Let’s start by laying out the situation flat. Anyone making a living in online marketing these days has to diversify the search engines they use in order to stay profitable. It’s a natural fact. Thing is, while many affiliate marketers are still narrowly focused on Google, the Bing market share is growing fast and savvy affiliates are starting to get themselves hooked in. Question is: Is it time for you to use Bing, too?

Bing Gains Momentum

Recent data suggests that Bing has around 28% market share, making it a slice of the pie that’s unwise to ignore. With its recent acquisition of Yahoo! Search you can expect this percentage will continue to grow. So, if you’re having problems getting listed or staying listed with Google, Bing is an eminently viable place to look as a revenue-producing alternative.

The Search World According To Bing

As far as Bing is concerned, “Ultimately, SEO is still SEO… it benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design.”

That being said, the majority of the standards laid out by Bing pertaining to SEO are straight up basic. For example, things like using unique titles and meta-descriptions, consistent data structure, and an XML sitemap are key.

The Myth Of “Meta-Descriptions Nevermore”

If you hear someone talking smack about how Bing search engines don’t bother to spider meta-descriptions, be sure to chew on a grain of salt while you listen. This will protect you from their seriously antiquated conjecture.

While there was in fact a time a few years back when the major search engines started disregarding meta-description tags due to search engine spamming, recent algorithms have improved for identifying tags that don’t sync with their respective page content, making proper meta-tag insertion important again. The lesson? USE META-DESCRIPTIONS.

BTW! The biggest mistake to avoid with your meta-tags is using the same one for every page. That just screams duplicate content. The best thing to do is create a unique tag for each page, or else don’t use meta-tags at all. The same goes meta-descriptions on Google.

Quick Tips For Advertising On Bing

The rules on Bing seem less stringent compared to Google, especially in the manual review category. Bing doesn’t yet have the heavy policing standards, making it an opportune time for affiliates to start incorporating it into their marketing campaigns.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind for Bing campaigns:
*Make sure each page has at least 350 words on it, not including typical page elements such as menus and titles
*Use inbound links with keyword rich anchor text

*Put keywords in your URLs
*Building quality outbound links to reputable sites (e.g., merchant site)
*Microsoft also offers the Bing Webmaster Center where you can troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your sites. There’s also this document “Bing – New Features Relevant to Webmasters” (PDF)

Bing is definitely a legitimate contender. If you’re getting pinched on Google, it might be time to diversify.