a little money on the table by focusing exclusively on Google while neglecting Yahoo and Bing? I wrote this article to share a few tips about what kinds of things those websites all share in common when it comes to SEO. If you pay attention to those things it will help you rank better in all three of them.

For starters you need to pay attention to your page titles. All three of those engines use the title of the page as a leading indicator for determining relevancy. If the keyword is in the page title HTML then you are already most of the way there in telling the search engines which phrases to rank your page for.

Another thing they all share in common is that they check for the presence of the keywords on your page. In Google you can make a page rank for a term just by throwing enough anchor text at it from other pages on other sites. With Yahoo and Bing you are going to have a more difficult time doing that. For them you really want to have the words on the page. This is pretty much common sense anyway.

Speaking of anchor text, all three search engines use links to help determine how high a page should rank. There are some differences though. It appears that Yahoo and Bing will put more weight behind links that appear within a website. Google seems to have more emphasis on links that come from other unique domains. Anchor text is a big deal though.

Links in general are really important to all three of those search engines. Google prefers to see links from a wider variety of sources. Bing and Yahoo don't seem to care as much about link diversity. They care more about the number of links and what the anchor text is.
Even though PageRank is unique to Google itself, it is suspected that the other search engines use something similar to calculate popularity within their own indexes. So, you should apply the concept of PageRank to all three search engines and not just Google alone.

Follow my tips here and you will see your pages performing better in all three search engines. Don't be too quick to dismiss the smaller search engines. If nothing else, they serve as a backup source of traffic for those times when your pages aren't doing so well in Google.

About the Author

If SEO for the search engines besides Google really interests you, then you might like to read my article about how hard it is to rank in Bing. If you want to see how easy it can be, you might also want to check out my article marketing case study website where I prove that it is possible to rank number one in Bing using article marketing as the only means of promoting a website.