Bing is the renamed search engine recently released by Microsoft, and, whilst it’s like its competitor Google in many ways, it has a number of its own nuances – in terms of end-user experience and search results – that make it a viable alternative to the market leader.
Search Engine Algorithm
Search engines use a number of different signals to deduce page relevance and ranking. These include titles, URL content and keyword density as well as a myriad of other contributing factors, such as page popularity, length and quality. Algorithms are created to assign value to certain pages and produce the best results. Because of the complex nature of these search engine algorithms, however, there is no set way to build them.
Site Relevance & Quality
There are many trivial differences between Google and Bing, such as layout of the homepage and search engine results page, but the main difference between the two is the way each system’s algorithm differs. Whilst it doesn’t seem to incorporate any new signals when evaluating a given site’s relevance, Bing gives noticeably more weight than Google to certain signals.
- Bing pays more attention to keywords and keyword phrases present in URLs.
- Bing puts a much greater emphasis on capitalised terms.
- Bing displays pages from larger sites more often than smaller sites.
Both companies, of course, won’t release how their algorithms are made up, but their effectiveness is measured by end-user experience and satisfaction.
Bing has a very small percentage of query volume compared to Google (3.16% against 85.35%), but Google has a number of years on Bing. The fact that Bing is implementing different strategies will highlight how effective both algorithms are as time goes on.
As the number of businesses realising the value and importance of having a website increases, so too does the volume of results on SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).
Search engines are constantly changing and adapting to the demands of the market – by offering more space for paid search advertisers, increasing the diversity of results to cater for things like news items, youtube videos and twitter tweets, as well as actually enhancing and optimising the layout of the SERP. As these changes are made, so must your strategies change.
Standing out amidst a rising tide of search results is crucial to success, and, with many phrases now producing as much as five times the amount of results they were producing two years ago, the market is expanding fast.
Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to continue keeping your company from getting lost in the plethora of search results.
- Ensure you regularly update your website with relevant and compelling content.
- Expand your online coverage (if you are using twitter and other social networking tools, and external websites for company features and articles, then the extent of your presence on SERPs increases too).
- Monitor your competitors so that you can take opportunity of gaps in the market or areas where you might want to bolster your offensive.
- Don’t lose sight of the importance of generic keyword phrases, but recognise that the right keyword research and consequent focus on niche phrases will improve your SERP ranking in areas competitors might not have yet exploited.
Of course, on top of all of this, a close eye should be kept on how SERP competition is continuing to change and the new challenges it is posing. Staying aware of and constantly updating your strategies to fit the changing environment is integral, and we at MAD Productions are committed to research and innovation in this arena.
