SEO tips and tricks for Bing

SPONSORED: A look at how to get the best out of Microsoft's Bing search engine.

By PROMOTION, 1 Oct 2009 at 15:20

For example, the new document preview feature will change how surfers select sites, he said. In Bing, when the search results are surfaced, sites have a little dot next to them. Rolling over that dot brings up a preview of the site, showing what information is available there.

“Document preview means that as an SEO it is less important to get into the number one slot,” Cohen explained. “People take time to look at all 10 links.”

“You can expect to see a lot more traffic going to the second to 20th spots, instead of just position number one,” he said.

Webmasters can't affect what's shown, but can ask for a page not to offer a preview.

Another feature which will help better distribute traffic are the new categories. Alongside the left hand side of Bing search results are a series of suggested categories, surfaced for about a fifth of all search topics.

If a web user enters in a city name, it will suggest tourist sites, transport information, weather and more. So instead of just the top five organic results on the SERP – the ones most likely to be clicked – there are also a series of keywords, giving users one-click access to a refined search.

Alongside this, there is also a list of automatically generated related searches, to give users even more options to choose from.

“Categories mean users can expect to pick a bit, they can find search terms they wouldn't have thought of,” Cohen said, explaining surfers using Bing will semi-search and semi-browse, extending the options available to users, and in turn, widening the traffic going to sites not surfacing as the top few results.

In its testing, Microsoft's search team found that the click through rate for categorised results was better than that for organic rankings from six through to 10, meaning users found the categories more useful for the search than digging through endless results.

“The impact is going to be more traffic going to sites not in the top three,” said Cohen. “As SEO, there's a better chance of getting traffic.”