How are your referral stats looking? Noticed more traffic from Bing lately?

According to a Nielsen report last month, Bing is growing faster than any other search engine. It was reported Bing had 10.7% of the total search market, up 2% from the month before. Yesterdays report from Hitwise suggests Bing has since dropped to around 8.96 percent.

So, somewhere around 8-10% perhaps.

The new statistics, from internet research firm Hitwise, will make disappointing reading for Mr Ballmer, who has said he is willing to spend as much as $11bn on search. Earlier this week he told The Daily Telegraph: “We’re trying to give Google a little competition in the search business

Microsoft have struggled for along time to make a dent in Google’s share of the search market, so it looks like they are beginning to make inroads, albeit slowly. Microsoft have done a ton of marketing to promote Bing. They’ve introduced cutting edge features like visual search and voice support.

This is not a battle Microsoft can afford to lose, and for search marketers, competition between engines can only be a good thing.

Is Your Site Optimized For Bing?

The thought of adopting different optimization strategies for different engines feels so antiquated now.

Years ago, there used to be a lot of talk about how to optimize for the different engines. Some webmasters would go so far as to serve differently optimized pages to each major engine.

In the past few years, SEO has been about all-Google, all the time, so the rule of thumb is to optimize for Google, and the rest pretty much takes care of itself.

This advice still stands.

Keeping Up With Bing

Google has Google Guy (Matt Cutts). Likewise, the Bing search team regularly reaches out to the SEO community. SEOs should bookmark the Bing Webmaster Centre announcements.

In particular:

• Search Engine Optimization For Bing
• Making Links Work For You SEM 101
• Are You Content With Your Content

NB: You need a Live Id to see those links.

Microsoft released a comprehensive document for Webmasters. Check out page 23 where they address SEO specifically.

Like Google Guy advice, it tends towards the general and is ultimately self serving, but interesting to be aware of, nontheless.

The Bing Difference: Why Bother?

In terms of search engine results pages, the two engines do produce different results. Here’s a nifty tool for side-by-side comparisons.

Why should you be interested in Bing at all?

Even though usage is lower, the user demographic for Bing is different to that of Google. Ask search marketers and you’ll get anecdotal evidence that Bing/Yahoo users don’t tend to be as web savvy as Google users, use the web less often, are more likely to click on ads, and are more likely to be involved in online shopping, whilst Google appeals more to researchers, webheads and geeks. If you’re engaged in web commerce, you need to be thinking about Bing.

Bing Ranking Tips

From the Bing Features For Webmasters document:

Because of this new way of thinking about search, some webmasters might initially be concerned that the shortened primary organic listing in the new Bing SERP might render their SEO efforts as less effective. Instead, Bing makes it easier to compete for broad terms because it surfaces more categories automatically, increasing the number of results on the page and generating more relevant content.

In reality, the same SEO strategies you use for Google apply to Bing.

1. Get Your On-Page SEO Right

Nail the basics.

Make sure your content is unique, use H tags for titles, use alt tags for images, use unique page titles and description meta tags, one topic per page and ensure your copy is free from spelling and gramatical errors. Like Google, you can sign up for MS Webmaster Center which will help you spot and troubleshoot problems.

2. Quality Inbound Linking

Bing appears to favour linking from pages that share a similar topic area.

Is Bing a theme-based engine? Think of a theme as a topic pyramind. A themed site would have the topic “cars at the top. The level beneath that would be makes of cars i.e. Ford, Ferrari, Lotus, then below then models, then components, etc. The theory goes that a site should be all on the same topic to rank well, and links should come from sites on the same topic. Themes used to get discussed a lot, but fell out of fashion when people realised Google didn’t use themes.

Is Bing using themes? I don’t think so. Like Google, the algorithms appear to be largely page based, as opposed to site based. Bing looks at the topic of the page linking to you. If the linking page is on a similar topic, the target page receives a boost. Have a play around with the title tag on the linking page. Try to ensure the title tag keyword on the linking page is the same as the keyword you’re targetting on your optimized page.

3. Domain Age

Domain age seems to be an important factor in Bing – the older, the better. Like Google, Bing tries to establish authority, and domain age is one way it does this.

Got any tips for optimizing for Bing? Any patterns you’ve noticed, particularly in respect to how Bing differs from Google?

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Today is the start of breast cancer awareness month. During the month of October you are likely to see more information about breast cancer than you may have seen all year. The difference is that you can help spread the word by focusing on the topic for at least one month. It’s easy. All you have to do is stumble, delicious, digg, reddit, kirtsy whatever article you see related to increasing awareness.

Help increase the flow of the topic on the web and help save the tatas.

Oh and one more thing you can do.  Turn Twiiter Pink.  Do you remember Green Friday, the ode to @gregboser?

Just imagine it looking like this…

So step up and go pink!

It’s that time of the month again folks — time to pay your bills, flip a page on your calendar and refresh your linkbait ideas .  The month of October should be a big one for social media, and ideally you could use this to help aid in linkbait and content creation for your promotions.  By looking at some of the topics and finding a way to relate to your field, you can harness the momentum of that topic and hopefully get more traction.  Here’s what will be hot on social media this October!

• MLB
  It is playoff time!  Who’s in, who’s out?  How long has it been since teams have won a title?  Take a look at any of these angles as it is about the only time of the year that baseball gets hot.
• Halloween
  Get this type of linkbait going early, as the later in the month you go the more saturated the topic will be.
• 2016 Olymipcs
  The new venue is Rio De Janeiro  and there should be an easy week of analyzing the location and what could go right/wrong.
• Michael Moore & the Movie “Capitalism”
  Moore’s newest movie drops today and he is always loved in social media.  This movie might not be a blockbuster, but could bring up some good (and hot) topics for you to write about.
• Horror
  October is the month for lists of the scariest books, movies and more.  Putting together any list that will scare the pants off of readers is sure to do well in October!
• The Stock Market
  After seeing such a rebound in September, the market is sure to be a hot topic in October in whichever way it moves.  Goes up?  We are back to normal!  Goes down?  Another recession.  Any analysis should do well this month.
• Pumpkins
  This may sound silly, but any pumpkin cut-outs, recipes, or products are LOVED at this time of the year.  If you can work your piece around pumpkins (like carving a nerdy jack-o-lantern), you will have instant momentum due to the season
• Roman Polanski
  In case you have had your head in the sand, filmmaker Roman Polanski has been caught and could be extradited back to the US.  The court case was pretty clouded originally, so if you have any need for legal linkbait (tainted trials, extradition, fugitives, etc) use this for extra momentum.
• NHL
  The new hockey season has started so get your linkbait out there while people still care.  Hockey is usually a tough social sell, so try doing it while at least a few  people are talking about it.
• Protesting
  It seems that there is more protesting going on today than there has been in recent years. Whether you are having a tea party, protesting health care or are just mad at the world, protesting has been hot recently and will continue to be throughout October.

Now let the ideas flow and get creative (with the momentum on your side!).  Have a happy haunted month of linkbait!

Have any other hot topics for the month of October?  Feel free to share examples below!

…and don’t forget to follow 10e20 on Twitter and subscribe to our RSS feed.