As reported recently by the Score report, American consumers did more than 16 billion searches in the month of July 2010, with Yahoo actually gaining 1.2% of search engine market share.
And surprisingly Yahoo’s gains were largely at the expense of Google sites, which lost 1% of search market share month-over-month. Google is still the front-runner with 61.6% of the search market. But for how long?
As you already know, Bing and Yahoo don’t supply the majority of the traffic to your site, but they do drive highly targeted traffic. And that’s pretty significant.
In fact, over all Yahoo! and Bing users will stay on your site an average of 23% longer then someone who came to you from Google.
At a recent SEO Conference (SES SF) it was said “Yahoo and Bing are merging. They’ll be 100% merged by the end of August or the beginning of September.
This is actually a pretty big deal and something that web masters and business online can no longer ignore. not something to ignore anymore. If you do, you’ll be missing out on 10 to 12 percent of traffic.”
How To Take Advantage of the Yahoo! / Bing Marriage:
1. Bing favors domain names that have some age on them. Don’t make the mistake of giving up a domain name with good history and start again. Instead, use the aged domain as your “money site” and then use newer “keyword rich domain names” as feeder sites in your own link network.
2. Titles are of first importance when it comes to on-page optimization. Bing clearly places a lot of importance on Title tags and what they say about your site.
To leverage this make sure you use your best keywords in the title tags of every page on your site. But don’t just stuff the keywords in in the title tag, just to have them there.
Remember, your title tag isn’t just for the search engines. Use it to “Sell the click” as our friend Jerry West from WebMarketingNow.com says.
Making your title tag stand out from the rest of the serp results will increase traffic and conversion over keyword stuffing the title tag alone.
3. Bing seems it also places a higher value on pages that have at least 300 words. We’ve spoke with a number of trusted SEO guru’s who have confirmed this and in fact report that 1,200 words is actually the magic number to shoot for.
4. Link popularity is your #1 off page SEO strategy bar none. Conventional SEO advice says that your backlinks need to be from relevant sites and or related sites. But the fact is, it’s just not true with Google (at all) and not true with Yahoo! Bing on the other hand does want to see this sort of relevancy, but if they join with and use the Yahoo! database, all bets are off.
When it comes to link building, get links where you can get them and try to get a mix of links. Relevant links offer the added advantage of long term “future proofing”your SEO efforts, but don’t over look any non relevant link because they work too.
