Robots are responsible for the initial ranking of your page on search engines, but user interface can be just as important. Image: Flickr / cowalsh / CC-BY-SA

When working on search engine optimization, it can be easy to focus on results of one major search engine. Google does account for a huge portion of search results, but it is not the only search engine out there. The reality is that the best search engine optimization uses a wide range of tactics that are effective on multiple engines.

Update your SEO strategy

The latest updates to search engine algorithms have created a new paradigm for good site construction. Every site that is courting search engine traffic should:

• Ensure that your site has a robots.txt file that tells search engine indexing robots how to read your site.
• Links, both into and out of your website, should make use of the “title” feature in the code. This tells search engines the topic of the link. Most of all, you should make sure that anchor text is a perfect match for the topic of the page.
• Your domain name or URL should match your topic. If your website is about cats, for example, the URL should contain the word “cats” – such as www.example.com/cat-info.
• Make use of schema.org microformatting to organize the information on your site in a way that search engines will understand.

Bing’s differences

Slowly but surely, Bing has been gaining a share of search traffic. Even though Bing still accounts for a very small percentage of searches, that percentage accounts for millions of searches each day. Taking a few small actions to target some or all of your site to Bing will help bring your site additional traffic.

• Bing manually reviews the top search results for a large portion of high-value search keywords, so be sure that your site is as user-friendly as it is robot-friendly.
• Bing will always show results from partner properties, such as Yahoo and Hulu, before outside properties.
• Bing does not index pages nearly as well as some other search engines. Because of this, you should submit your site to Bing in order to ensure it is indexed.
• Bing focuses heavily on “social signals” from social networking sites to determine ranking. This means focusing on partner social networks, Facebook and Twitter, will produce better rankings
• While Google has been moving away from exact match rankings, Bing still relies heavily on exact-match search results, especially for longtail keywords. Adworkz.com tests have shown that exact match targeting of content can produce pages within the top 10 search results on Bing; the same pages rank in the fifth to 10th page of Google search results for the exact same search.