SEO Isn't Only About Google??

"It will be at least nine months -- and probably closer to a year -- before Microsoft takes over Yahoo's search infrastructure, theoretically consolidating 28% of the U.S. search market and mounting the first credible challenge on Google in a decade."

Not to rush into anything. There is no real sign that Bing is going to make much difference for a while. There are a few signs of some change coming along. This article (click on the title to go to the full article) points out a few differences that we need to be aware of.

When I read it, a few points jumped out. The first was that this is all still under discussion and Microsoft is still actively tweaking their operation, so nothing that we might think we know is really "fixed" yet!

With that caveat in mind, here are the points of importance that I noted:

• Bing focuses more on the use of "categories", and those terms (names of the categories they use) become more important keyword phrases.
• Bing is friendlier to Flash sites. This may open things up a little for more use of those kinds of pages within a site(?)
• Bing offers different placements for photos and video.
• Bing favors linking out more than other engines as long as the links are relevant to the overall context of the site and keywords.
• Enable MSNBot onto your site and submit URLs for all sub-pages as it doesn't automatically crawl all pages.

One of the comments posted in response to this article provides a list of suggestions for focusing on Bing that I found interesting. What I tried to look for are things that might indicate some difference in how one approaches site management with the advent of Bing. Lots of the "tips" suggested things that I think we should be doing already in optimizing for Google, which still has to be the priority for the forseeable future.