Microsoft's new search tool Bing has been out for more than three months, and it's gained a healthy 11 per cent market share in that time.
That alone makes it a search engine worth optimising for, but add in the recent deal with Yahoo which will see Bing used as the search tool across both firms' web estates and any webmaster can't ignore Microsoft's latest search attempt.
We talked to Dan Cohen, MSN's SEO guru, and got some tips from the Search Technology Centre in London to help bring you up to speed and make sure everyone using Bing can find your sites.
Don't panic
The first thing to know is that there are no substantial differences between optimising for the rest of the web and for Bing, according to Cohen. Any site which uses best practice for design and optimisation will do as well via Bing as it does any other search engine, so if you've properly categorised and linked your site, and have good use of keywords, there's no reason to panic just because Bing's now on the scene.
He advised optimisers and webmasters that it's really business as usual, saying it still pays with Bing to do your keyword research, submit your sitemap, ensure code is perfect, use clean URLs the SEO guidebook hasn't been rewritten in anyway, Cohen said.
What's new?
That said, there are ways to do better in Bing because there are differences, especially to the search engine results page (SERP).
"There's no special SEO but it does change search behaviour," Cohen said of the new search features. "The change in search behaviour means there's more broadly distributed traffic."
