Making sure you optimize for Bing and Yahoo as well as Google

Most SEO practitioners concentrate only on optimizing their sites for Google. It's as though the other search engines don't exist. However, not only do they exist, they can provide lucrative traffic. Traffic from engines like Yahoo and AOL are more likely to convert into sales than the users of Google who tend to me more savvy and more reluctant to buy. And Bing, the new offering from Microsoft is gaining market share. Therefore it's a must to learn how to optimize for Yahoo and Bing.

Let's start with Yahoo. How do you optimize for Yahoo? Yahoo likes long pages. Studies have shown that the pages on the Yahoo results have almost 200 more words than the pages on the Google results. So do ensure you produce decent articles on your site thatv are at least 800 words if not longer. Yahoo also puts weight on on-site optimization. You need to include all the keywords you want found in your text, with the main keyword in the title and URL.

Bing is a lot newer (it was only launched in June 2009), so as yet there isn't that much information available on it. However we already have early indications on how to optimize for Bing. They are very keen on keywords in the URL. And they like authority sites with a bit of age. the older the site and the more relevant anchored backlinks it has, the better it does in Bing. This does mean that newcomers with new domains may feel a little frustrated. But patience, eventually your site will age and in the meantime concentrate on getting those anchored backlinks.

Google of course loves new material, they tend to give newbies a chance by putting their material in the search results initially and seeing what happens. If the material then starts to attract backlinks (Google assumes that people found it and liked it and linked to it), it stays in the results. Otherwise it will disappear in what is known as the "Google Dance". Therefore do concentrate on getting those anchored backlinks from relevant sites.

The watchword at the moment is "relevant backlinks". All the search engines seem to be getting tired of links that come from dubious places. Therefore be careful about where you get your links from and only collect them from sites in the same niche as the site you are promoting.