Optimizing for Bing vs Google

[TravG]

While I do not see much talk of it on this forum, another forum I visit from time to time the topic of optimizing your site for search engines (mainly Bing) verses Google comes up. Obviously with my sites (as I am sure with most) Google drives about 90% of traffic and clicks so it is always in my best interset to optimize for Google.

With that said, my search results for keywords are very different for Google and Bing. I can be in the top 3 for Google but not even show up on the first page for Bing.

I tried to do a little research on optimizing for Bing without hurting my Google results but didnt have much success. Everyone basically writes about optimizing for Google and who cares about Bing!

The thing is if we could get just a 10% increase in clicks from Bing that would be substaintial. I will keep looking into this and try to share the results here but if anyone else knows some tricks and secrets and willing to share them that would be great.

I dont have a crystal ball, but Bing has been doing some nice advertising and I could see them in the future picking up more users. Being in front of this would benifit those who have already done the work to improve rankings for Bing.

[bauss]

Bing is slower to index pages, because they don't have as much bots looking for new content, so it takes longer for Bing to send more bots to your pages to update the search results. If you optimize for Google, you're basically optimizing for Bing too. The only difference that I'm aware of is that Bing takes meta keywords into consideration, and Google does not. I'm 100% sure about that though.

[edgarf76]

I actually never signed up for Bing webmaster tools. Bing has been doing tons of advertising on tv, everywhere. I read somewhere that Bing Captures less that 20% of search engine users.

[universal4]

It has always seemed to me that Bing was more sensetive to on-page optimizing compared to Google.

This may be changing more over time.

I do not get a lot of traffic from Bing, but sometimes their webmaster tools have discovered issues on pages before Google does....although this is usually stuff like forgetting an h1 tag and so forth...

Rick
Universal4

[edgarf76]

thank you. That brings up an on page issue that I am having trouble with. The H3 and H4 tag look okay when viewing the page. When I use the H2 it looks so big and out of place, and the H1 tag is even worse. I have tried to use pictures at the bottom of the page as a photo gallery and putting the H1 and 2 tags with the keywords under the pictures. It looks strange but I have put "enjoy your photo gallery" to spice it up. But isn't that keyword stuffing anyway?

I read about the tags and (I don't remember the source) but it said that the title tag is put as the H2 tag and the H1 is something else. I looked at the source code and that was correct for the H2 tag but not the H1 which is very important. Does anyone know an elegant way to use the tags without making the page look strange?

[universal4]

All you need to do is change the font size of the h1 and h2 in css and you can still use them.

Rick
Universal4

[AceOdds]

I've not had much success with bing but one thing I noticed is that they *really* like exact match domains. Also a subjective observation is that they are not as good at localisation as google, so you are more likely to see american targeted sites in the results.

[edgarf76]

I am pretty sure I tried to change the font size in wordpress. I am going to google it now Thank you

I googled but I am only finding CSS not html. Do I have to use CSS or is there a way to change the code in html?

[universal4]

Well you could use inline styles, but that would mean you have to add the code on each page.

If you change it in css, it will not have to be done again, is much cleaner and uses a bit less code.

Be happy to give you a hand with this if you like.

Rick
Universal4

[edgarf76]

thank you, I may need help with it. I am reading about it and trying to figure it out. What I am reading is actually editing the setting in wordpress as if I were to put a pop up ad under the body tags.


I read about how to do it, and I went into the editor and found the code that I think that I need to edit. Is this correct?

#header h1 {
font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Sans-serif;
font-size: 48px;
font-weight: bold;
margin-bottom: 0 !important;
padding: 20px 0 0;
text-transform: uppercase;
}
#header h1 a, #header h1 a:visited {
color: #EDE9DD;
text-decoration: none;
}
#header h2 {
color: #DDDDDD;
font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
line-height: 14px;

If I change it to this below should it work?

#header h1 {
font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Sans-serif;
font-size: 8px;
font-weight: bold;
margin-bottom: 0 !important;
padding: 8px 0 0;
text-transform: uppercase;
}
#header h1 a, #header h1 a:visited {
color: #EDE9DD;
text-decoration: none;
}
#header h2 {
color: #DDDDDD;
font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Sans-serif;
font-size: 8px;
line-height: 8px;

[muffincrumbs]

Yes that looks right to me. Keep in mind that unless you are using a child theme, CSS revisions made to theme files will be lost when updating the WordPress theme. Jetpack has a place where you can put it, and some themes have a place in theme options to edit CSS. These places are a better bet, but using a child theme and modifying the files directly, and not using old-dog slow plugins is best.

[edgarf76]

I have not installed Jetpack yet. I don't want to mess my page up by supplementing the code. Right now I am doing it the inline way.

[baldidiot]

I've not had much success with bing but one thing I noticed is that they *really* like exact match domains.

I've actually found the opposite to be true - I have a few EM's that are sitting at the #1 spot in google but are more #3 to #7 in bing. These sites are ones I've done with no or very little links.

TBH just looking at bing now the serps look way better for hollywood terms (eg: online casinos) than google. Shame that google has an obscenely high market share in the UK (my target market)...

[thebookiesoffers]

I've actually found the opposite to be true - I have a few EM's that are sitting at the #1 spot in google but are more #3 to #7 in bing. These sites are ones I've done with no or very little links.

TBH just looking at bing now the serps look way better for hollywood terms (eg: online casinos) than google. Shame that google has an obscenely high market share in the UK (my target market)...

I was doing some research last night on google for some main casino terms and the SERPS are awful at the moment.

On the Bing thing, only thing I ever have heard is bing doesn't value Anchor Text as much, whether that is true though I have no idea

[baldidiot]

I was kind of hoping the latest penguin would sort them out a bit, but no...