What the Microsoft-Yahoo! search deal means for SEO

And then there were 2….

SEOs are waking up this morning to the news that Microsoft Bing will now be providing the search results for Yahoo’s search engine.  You may be wondering what the implications will be for you and your search engine rankings.

Essentially, it means that the volume of searches being made at Yahoo will stay the same (or may see an increase from being in the news), but that your rankings in the Yahoo index will be replaced by your rankings in the Bing index.

This could be a good or a bad thing for you depending on which search engine you rank more highly in.

The change will not be made overnight, since Yahoo! and Microsoft will have to wait for regulatory approval before the deal can commence.  While we have time to prepare, you should begin to focus on your Bing rankings, which will account for both Yahoo and Bing search rankings in the future.

Ways to increase your Bing rankings

1) Ensure your website has been submitted to Bing Webmaster Center
Submit each of your websites to Bing’s index, and make sure that you submit your sitemap url.  From here, you can monitor the page score of your top ranked pages, and you can check for crawl issues such as 404 errors.  This tool is also handy for monitoring the backlinks that Bing has detected for you, and they have a very useful tool for checking your page relevancy against different keywords.

2) Go through basic SEO best practices.  Give your website a checkup.
Ensure that all of your pages have relevant title and description tags.  Make sure that they are not stuffed with keywords, and that they are relevant to your page content.  Ensure that you make use of H1 and H2 tags for headlines and the most relevant phrases on your pages.  Ensure that your title tags are not the same for every page on your website.  SEOMoz has a fantastic article on SEO best practices if you want to read more.

3) Submit your site to Bing
Perhaps this should have been the first point, but if you aren’t already listed in Bing’s results, submit your website.  To check if Bing has indexed you, perform a search on Bing for site:yourwebsite.com.

Ok, I’ve optimized my website for Bing.  What now?

If you follow those simple steps, Bing will easily index you, and give you feedback of any issues your website may have.  Follow best practices, and you should be ranking for your main terms.

Microsoft Bing is apparently very interested in integrating with Yahoo’s existing search innovations, such as BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) and SearchMoney, so services running search engines on those APIs will also begin to serve Bing results.  SEOs will quickly see that their Bing rankings are going to start being much, much more important when they are optimizing their websites.