The Bing/Yahoo! “search” merger is on its way to becoming a reality. This deal has been talked about forever it seems but now it appears that the likelihood of this occurring is close at hand, now that this deal obtained regulatory approval last week. There are still some hurdles to climb but for all intents and purposes, the Bing Powered Yahoo! Search will be the next new thing in search engine marketing. This merger opens up many new questions, in particular in regards to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Will this be easier to do now that we’ll have two major engines instead of three? The answer, of course, remains to be seen but we do know that in preparation of this upcoming change, we suggest the following tactics:

1. Optimize for Bing now – if you haven’t spent much time optimizing for Bing, now is the time to do so. Set up your Bing Webmaster account and get indexed.
2. Add original, unique content to your site – If your site does not have it, time to start writing it.
3. Use well-architected code in your webpages (including images and Sitemaps) so that users’ web browsers and search engine crawlers can read the content you want indexed)
4. Get to know Bing’s Guidelines and Standards for Web Optimization.
5. Read all you can on Optimization via blogs, articles, and news alerts.

Optimizing for Bing isn’t necessarily different than optimizing for any of the other engines who also prefer good content, good links, and good site code. The only difference here is that most people haven’t taken the time yet to get-to-know Bing’s platform. Many, in fact, haven’t bothered to sign up for Bing Webmaster and many haven’t bothered to submit their XML sitemaps to Bing either. However, because of this impending change, perhaps more will act because it soon will become much more important. 25-28% of the market is nothing to sneeze at…