SEO – Search Engine Bingo

Although Google are the current Search Engine Leader, there has been a noticeable increase in the use of Microsoft’s Bing search platform. Moreover the merger of Bing and Yahoo will have a major effect on the SEO industry which primarily focuses on Google alone. Simply said, only using Google will have a detrimental effect on your SEO campaign, thus resulting in lower traffic than you could potentially achieve. Bing holds a market share of around 30% of all Monthly search queries compared to Google with 65% market share of all Monthly queries. Thus SEO experts cannot afford to cancel their link building and other SEO practices to conform to Google’s attempt of Monopolising the Search Engine Industry. Competition is a great thing; in markets it can drive prices down and affect baseline share indices. In the SEO world it allows customers or users (however way you wish to view them) to use alternate solutions and no doubt helps keep things fresh without one company having the rights to dictate how things are searched for.

Ultimately it is paramount to construct your search engine friendly pages for all the major search engines and not Google alone, who knows how the market will turn, you wouldn’t want to cut out 30% of the market. What would happen if Bing became the more popular Search engine?

Google will not penalise you for creating back-links from USEFUL closely matched content sources which is what Bing favours and Google seems to moving away from albeit marginally. So over the next decade will we see a rise in Bing users or will Google continue to hold the market share and pump out more targeted advertising (which must annoy many users, I know it annoys me), will Google change direction once again and innovate?

Microsoft has publically said they never intended Bing to rival Google but rather provide a different way for users to find content they desire. I sometimes do feel when using Google that much of the content is pushed at me, due to companies paying the higher price, rather than the relevancy of the search criteria itself.

Google seems to dictate the way in which the SEO practice must be done but this is not the way things should be, sites should offer high quality content this should be the basis of SERP’s not the amount paid or the highest bidder. The one fundamental thing webmaster must do is have their clients create fresh high quality content or have copywriters create this for them. This surly would lead to a better informative internet rather than one dominated by businesses with larger wallets. Just a few words and my thoughts on the current SEO/SEM standing.

Daniel Brown – Webmaster