Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Ok so it's Thursday and I really do have to work today even though my head is telling me that it work is the last thing it wants to do. It seems that my head would really like to go and rest in some quiet place.

Steve and I went to a wine tasting last night that might have got a little rowdy and I might have drunk just a little too much ... but I never get a hangover. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it and the raging headache that I have right now was obviously caused by something else.

So I hope you will forgive me if I sound a little vague today ... maybe even a little flat ... but I'm sure I'll muddle through.

Today I want to talk about Bing ... you know ... that other search engine that's out there that some people actually use. Of course most of us think of nothing but Google but Bing is there and sending traffic so it's definitely worth thinking about.

For quite some time now we've been watching Bing send traffic to a lot of our mainstream clients' sites and although the numbers haven't been big it has been obvious that the traffic that has been arriving from Bing is more interested in buying what our clients are selling than those that come from Google.

More people who have hit the sites from Bing have stayed longer and looked at more pages than those who have come from Google so from our point of view there is some real value in the traffic that Bing sends.

I have to admit that for some time now Steve and I have wondered if we're the only ones who have seen the value in the traffic that comes from Bing. I can't remember seeing anyone in the last few years talk about Bing as being a valuable traffic source but that's now changed.

Over on Search Engine Watch today a noted search engine expert suggested that anyone who ignored Bing was "ignoring a heavily e-commerce-focused demographic that can provide modest, but incremental, traffic and revenue."

Even Microsoft believes that the traffic Bing sends is more inclined to buy than traffic from Google and they suggest that a person who uses Bing to search for a product is 31 percent more likely to make a purchase than the average web user.

In other words if you ignore Bing and focus only on Google you're missing out on people who want to buy what you might be selling. So are you ignoring all that juicy traffic?

If you are then you're yet to discover just how frustrating it can be to actually get listed in Bing. Sure they have the Bing-equivalent of Google's webmaster tools and you can certainly register your sites and provide Bing with XML sitemaps and Bing will give you lots of relevant information about how your site is performing ... once they actually get round to crawling and indexing your site.

And that's one of the major frustrations with Bing ... no matter what you do to try and speed up the process Bing takes its own sweet time to do that all-important crawling and indexing. Google can start crawling and indexing within minutes of you listing your site in Webmaster Tools but Bing can take weeks.

But it's definitely worth the effort and the frustration and once Bing has included your site in their search results there are a few things that you can do to improve your ranking. Obviously these are not going to work for ever and just as obviously I'm not going to give you all of them ... it's far better that you do your own testing to find what works for you ... but here is one that may be worth thinking about.

Bing seems to place more value on inbound links from just about any source you can find than Google does. Some even suggest that Bing can't spot paid links as well as Google can but we haven't tried that one so if you want to play with paid links then I would suggest that you do it with some care.

Thin sites may not do so well in Bing either but in adult ... where most sites are thin ... you might find that a niche specific hub or portal may do quite well.

So maybe it's time that you had a look to see what Bing has to offer. If some of us are finding that the traffic coming from Bing is more inclined to buy what we're selling then that may just be what you discover too.

You won't know till you try.